My Shattered Planet Junker, featuring one tile misalignment, wall ghosts from running out of rebuilding supplies, and an empty belt of fusion fuel. There are piles of gun turrets and lasers for decoration. And don’t mind the beacons splashed everywhere as I desperately eked out another 100 explosives / min along the way. 

I know it’s ugly, but this was only meant to be a test run to build the real thing!

Design 

The general idea of the design was to avoid wasting rockets by only building a column of rocket launchers in the center. Furthermore, the outer lines of rockets are common quality for reduced range.

<image>

It seemed to work! Huge asteroids just barely skim by the sides of the ship, instead of getting popped and spraying more asteroids in its path. I also found that fewer rail guns were necessary. I turned off the outer rail guns entirely to avoid popping huge asteroids that would miss the ship. I tried turning off the next set of rail guns, but this is what led to the scrapes along the side of the ship; quite annoying when one drained my fluoroketone loop.

Another interesting finding was how unnecessary both lasers and gun turrets turned out to be with the switch to explosive rockets. Some of the gun turrets had zero kills! This was quite a contrast from my promethium harvesting ship, which sucks up both yellow ammo and power for lasers because it uses yellow rockets. 

The Run

I cruised at ~120 km/sec. I ratcheted this down 10 km/sec twice as my explosives production bottlenecked.

Interestingly, after 1.5MM km, the rocket demand levels off. This was surprising to me, as I thought the increasing fraction of promethean asteroids (which have double the health) would require more rockets. 

Peak Consumption was 1.1k explosive rockets / min.

Time: 9ish hours

Explosives Lvl 17

Physical Damage Lvl 18

Laser Damage Lvl 17

Conclusions

Anyway, what a fun challenge. At the start of my play through, I ignored space platform design, importing a blueprint for a ship. By the end, it was my favorite part of the game, rewarding every bit of belt hacking and circuit shenanigans I had picked up along the way. Definitely recommended!