DSP: Logistics Towers

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Logistics Towers

I made it back safely to the bootstrap base. That was a fun little scare. Nothing major, but hey, when you're all alone even small bits of craziness like that can be fairly shocking. Forever onwards though. Now that I have the titanium and processors from the mining base, I can begin construction of the logistics network. My habit until now is to bring the resources via belt to a location near where I've built all my other buildings, and then had the fabricators produce the items for me. But not this time! I want to use these damned things finally.

I have the Icarus construct a few using its onboard fabricator. It's slow and annoying, but the first few pop out, and I indulge myself.

Don't ask me how the Icarus could construct those, much less carry around multiples of them.

 See how disorganized and sloppy that looks? Welcome to the power of the logistics system! Each of these planetary versions can store up to 50 logistics drones and have three types of items each. Each item it can choose to either supply to the logistics system or demand from it. In this case, I have a tower that is demanding the three items I'd need to produce more planetary towers. Plus one from the lower tower. Each drone consumes power for flight proportional to distance, but power is essentially free and the ease of construction means I'm not too worried about them. 

All of which means that once I plug in the materials into the system, I'll be able to demand from anywhere. Halfway across the world? No problem. I can tweak the settings too if I'd like, but for now this should work out fine. 

But why bother? The sloppiness is intentional to a degree. The quicker I can construct buildings, the quicker I can build the dyson sphere. Having to carefully construct transport lines so I don't muck things up later takes valuable time, and I'd rather not waste it if possible. There's also the relation of raw materials to outputs and further down the chain. As I mine out worlds the production will by necessity be decreased. Under the old system that means that unless I go back and tidy things up items further down the chain will slow production as well. By adding things to a larger network I can much more easily notice changes in production and change them. Lastly there's the problem of splitting and evening out lines getting more problematic. The preference is that I have a guaranteed input line to each fabricator where I know how much is being added. The shared pool will even that out as well, so I don't have to worry that I have one line only producing 75% of what it could while another is producing 50%, as an example.

Middle Managers In Space

I won't change things immediately. But this is a major change that has me fairly excited. And it seems like the "supervisors" back home have rolled out some new initiatives. Namely some goals they'd like me to reach, and little awards to give when I hit certain thresholds.

I mock a little, but I do like achievements to pop up when I hit bits like this. And goals to hit are great for new players to use as guidelines

They brainstormed a bunch of these things, and even added some retroactively for me. But hey, it's kinda neat to see that my bases combined have used 1 terajoule of energy so far. That's not an insignificant amount of energy. Helps relieve the monotony I suppose.

Back to base building. Obviously nothing is going to come out of these towers unless I build other towers to supply the materials, so that's next on the list. My plan is to only introduce items steadily to the transport network. Working backwards of a sort. There's no reason to tear up the infrastructure I already have right at this point. But any new construction is going to go through the system, so it'll gradually end up being on these lines. And that's for this planet. It's coming up soon where I'll be expanding further out, on multiple planets. That'll be quite the experience.

Each tower can have some drones in it. These drones can fly to collect items, or to deliver them

Isn't it pretty? The sky will be bustling here shortly as I increase logistics usage. Thankfully the onboard processors are good about managing collisions so I shouldn't have to worry about them at all.

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DSP AAR: One More Step to Towers

 

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One More Step to Towers

Processing chips done, I'll head back to the base with a fresh load of Titanium for my industry there. One step closer to logistics ships and the ability to build a better base. There's some setup and research still to be done, but I'm almost there. Annoyingly this is when the constraints of the bootstrap base really start rearing their ugly heads. One of the things I've tried to do is keep items sourced closely to the other bits that need them. Oil products have generally been by themselves, so I could keep things tidy by separating them from the more metallic items.

That luck can't continue as I build more exotic items. And the logistics systems are actually quite the exotic item. Flight is harder than it seems at first glance. Humans didn't get it going until industrialization and even then they used some shortcuts. Unlike back on Earth, I can't count on resource planets having an atmosphere worth anything, so I'll need a system that works without air. And preferably one that doesn't involve consuming resources that I'd rather put into making a Dyson sphere. Of course, I'll also need a system that can go between planets in the void of space. Early rocketry can technically work, but that's not nearly efficient enough for me. Instead we'll use a variant of the engines on the Icarus for flight.

The idea of space flight without using some sort of propellant is funny to me, but nice to have

 

A new addition to the old line, and showing exactly what kind of nonsense I'll need to do to get things working. Sorters stack, so I went the easy route and trucked over graphene over to build my particle containers. What kind of particles you ask? I really don't know. The stuff we're working with now is downright strange.

How will this system work? Get a tower. Get it good and high with an elevator to make take off easier. Take some simple drones with a large cargohold. They don't need to be complex, the tower machinery and the particles involved will do most of the work. Load them in, power the entire thing with a frankly large amount of power, and we should have flying cargo ships that only use up electricity. And with the green energy I'm producing now, that makes it practically free!

A slightly different way of doing construction. The thrusters only go to making drones, so might as well keep them connected

Two more constructions. Unfortunately I only brought the few processing units I had made before, so it's off to Zibel 1 again to pick some up. Same as with titanium, I'm almost ready to get things completely automated, but I'm not quite there yet. I still need to research the exacts for some of this technology and I'll need the titanium and chips. A quick jaunt over and back and uh oh...

Space Flight is Maybe Not so Easy

I wasn't reading my checklist before I left for a routine mission. I forgot to pack extra hydrogen! No hydrogen means no extra energy generation and I'm forced to resort to the zero point energy generator the Icarus started with. It's infinite energy, but a tiny amount. It's not a major scare, but the idea of spending so much time to reverse course if I were to miss the location makes me shudder. I made it back safely, but I'd have preferred to not run into that trouble at all! Clearly the next energy source is on the cards for development. 

So far I've gotten by with burning fuels. Mix a fuel with oxygen and you get energy. Oxygen isn't plentiful in space, but it has been plentiful enough on these two planets that the Icarus can grab it constantly with little processing required. Easy to store and plentiful, I don't need to think about it. But the energy source is less plentiful, and hydrogen is the best possible burnable fuel I can use. If I want to get more energetic I'll need to go nuclear. There's a simple reaction available where you smash deuterium together with a single proton to produce quite a bit of energy. For me it means I can store eleven times the energy I could with burning the hydrogen and burn 50% quicker to boot which is quite the upgrade. But that's only soon. First, flying cargo ships. Next, turning the inside of the Icarus into a mini star.

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DSP AAR: Space Flight Made Easy

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Space Flight Made Easy

For fact: Jupiter has the volume of 1321 Earths. The scale here is a little off.

 Cargo acquired, time to head back to Zibel 3. Space travel is already a little dull. Though there are further upgrades to Icarus that should make things nicer. Higher speeds, more energy to hit those higher speeds, and more inventory capacity to make those trips worth it more. So that's ok. Soon enough I'll have it more automated. Easier to have machines do the work for me.

Back at the base, production is setup for analyzing some new construction techniques. It primarily researches using two of the toughest materials I can create right now, titanium crystals and diamonds. Crystals are quite the unique type of material, and should allow for some very nice technologies soon. I'm particularly eyeing the tech for a ship-based logistics network. Being able to send materials across the world or from world to world in a point-to-point manner will help immensely. Belts are great, but they very much do have their own limitations.

It is the odd case indeed though that I know enough of what I'll need in terms of materials, but yet not knowing how exactly to get it done. Research is still ongoing. And as usual, as soon as I fix one thing, another thing starts lagging behind.

And so it's a good time to start thinking of the next project: building the materials so I can build my logistics towers. There's two types of towers: planetary and interstellar. Both can employ logistics drones that'll transport materials between two towers on the same planet. The interstellar towers also have an additional height for easing the launch of logistics vessels that can go to other planets; at this star or others. Each come with their own set of materials that are still in the research phase that I'll need to develop the basics for. And after that, I can really start designing a better base. More options means a much better possible design.

The nice bit is after this I can develop a base with all the tools, and make something I wouldn't call a "bootstrap base" after its done. Unfortunately, the additional materials will make for some headaches in design. If you'll see, I've got science production in the center. To the east of it was production related to the beginning metal resources. To the west I've had products primarily relating to oil products, carbon, and now some titanium. Now I'll need to mix the two.

I say "now" but realistically I mean soon. More immediate is that my first burst of titanium is gone, and I'll need a lot of computer parts. Which are best sources from Zibel 1. So off I go again! Time for the Icarus to serve as a courier.

I decided to go with a white overall paint job with purple highlights

Luckily for me the two planets are close by in their orbits so this should be a quick jaunt over. I'll bring over some equipment to build processing units and bring back titanium while the constructors do their work. So 2-3 trips total. It's nice that the planets are so close. Did anyone ever tell you to make a list before you go on a trip? Well I forgot. I had everything but the very many smelters I'd need to for the process. Ah well. I'll take a load of titanium back with me when I go to pick them up so it's not a complete waste. 

And voila! Processor hot off the press. Almost literally, in a fun turn of events, considering how that term initially came about. You may notice that these lines are nothing like what I have back on the original planet, and there's a reason for that. The bootstrap base is ideal for producing many different types of items, and keeping them close together cuts down heavily on transport belt usage. So it's both efficient from a materials standpoint, but also thinking time. 

Here I'm not so worried about either. I have numerous transport belts that I can pick up and reuse eventually, so I'm fine with maybe being a bit wasteful, and I'll only produce a few products here. in this case I have multiple lines of raw resources only going to the eventual goal of producing processors. If I want to produce different items on this planet, I'll do it in different locations around the world. Logistics vessels will vastly change what my planets end up looking like.

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DSP AAR: A New Metal

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 A New Metal

As a handy rule of thumb, you can roughly tell how production is doing based off of the belts. If the belts are full, like in this case, that means production is greater than usage

Metals are an amazing material and are almost the sign of humans and their drive to subjugate the natural. Metals are so integral to how society works and the advantages it gives humans that early history can be roughly split into ages based off of the metals that are widely used at the time. You start with copper, a soft and easily smelted metal that nonetheless can be useful as in tools or weapons. It doesn't take long at all for people to start experimenting with alloys, with bronze bearing special mention for being a large improvement and seeing usage well into the gunpowder age. Next came iron, a metal that required increased heat and one that was worse than bronze in most aspects, except for cost. Never underestimate how much cost can influence the effects of a material.

Steel is a special metal. It's technically an alloy, and humans have been technically using it almost as long as we've had iron. Costs and quality concerns kept steel from seeing widespread usage, but we still knew of it and intentionally used it. But knowledge moved on, and humans learned better methods for steel production and created an age that might have been known as the steel age - if not for all the other advances that were being made at the same time. A general knowledge of chemistry and metalworking allowed for multiple types of steel that we could use. New metals we could access with a knowledge of chemistry and electricity, such as the cheap usage of aluminum. Or other synthetic materials like semi-conductors and gases.

History lesson aside, I'm interested in only three different metals: iron, copper, and titanium. Iron serves the bulk of my needs, especially early on. It's strong, and works well as a building material, while also serving as a great magnet when needed. Copper's soft and conductive, and therefore useful for anything involving electricity.  Then there's titanium, which lacks the raw strength of steel, but is so much stronger for weight which is absolutely a characteristic I will require. I can combine the three to suit my needs too. Need more strength? Steel. Strength with low weight? Titanium steel. 

Annoyingly, there's no titanium on my starting world. If I want some of this great metal, I'll need to do some traveling.

The First Spaceflight

With lots of silicon and copper, this world will also be fantastic for producing computer parts

 

Enter Zibel 1. It doesn't have the most titanium, but it is close and with an atmosphere allowing for wind turbines. Perfect place to nab some titanium. Conveniently, I've recently upgraded the Icarus's thrusters for interplanetary flight. "Sailing" is the term we use for it, as it's not quite rocketry, but similar.
 

Units and distances not at all to scale.

Thankfully the two planets are relatively close to each other so the trip doesn't take very long. I'm an engineer and not a physicist so I'm not entirely sure how the sailing process works, but in effect I pour a lot (and I do mean a lot) of energy in and get a fairly steady speed out.

This is listed as a "rocky salt lake" planet. There's zero water. It's great for ease of building.

 

Welcome to Zibel 1! It's pretty dull, I've gotta say. offwhite to red are the only colors here, but I didn't come here for sightseeing. I came here for titanium. Now I could certainly start harvesting other materials while I'm here. This planet has silicon and copper in high quantities, which would make it perfect for producing computing parts. But, I don't yet have any way of getting those materials back to Zibel 3 outside of carrying it via the Icarus, and I'd far prefer to have something automated first. And wouldn't you know it, but a light and strong metal like titanium would be perfect for objects meant to fly.
 

These are the only titanium veins on the entire planet

A flurry of construction later, and I have titanium bars being produced for transport back to the boostrap base. While they're producing, I'll give Icarus time to recharge for the flight back as well. Man, you'd think traveling to new worlds would be more exciting than this, but sadly not. Dull is the word of the day here. But not for long. Hopefully.

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DSP AAR: New Meaning to a Lunar Calendar

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New Meaning to a Lunar Calendar

 Do you know one of the things I'm happy I don't have to build here? A freaking calendar. One of the oddities of being on a moon is that there's no consistent solar schedule. The moon rotates same as Earth did, but there's this giant planet that's sometimes in the way of the sun. What would you even call it when it's supposed to be daylight but yet it's dark out? Darn. We got our day skipped?

Random ramblings aside, yes this matters. I've recently rediscovered the technology for solar panels. It's a simple technology, and the basis for the Dyson Sphere I hope to construct later, but not quite useful on this planet. It spends too much time dark for me to think it a consistent power supply. But that's alright. Wind power is quite the energy source, and for this moon the most efficient way to turn solar power into usable work.

For reference, I'd need 125 wind turbines to handle the current load

Not that I necessarily have enough to supply the entire base all the time. Every now and then I'll spend time upgrading the network by adding yet more wind turbines to the mix. Energy consumption with the bootstrap base can be odd. It takes time to construct new segments, and as I do some belts back up as they fill to capacity. Then the new belt comes online, and items further down the chain also activate to start filling the new line, which all drain power. Made especially worse if I grab more items to replenish my supplies, which again require more power to fill.

Black Gold

You can stack some buildings to save on space if you want. Science buildings are the ones I'll use this capability most for.

And red science is online! The red cubes are a mixture of carbon and hydrogen being supplied to allow for experimentation. Given that those two elements are the heart of most oil products, it's important to experiment heavily with them. 

The process starts out straightforward. Take crude oil out of the ground, and run it through a first round of processing. This will separate some of the hydrogen from the mix as a byproduct with a more useful form of oil. Then I have some options. I can further crack the oil and separate it into carbon and hydrogen. Given that I can far more easily use coal for my carbon needs, I'm really only interested in that process if I require extra hydrogen.

Alternatively, I can turn the oil into plastic. An eminently useful construction material that I'm sure I'll need quite a lot of. Or use additional oil and water to reinforce titanium into a crystalline structure. There's even some faint amount of sulfur in the oil for the sulfuric acid I'll require. I could even burn it for power generation if I wanted to. See? Super useful stuff oil is.

Working backwards

There is a very satisfying feeling to see rows of production like this

And now to reap the benefits of the oil products. One major improvement is with better belt and sorter technologies. The new belt runs at double the speed of my initial one, which makes adding on more products a breeze. Two regular belts would carry the same density, but come with additional hits to organizational complexity. I have to worry about the extra space of the second belt, make sure it fits, and potentially that it's added correctly to the entire mess of other belts. But upgrading is easy, assuming I don't mind spending the extra resources. Which I don't. I do have more than enough for a good long time.

Which makes for an odd construction flow. I'll research new items, add them on as production, then backtrack over the system to add on production elsewhere as needed. Building better belts means using more iron and steel bars, so hopping back through and setting up additional mining and smelting facilities became a thing. After that, I'll look into increasing the amount of red science I produce, and then work on unlocking the yellow structural science cubes. It's all coming together and moving steadily along. I like it.

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DSP AAR: Building Up

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How to Design Your Very Own Base

If you look closely you can see the flying drones that construct the buildings

 Forgive me if I get a bit technical here, but this is what I'm here for. As an engineer I can't help but be technical at times, and boy does it feel good when I am. Now I want to design my bootstrap base, which means considering some design principles that I can follow (and how to know when it's acceptable to break those design principles).

First thing to consider is how best to use my logistics methods. With my current technology I have only conveyor belts and the Icarus for transporting goods.  Later on I'll be able to use logistics drones for transporting goods long distance or for organization, but right now belts will be my bread and butter method. There's some limitations on how I can build them, mostly relating to height and making sure they don't get in the way of each other. You can see here that I'm building them with struts when they're going north/south above my line of facilities for just that reasoning.

 The other major concern is throughput of each belt. With some upgrades I'll be able to build better belts, but for now my belts are limited to 6 units per second. This means I'll need to consider whenever I'm building just how much throughput the line can handle. There's no point in building more facilities if they're going to be starved of ingredients.

Lastly I want to consider the design for my design. If these facilities were more permanent I'd build a blueprint first before placing, but the items are so modular that I don't have to! I'll build as I go, and modify the construction as needed. It's like building a blueprint, but with buildings instead of ink. I'm pretty sure that I if I did this in Engineer School I'd be thrown out, but hah! The beauty of being all alone is there's no one to be upset with your decisions.

My simple plan is to have a ring of facilities, each "line" going north/south and producing one item, with storages at the beginning to provide easy access if I personally need a bunch of said item. There's three exceptions to this rule. To the left I'll have one line for producing the factories and other buildings I'll require. There are numerous buildings I'll need, but most share similar components, and I'm not worried about throughput, so it'll be fine if the later factories are starved to start. They'll all fill in time, and I won't have to worry too much there. Next to that line will be the construction lines for conveyor belts and the sorters that move items from the belts to the factories. New upgrades will require items of the previous tier, so I'll gradually add on production there as technology allows.

Lastly I'll need raw materials of some sort, which will all come north of the factories. Most of those products will also require some amount of refining to be usable by my factories, so to save space I'll refine them on site. So rather than shipping copper ore in, I'll smelt it first and then ship it. 

A New Dawn for the Base

Flying gives both a speed boost and is easier to avoid collisions, but does increase energy usage

And the design starts taking form. The small buildings to the north of the factories split the belts evenly, allowing for one incoming belt to service multiple lines. As I need more of an item, I can easily extend the construction southward to allow for more factories to produce that item. If I need more incoming capacity, I can always build belts above the original ones allowing for multiple incoming and outgoing belts in each line. To make things easy I've been keeping the raw materials to come from the north.

 See that facility too down the line? That's constructing foundation. As you might have noticed, there's a good amount of water on this planet. And while water is great for some industrial processes and large bodies of it are needed for starting a biosphere so I can get that sweet sweet oil, it's not very good for building. So I'll pave over it with metal and stone to provide sturdy ground for my facilities. 

Not pictured: The fields of wind generators I planted to the south to power all of this

 There's a few things left to add on, and then I'll have the oil production ready to go. With that will be more opportunities for additional upgrades. Icarus is quite enjoying the new upgrades I've already gotten. Increased speed, thrusters planetary flight, and more energy. Cleaner energy too, with the tech for graphite. Gets rid of all the nonsense that you'd find in regular coal, leaving only well-organized carbon to burn.

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DSP AAR: Raising a Robot by his Bootstraps

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 Raising a Robot by his Bootstraps

 

The conveyor belts are about the only thing you can build on the water

 

Have you ever heard the phrase of "Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps"? It's a fascinating bit demonstrating how languages everywhere are living things. Way back when in the ancient period before computers, there was a sarcastic phase about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It's clearly impossible, and it was first a sarcastic and then legitimate phrase about the difficulty of raising your socioeconomic station. 

Later on it morphs again, primarily with computers. Where does a computer start when it needs to load information, but first needs to load information to load information? Why, it boots up, that's how. Bootstrapping and booting thus became a verb in its own right, referring to something similar but completely different from the original intention. And so I find myself here with another example of bootstrapping, as I need to construct facilities to make materials so that I can make the facilities and so on. I have to start somewhere, so I may as well start by lifting myself up with my non-existent bootstraps. 

You can only burn fuels so quickly. Energy generation is a constant concern for the entire game

Turns out it's easier to raise yourself up with back-mounted thrusters, but still. They are noticeably energy hungry, but convenient for keeping the mech from getting wet, given that I have no boots to protect myself.

All the production items I know of currently I can produce for myself with the Icarus's onboard replicators, but they work too slowly. Far easier to have a mining machine do part of the work, transport the ore with conveyor belts to a smelter, and then from the smelter to fabricating facilities. Even having the facilities build the intermediate products for me is a major time saver, and thus I from all that I'll begin. 

 The Plan

The upper section all deal with upgrades to the mech itself, below that are facilities and drone upgrades

Roughly, my initial plan is to get the basics all squared away. Some buildings to make the intermediates and conveyor belts along with a small section for the initial research.

Initial research involves using intermediates. After the initial stage all research consists of one or more colored cube "matrix" instead to keep things simpler and easier to automate.

While that gets started, I'll then want to build a more long-lasting setup. One I can build on as I go to more efficiently work, rather than having a "spaghetti" set of lines going every which way. By doing that, I can get stacks of the buildings I'll need, negating the need to have Icarus do all the hard creation work so I can focus on constructing more. Research too has been out-sourced to matrix laboratories.

Once that initial framework is complete, I can start working on oil products. Oil itself is a fantastic construction material and I'll use it heavily as my production and the materials I require become more complicated. As well, I'll be able to work on getting the Icarus upgraded, allowing for more basics like increased speeds and energy storage, but also game changers like stronger thrusters for going off planet. Because while Zibel 3 has a good range of materials, it lacks silicon and titanium in any large quantity. I'll need to go off-planet to get those in the numbers I require.

And with both of those materials, I'll be able to construct an interplanetary (and soon interstellar) logistics network. 

Every planet has a summary section like the one to the right. Decent amounts of iron, copper, and stone, with large amounts of coal and oil. For ease of the simulation, all planets are the same size.

First steps first though. Booting this process up properly will take time. I'm glad I have plenty of it, alone out among the stars.

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