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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