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This is an end-game promethium ship optimized for speed / size. The core motivation is, based on the official formula, weight is much more important than width when optimizing for speed at the scale of large Promethium ships.

So I took this to the extreme and made this hollowed-out ship, tested in editor:



Blueprint

It regularly farms promethium at 600,000km+, making ~960k science every ~35 minutes. The catch is it requires 24+ levels of stronger explosion, 20+ levels of laser, asteroid productivity 30, and railgun speed 10.

Other features:

- Safe egg belting: the combinators programming of the science area ensure eggs are always belted and consumed at multiples of 10. The science cryo pants are in the range of front rocket turrets so this is necessary to prevent (deadly) friendly fire.
- Unfiltered rocket turrets: they're quite good for defense at high speeds and really far on the shattered planet journey. They do waste some rockets though.
- Carbon-efficient explosives: it uses the sulfer->coal->oil->sulfer loop with biochamber oil processing, fueled by spoilage from eggs and nuclear-powered steam.
- Rocket making layout maximizing beacon reuse, which reduces weight.

This is a very cool design! I just can't work out how to get this started with the eggs? how many eggs is it suppose to request for the inserter arms to active? The decider combinators reference 80 and also 320 but I have requested 500 to test and they still don't activate?

Can you tell me how what the best numbers for this are?

andyseemight wrote: Tue Oct 28, 2025 9:43 am This is a very cool design! I just can't work out how to get this started with the eggs? how many eggs is it suppose to request for the inserter arms to active? The decider combinators reference 80 and also 320 but I have requested 500 to test and they still don't activate?

Can you tell me how what the best numbers for this are?

It's designed for around 280k eggs I remember. It will only start processing eggs after leaving Nauvis to prevent infinite loading.

Hmmm the second it leaves Nauvis the inserters arms are still disabled by control behaviour even with 4000 eggs in storage. Would you be able to look at the blueprint to confirm this is happening to you?

andyseemight wrote: Tue Oct 28, 2025 6:58 pm Hmmm the second it leaves Nauvis the inserters arms are still disabled by control behaviour even with 4000 eggs in storage. Would you be able to look at the blueprint to confirm this is happening to you?

This shouldn't happen. I used a legendary starter pack in my blueprint so if you used a common one, the hub connections will be lost when pasting, which could result in the behavior you mention (by failing to read the egg count). There are a lot of connections so the easiest way is to create a new platform with a legendary starter pack, paste it again and quickly disable the auto-request, then manually copy the hub connections, then use the legendary platform for something else.

You are precisely correct! Yes it has to be a legendary Space Platform Hub. Thank you! It now works!

andyseemight wrote: Wed Oct 29, 2025 10:04 am You are precisely correct! Yes it has to be a legendary Space Platform Hub. Thank you! It now works!

Glad to know that! I later found out a few bugs where some of the cryos would still end up with leftover eggs so it's best used for continuous operation for now.

Yeah that is correct. I added some laser turrets to purely focus on biters when that happens. I've also made it so it dumps promethium on vulcanus and another ship ferries it back to Nauvis so that the Promethium ship can focus purely on grabbing eggs without the complication of it potentially hovering around Nauvis for too long accepting eggs while promethium science backs up in its internal storage.

This ship is a great design and I never even thought to look at using biochambers for oils for the purposes of more reliable sulfur production!