[2020] I recently started a game with Space Exploration. When is offworld mining worth it?

Originally posted by craidie

The second you get a cargo rocket.

For example the only source of vulcanite on Nauvis is from deep core mining. And you'll be getting a metric shit ton of stone to dispose of if that's the only source of vulcanite you have. And you need Vulcanite for space science...

When you start thinking of bringing back things that are found on nauvis surface It won't be immediately profitable.

First we need to figure out the cost of a launch.

• Capsules are reused completely, so no need to factor that in, we do need to bring them though. Sections are a bit more complicated. A single rocket can fit 23 rockets with pods(18 slots leftover.). you get 20% reused from the rocket that brought it. 80 sections take another 16 slots. That leaves 2 slots for whatever for a delivery of 24 rockets. That leaves a single rocket build cost back to nauvis at 104 ish cargo sections

Rockets crashing complicated as hell

0.9^({ Rocket Survivability lvl }) * 0.5 * [x / (x + 500)] Where x is the amount of cargo rockets launched.

Luckily it doesn't affect much. You lose the rocket but cargo is intact. So the cost is not that big at the start. It does increase the cost of a rocket by another 4 sections at the start(the more reusable your rockets are, the bigger penalty a crash is) 108 sections per rocket.

• It costs us 18.5k iron, 13.5k copper, 9k stone, 2.6k coal and 75.8k crude to build a 84 sections from scratch with t3 productivity everywhere possible and yellow assemblers. With recipes that use nauvis only materials.

depending on how far you're going you'll lose some of items from each stack(not a problem with single stack items though) shouldn't be more than 5%.

All this means that IF you source oil and water from nauvis you get to 45k ish raw ore/stone/coal in total needed per launch back to nauvis. So yeah not going to happen. You would need to halve the costs for it to be in remotely profitable. around reusability 9 you'll probably be better off compared to delivery cannons

Originally posted by fatpandana

Please tell you have been scrapping them!

Originally posted by fatpandana

Ops. I miss read that, still havent had cafeine. Cannon capsules are not re useable.