Talk:Planetary Colonialisation and Production

1) When building colonies, remember that links are your enemy - you need to minimize their number and length so that you have more CPU and power for the actual structures.

In all the pictures shown, links are just enormously long. An extractor takes 200tF and 800mW to operate. A decent length link (Let's say 3831km) takes 782tF and 585mW!

Consider the following setup (see image):

From extractors, all ore flows to storage (in case there is an overflow, the factories don't throw the surplus away), and from where it is routed to factories. Notice how we bunch up the factories as close to storage as possible (up to 3 factories seems to be the max in a chain for a normal, non-upgraded link). The factories route the processed resources over the same link right back to the launcher (which can also be huddled as close to storage as possible).

The instructions mention that bunching extractors together lowers their efficiency; that is the only reason for those links to be long. (at 4 extractors in the chain, processing at 1000 units of raw resources each/15 minutes, you'll be using about 65% of the capacity of the last link to storage - another way to say it is that it seems a std link can handle about 6500 units or resources sent over it per 15 min period).

Another thing to consider when building your colony is with what frequency you want to extract the ore. A 5hr cycle, repeated 3 times, yields 2 times the ore of the 23 hour cycle. Once you've figured out how often you can restart your extractors, figure out how many factories you need to keep up with extraction.