Day 19

With the right skills I can do 2-3 P4 processors on one planet. Also depending on the P4 product. I decided to dedicate a storage for every P3 that I make. This will let me run the factories for 5+ days once they are filled. In the middle is a Launchpad that will distribute the materials. There is a cooldown on every expedited transfare. To reduce it as much as possible, I had to upgrade the links connecting launchpad with storages. On lvl 5-6 this brings the cooldown down to 5 min.

Different P4 items

they are not all the same?

So by now many might have noticed that P4 come in 2 different setups. Some use 2x P3 + 1x P1 and others use 3x P3. Processing from P2 to P4 requires some P3 processors to convert the P2 materials.

On the left all 3 inputs are P3. On the right only 2 inputs are P3 and 1 input is P1. We see that we actually need less buildings for the right setup. The difference in powergrid/CPU is:

Item	Left	Right
Launchpad	700 MW/3600 tf	700 MW/3600 tf
Storage Facility	2100 MW/1500 tf	1400 MW/1000 tf
Advanced Industry Facility	4200 MW/3000 tf	2800 MW/2000 tf
High-Tech Production Plant	400 MW/1100 tf	400 MW/1100 tf
Links	~200 MW/~300 tf	~140 MW/~210 tf
	7600 MW/9500 tf	5440 MW/7910 tf
without storage	5500 MW/8000 tf	4040 MW/6910 tf

We can see some P4 needing more powergrid/CPU. It also seems that storage facilities take up much resources. We might replace all storage facilities with launchpads, but the enormous CPU requirements would only allow for 4-5 launchpads per planet with max skills. Or we can forget about storages and have  some powergrid/CPU left for more P4/P3 buildings.

Storages

why do we use them

In PI there are 3 different buildings that can store products. The Command Center(500 m3), Launchpad(10.000 m3) and Storage Facility(12.000 m3). A single P4 product takes up a volume of 100 m3 and one P2 material 1.5 m3. With production planets volume is a major concern. Would you like to produce more P4s in a short amount and refiling storages on a daily basis or do you like it easy and wan't them to run for several days without your attention.

Launchpads:
- 10.000 m3 volume
- can directly import/export materials
- requires 700MW/3600 tf

Storage Facilities:
- 12.000 m3 volume
- requires 700MW/500 tf

With extraction it was clear that Powergrid is the bottleneck mainly because the ECU uses so much power and little CPU. With Factory planets we also need to worry about the CPU consumption. With Max skills you get 19.000MW/25.415 tf. The max number of either storage or launchpads is: 7x LP or 27x Storage. Launchpads are easy to use, but with its low CPU consumption Storages are the clear winners for storing massive volumes.

Input (one P4 processor)	Launchpad	Launchpad + Storage
Broadcast Node	2 days 7 hours	8 days 8 hours
Integrity Response Drones	1 day 13 hours	5 days 13 hours
Nano-Factory	3 days 1 hour	8 days 8 hours
Organic Mortar Applicators	3 days 1 hour	8 days 8 hours
Recursive Computing Module	2 days 7 hours	8 days 8 hours
Self-Harmonizing Power Core	2 days 7 hours	8 days 8 hours
Sterile Conduits	3 days 1 hour	8 days 8 hours
Wetware Mainframe	1 day 13 hours	5 days 13 hours

Note: For P4s you can't split the output: Launchpad 4 days 4 hours, Storage 5 days

How to fill em up? Every ECU and processor can output their materials to a storage overtime, but what if you need to fill up a storage in a short amount of time? Launchpads are the key to the problem as they can directly input materials from the Customs Office. Storages don't have that ability so we need to use Expedited transfer from a Launchpad to a Storage to transfer materials. The trick is that once we do that a cooldown timer will appear on the Launchpad that transferred the materials preventing us from using the same Launchpad to transfer materials to a second Storage Facility until that timer resets.

An Launchpad and a Storage Facility are connected by a link. This link can transfer 1,250 m3/hour. This means that if we use Expedited transfer and send 5,000 m3 to a Storage then we will get a cooldown of 4 hours. Upgrading the link to 2,500 m3/h will gives us a cooldown of 2h. So all we need to do is to keep upgrading the link till we hit a cooldown of 5min. Below that we can't go anymore. Seems to be the limit =/