I like the idea of maintaining your POB by mining scrap. Very cool. I like mining.
However I ran some numbers based on this spreadsheet and it seems this isn't as cool as I originally thought of.gosh I hope my math isn't off otherwise this whole thread is for nothing aaaaaaah
Main issue I ran into is that the smelter refined soooo slow. I mined 100.000 scrap a few days ago and only about 30.000 of that has been refined into Basic Alloy. A rate of 11.700 scap refined/24h isn't great. Think of all the used space gong to waste. Moreover, even a Core 2 base consumed about 8,400 Basic Alloy a day. The refinery makes 5.500/day! Essentially this means relying on scrap is only good if you have a Core 1 base,
EDIT: Oops! I'm dumb! Bases Core 1 to 4 all eat up only 4,320 per day. I edited/removed parts of this post which relied on this wrong math.
Oh but wait, I can go into overdrive by supplying some Industrial Materials and the smelter will go faster! How nice! Wrong!
A supercharged smelter will go trough 21.000 scrap/day producing 15.700 Basic alloy. A nice increase, but still nothing great, compared to ore refinery speeds. Also this consumes 2.100 Industrial Materials. So what, no big deal right? Well again, problem.
My whole idea behind succumbing to my inner Junker and smelting scrap was to maintain by base that way (excluding FOW), instead of buying Basic Alloy. I even had the idea to undercut NPC bases and sell Basic Alloy to players. But this would not work because I will need to either:
- have the smelter at the normal speed and spend the rest of my time waiting for the smelting
- overclock the smelter, but spend extra money on Industrial Materials, which costs money and requires one extra trip/day
I have to mine 11.000 scrap/day (which I don't mind). But this means that when I decide to fill the base, it will stay filled with scrap for a long time, only converting about half the scrap into basic alloy. Again, scrap taking us space and freeing it fast enough. Oh! And don't forget! It's not enough to just mine 11.000 scrap. I gotta buy the fuel and industrial hardware (disclosure: I don't mind the fuel requirement. Would be strange to refine it with zero energy).
At the end of the day, I would have been easier to just not bother with the smelter and just buy my Basic Alloy. Factor in the time you spend mining, the time refinery spends smelting and the 98265 units of scrap taking up cargo.
So please. Consider increasing the speed in which scrap is turned into Basic Alloy. End my suffering.