Going for the speed achievements. I had the great idea that fewer asteroids meant I could race to planets and Solar System Edge with lighter ships.
…turns out it also applies to asteroid chunks. My ships needed a full hour to refuel, and space science took several hours to get the research for getting to Vulcanus.
RESTART
Well, I know what I am messing around with tonight.
There is a viable strategy with it, but it requires a specific infrastructure from the start: Build a huge science platform with 40 grabbers to get going, and ship water up via launches. After Vulcanus for carbon, all fuel can be shipped up.
Another strategy you could do to mitigate that is have a blueprint of your ship with huge extended arms, keep a cargo bay’s worth of the materials, and whenever you stop, slap that blueprint on.
Collect materials like a stationary satellite build, and then deconstruct the arms, and pack them away.
Wish this could be a fully automated thing, but its livable for a speedrun situation.
You could even store asteroids in permanent belts on your real ship, so the processing can keep going mid-flight.
This is an amazing tip, I’m going to use this for all my platform builds now.
Most likely just for the build/startup phase which happens in orbit. I’m sure it will reduce the time from build to launch massively