BIE's Gigacharger: PRIME

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TL;DR: New Dark Fog-compatible gigacharger, and a new tool to remotely manage your battery supply. You’ll want to read the construction notes.
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(begin cheesy ad copy)

Greetings, engineers!

Bug’s Interstellar Emporium is proud to unveil two new additions to our blueprint catalog! While we’re most famous for our Fetchingly Fast Furnishment collection released on Blueprint Day almost three years ago, our story really began when our founder an engineer whose name has been lost to history accidentally exploded a moon after crashing a shipment of antimatter rods. COSMOS revoked that engineer’s antimatter hazmat shipping permit and he had to find a new way to power his star cluster. Thus began our appropriately-named “No Hazmat Permit” (NHP) collection!

That’s right, engineers, we’ve updated our high-end gigacharger to work in today’s chaotic universe! 

Meet Gigacharger: PRIME! 

PRIME builds on the lessons learned from our previous top model, Gigacharger 86, to bring you more power, smoother delivery, plenty of bufferage, and redundant, self-contained defense systems to protect it from the Dark Fog menace!

Unlike Gigacharger 86, PRIME is truly a set-it-and-forget-it model. Once you’ve placed it down, there’s nothing to configure to make it work—every piece is pre-configured so you can just walk away and manage it remotely with BMS!

PRIME is fully-belted and uses BIE’s patented StakExpander(tm) technology for lightning-fast uptake on all its exchangers! No more battery floods or freezes from PLS wonkiness, just smooth feeding and delivery!

PRIME also builds on Gigacharger 86’s lensed receiver arrays and combines their power with the recent upgrades COSMOS made to exchangers and accumulators! Now you get an extra 37 GW of power out of the system, for a total 123 GW of charging goodness in just one planet!

Speaking of those lensed arrays, we’ve adapted the StakExpander(tm) technology to them as well! Lens takeup is many times faster than Gigacharger 86, so that PRIME can spin up to both charge accumulators and defend itself in minutes, rather than the hours it took 86 to do so.

As for defending itself, PRIME has over fifty plasma turrets on-site in multiple redundant cells! Each cell makes its own ammunition and has repair functionality baked right in! Even if the Dark Fog manages to punch through PRIME’s exorbitantly thick shielding and destroy a cell, that won’t stop any of the others from blasting them into free atoms!

Truly, Gigacharger PRIME is exactly the system you want at the center of your empire’s power network! With BMS remote management, you can relax on a tropical planet without having to set foot in the baking heat of a sphere-enclosed gigacharger! It’s the best of both worlds!

Get yours today!

(BIE is not responsible for crashes, improper destinations, lost time, or system shutdowns caused by pilots hypnotized by PRIME’s beautiful, beautiful battery flow. BIE is not responsible for lost accumulators, nor is BIE responsible for the status of your antimatter shipping permits. If you are unsure of your status, please contact COSMOS. Any complaints will be hurled into our Black Hole Feedback Archive answered with all haste.)

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NUMBERS AND NOTES

PRIME eats 253 grav/lenses a minute at full power, though the initial spin-up is gonna need something like 60,000+(!) of them. Best to buffer up. There's plenty of grav-lens factories in DysonSphereBlueprints.com, and I recommend looking through them and seeing what suits.

PRIME eats 188 MK3 proliferator/minute IF absolutely none of the batteries are sprayed before coming in AND you manage to max out the three belts coming off the receiving ILS. My blackbox pre-sprays them, but I put sprayers here to cover empires that don't have that set up or if you have spray corruption somewhere in the network. This figure drops dramatically once your circulating batteries get sprayed and all that's left is the lenses coming in.

Time to go from completely full belts to nothing at all is 5:48 (348s). The belt and exchanger capacity is roughly ~80,000 batteries, not counting the 160,000 of the receiving ILS or the 180,000 of the sending ILS and the 30,000 of the belt-consolidating PLS. Total jammed capacity is therefore ~450,000 batteries--roughly half an hour to process all of that if demand suddenly jumps.

It takes 3:37 (237s) to get every exchanger going. That takes hitting it with ~85,000 batteries at once. The max single-shot landing of 8x receiving ILS with 10 vessels @ 2000 batteries per load is 160,000 batteries.

PRIME includes two traffic monitors on the output belts, right after the PLS that consolidate the belts. Out of the box, they just count batteries going by, but you can use them to set alarms to show when output is maxed. Max-output numbers are 6996 for the northmost one, and 6684 for the southern one.

Input ILS are set to minimum load of 50% (1K batteries). Outputs are set at 100%, 50%, and 20% for the near, middle, and far trio respectively. The consolidator PLS and splitters divide batteries evenly amongst the three arrays.

PUTTING DOWN THE PRINT

Pave the planet, THEN SAVE YOUR GAME. Seriously, don't lay this down without saving on the empty, paved planet first. You do NOT want to try and manually deconstruct this. It'll even give the Bulldozer mod fits. If it doesn't put down correctly, just reload and try again. So, so much faster and less frustrating, trust me--I've put this thing down 20+ times while testing and fixing replication errors.

Stand at the SOUTH pole when you place this. It's much easier to make out the "mohawk" belts from here, which you want because those belts must go directly on the meridians. There's also two BAB's directly in line with the mohawks, so you can use their center marks to make alignment if you need.

You may get a "compress at the pole" error when clicking to place, but so far in the numerous test builds I've done, this hasn't actually caused any problems.

As for actually putting down the buildings, there's a couple of ways to do it. For both of them, though, take along 47 PLS, 19 ILS, 190 vessels, and about 2500 logistics drones (not the fidget spinner ones, the regular ones). You want to lay those down first so that the ILS can receive their ingredients even without power--this makes sure there's proliferator on hand for the grav lenses that they'll request.

Note that the battery receiving/shipping ILS have plenty of free slots among them--you can use these to request buildings and belts from your mall. Another reason you want those first. 

Now as for the actual construction methods, there's "using the BABs" and "ignoring the BABs". 

Using the BABs means you lay those down first, along with exchangers, tesla towers, satellite substations, and ray receivers. This gets you planet-wide power coverage so all the BABs are powered. Then when you put down the really numerous stuff like sorters and belts, you can literally fly around the planet at top speed and let the BABs yank everything from your inventory and place it for you. BAB coverage isn't total, though, so you'll have to double-check the high tropics. This can be made a little more difficult because when a BAB grabs inventory from you, the "point at thing not built yet" indicator gets removed. This can make tracking down that lone unplaced belt later a bit harder.

Ignoring the BABs just means placing them very last. This is slower, but the "not built yet indicators" will work exactly as you expect them to.

If you think something didn't get placed, run a shipment of batteries through it. In a few minutes you'll know if certain exchangers don't light up. Same with the grav lens belts--you're looking for receivers that don't have the ring when their immediate neighbors do. The receivers on the same line as the tropical planetary shields do NOT use lenses, by the way, so ignore those. Unsure about the equatorial cannons? Check if they have a red ring--they should get ammo in less than two minutes when everything's hooked up.


FEATURES

While PRIME is very much a set-and-forget kind of print, it does have some cool features outside the ad copy. All of the equatorial cannons really do have independent ammo manufacture--go delve around amongst the exchangers and receivers and you'll find assemblers, smelters, and some interesting belting hooking them all up. The genesis for this whole print was wondering if there was enough space between exchangers to do any manufacture, and it turns out there IS. Quite the challenge getting everything hooked up!

Polar cannons also have independent manufacture, and at much higher rates given that their coverage and firing angles are better than the equatorial stuff. I'm sure some enterprising soul will find a way to ramp up production for the equatorials, but I was really shooting for "hey, it works, and well enough!" with the equatorial cells.

PRIME has dual-mode warper supply--it'll grab warpers from the network, but it will also grab green cubes to make them on-site. Either way you supply warpers to your empire, it'll use. If it grabs both, don't worry, the cubes get slowly consumed and provide for a nice buffer in case your warper supply gets hosed, and also prevents it from glomping down regular warpers off the network.

I'm also certain it's possible to stuff in more than 123 GW of charging, if the polar cannons and ammo were taken out. The current configuration seems to be a pretty good mix, however--the alpha version of PRIME did a dandy job of blowing 200-count Lancer waves out of the sky from L25+ hives. The truly mad could use PRIME to level up a hive, since it's pretty damn tanky. If you wired in some proliferator on the antimatter ammo, the overkill would level it up even faster.

MAKE CRAZY THINGS, ENGINEERS!
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