#petroleum building

[midwesternartlovertraveler]

Petroleum Building, Casper, Wyoming

[arolesbianism]

We did it boys we got our first game crash in oni 🎉

[cosmicpuzzle]

What is your Career like?👩🏻‍💻💼💰💸

The 10th ruler in your chart can indicate your career but it is not the only factor. However, the house placement of 10th lord/ruler can indicate at times the type of career you desire and also can indicate your job literally.

1st House : You will do well in careers which gives you a certain amount of independence. You can be an entrepreneur or a boss or a team leader. Authority and power are essential for you.

2nd House : You will do well in careers which pays you well. You can be good with numbers, finances and any responsible/routine job. Careers that depend on your appearance like modelling are good. Your job would need a good self esteem and self worth.

3rd House: You will do well in careers that involve mobility, communication, writing such as YouTube. Freedom of expression, and movement is important to you. You should be able to experiment as you wish. Change of careers as times change

4th House: You will do well in careers that gives you emotional satisfaction such as nursing, psychology. making an impact on people’s lives is important to you. Working from home can be good.

5th House: You will do well in careers that allow your self expression such as art, acting . Careers connected to children and transfer of knowledge are good. A career in which you are a genius and unique such as music, painting, investor.

6th House : You will do well in careers that allow you to maintain order such as backend work. Routine and a stable job is important to you. You may also do well in health , healing and animal careers.

7th House : You will do well in careers that allow you to exchange things whether product or service. You will do will in public careers like politics. Business is good as well as client based careers. You will do well in careers that allow you to work with another person.

8th House : You will do well in careers that allow you to research things like a biomedical or chemical engineer. Careers in digging like oil petroleum or digging another’s finances as auditing, insurance are good. Investigation and finding secrets. Psychology, medicine , surgery are good choices.

9th House : You will do well in careers that allow you to reach a wider audience around the globe such as publishing books, writing, online teaching, academia. A sense of meaning and purpose is important in your job.

10th House: You will do well in careers that allow you to be skilled and efficient in what you do. A generally good position for executive and managerial jobs or Government routine jobs

11th House: You will do well in careers that allow you to build your network such as social media manager, politics, businesses, digital marketing etc.

12th House : You will do well in careers that heal people and raise their consciousness. Careers in spirituality, metaphysics, non-profit work would be good for you. You need freedom and a flexible schedule.

For Readings DM

[dailyoverview]

Hashima is a small abandoned island about 9.3 miles (15 km) off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan. The island was continuously inhabited from 1887 to 1974 as a seabed coal mining facility, with a peak population of 5,259 in 1959. However, as petroleum began replacing coal in Japan in the 1960s, the mine was closed and cleared of inhabitants. Its abandoned concrete buildings, undisturbed except by nature, and surrounding seawall make the island an eerie, yet popular, tourist destination.

32.627778°, 129.738333°

Source imagery: Maxar

[ellapurnellmybeloved]

Blessed be the asteroid that fragmented itself and formed the meteor that fell on the prehistoric earth, decimating the animals that went on to become fossils and then petroleum that was extracted and used to manufacture the fuel that supplied the machines used to build the hospital in which Dior Goodjohn was born.

[apas-95]

honestly for as radical as 'how to blow up a pipeline' is it really cannot conceive of organised action.

the arguments the characters have are arguments between incrementalism and adventurism, and every time a character says 'this might be impressive and flashy but it doesn't actually do anything' the only rebuttal they have is the propaganda of the deed; of a never-before-seen type of spontaneous mass action spurred on by people Seeing That It's Possible. ultimately both sides are making arguments that are 'within the system' - the stated endgame for the activists is that widespread terrorism makes specifically petroleum unappealing to the capitalist market. that is as much of a solution as the mythological reform is, and is ultimately underpinned by the exact logic of 'raising awareness' as the positions they critique - positions they critique specifically for their *speed*, not for the fact that they are impossible.

the driver of climate destruction is capitalism, not any given resource. without a support network; without connections to the labour movement which can exert ultimate power, and bring the economy to a halt unless its demands are met; without a fighting organisation built from the support of the people; without bail funds and legal support; the only hope is that you can Make A Statement when you get imprisoned, and that, with no support from the outside, nobody ever talks.

if you want to destroy a system, then follow the example of the millions who have succeeded at that before you, learn from their experiences, and build a movement that creates guerrillas and victorious revolutionaries, instead of martyring lone terrorists

[youaremysunshine-court]

jonathan sims, c. 2015: there is nothing paranormal about this statement, they must have had too much to drink and hallucinated the entire event

alice dyer, c. 2024: this place is creepy? of course its creepy, its the british government. you think they burn down buildings? pfft, have you heard of british petroleum, they burn down oceans

[witchofthesouls]

I like thinking about humans-into-Cybertronians because of the weird, alien fuckery along with ex-humans making connections to certain things because it's the closest approximation they have.

Imagine if 'running on fumes' is a literal statement among Cybertronians. As their tanks run near empty, there's a petroleum-like taste that lingers in their sinuses and, if left long enough, cycles out of their vents. That's why Cybertronians typically don't like hanging around gas stations because it's a really stark reminder of long-term starvation. Meanwhile, you got an ex-human going like, "Man, I'm starting to taste gas, so I need gas. Huh, y'all have built-in reminders to feed yourself outside of hunger pains? That's neat."

As well as the ex-humans misdiagnosing themselves. Let's take Cybertronian carriage. Humans are used to a pregnancy that completes its course in a designated organ (aka womb), so finding out a mecha had straight up knocked them up that bypassed the initial spark-to-spark teether formation wouldn't freak them out in the ways that a lot of Cybertronians would be really concerned about. Especially the medics and said partner(s).

Ex-human crying over the sonogram because they got told it's a very high-risk pregnancy and all they see is the coming baby is very deformed since it's only a ball within a ball of green soup and silver tendrils. Partner is highly confused yet attempts comforting in varying levels of success.

Cybertronian medic needs to explain that the sparklet is healthy, but ex-human really needs to watch themselves because the entire process will be done within the gestational chamber and goes deep into explaining the complications that can happen.

Partner is absolutely riveted by all the gravity of the matter since the strain of having a full-carriage that initialized in the chamber can put the carrier in danger as there can be coding conflicting with priorities that rends said carrier unconscious or wrecks health complications, especially since there's a high-chance of the newspark not fully detaching from their carrier's spark as the dropping process ensures.

Ex-human that comes from a species where a pregnancy is like getting into a moderate crash, so damage varies each time is happy that they haven't fucked up badly yet and can plan a baby shower. "By the way, when's the due date?"

Medic: "Hard to say with the carriage combined, but it's more in the primary initialization stage. The sparklet's still has a visible, if a bit thin, teether to your spark, and a solid mass hasn't formed yet."

Ex-human: "Okay, so how long?"Medic says incomprehensible length of time for an Earth child and how it can vary.

*Confused ex-human noises over the several human lifetimes is the equivalent of a span to a Cybertronian carriage. And how multiple factors can impact the timeframe.*

*Confused Medic noises out of sheer concern over ex-human's family history, especially over the fact they have extremely and highly dangerously short carriages.*

*Confused partner noises on why their love wants to plan a bathtime for the newspark at this moment, and wonders if ex-human knows that water and infant Cybertronians do not mix.*

Or, another thing. What if the dropping process where the sparklet detaches from the carrier's spark to descend into the gestational chamber below to build its frame has very 'classic'** heart symptoms in a human body?

(** Quick heads up, much of human biology and modern medical understanding derives from male biology. Unfortunately, women usually see atypical symptoms that are more subtle, moderate rather than severe pain/discomfort, or pain in other other locations rather than the chest.)

Ex-human has sudden, excruciatingly chest pain, insides literally quivering and shifting in sync with the bursts. Meanwhile, everyone around them is calm, trying to soothe them, and they think they're honestly dying so fast because there's no rush to the nearby hospital, and everyone is pushing comfort-it's okay-we got you at them.

[philosophicalconservatism]

Response To Quote On Male Protection Of Women.

chinchillacrossing

Protect us from who? 🧐

Philosophicalconservatism

The very fact that you can ask that question is a stunning testimony to the effectiveness of male protection. A tribal woman living on the plains of Africa or in the jungles of the Amazon would never ask such a question. Women living in 17th or 18th century colonial America would never ask such a question. It is protection from both the physical threats and the stringent physical demands imposed upon the human race by a brutal natural world. Men are always protecting women either directly, as is done in more primitive societies, or indirectly by building barriers against nature around them, and an infrastructure that creates a far greater life of ease. Men also maintain that infrastructure.

Men are virtually all of the mechanical engineers, materials engineers, civil engineers, electrical engineers, petroleum engineers, construction workers etc. Men do almost all of the most dangerous jobs on the planet. And all of it is done to sustain and enhance this infrastructure which men have created in order to insulate and protect their families (which is to say, women and children) from the hazards of the natural world. That is why when there is breakdown in that infrastructure and some kind of tragedy strikes, that is the priority for men "Women and children first".

Original quote

"Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters."- Camille Paglia

[andavs]

Nope, still thinking about it.

Shannon comes back around Halloween and Eddie says they haven’t seen her in “almost two years”. The show timeline generally lines up with real life, so Eddie would’ve started at the 118 like early September? He’d been working there for about two months by then.

LAFD training is 22 weeks (or it was, apparently they shortened it a few years ago) which is like five months. Looks like there are academy classes starting in January and April, and April is the latest he could start to finish by September, and that’s basically graduating one day and starting work the next.

But April is a weird time to up and move a seven year old to a new school, just a couple months before the year ends. I don’t know if he would’ve moved in January for Chris to start at the new semester, but he probably moved prior to April to get him enrolled and get their new place somewhat set up before he started at the academy. (Unless they lived with Isabel at first, which I love the idea of, actually.)

All that right there is almost a year. So that leaves about a year before he moved to LA where he was back in El Paso alone after Shannon left.

Adding a cut because this got long.

Whether his parents helped him out financially for part of it or not, that’s just one year they gave him to not only adjust to suddenly being a single parent, but to try to cobble together the equivalent of his military salary with a high school diploma, alone. While also readjusting to civilian life and employment. And probably still recovering physically from getting shot three times. And losing the insurance he had through the army that was covering Chris. With untreated PTSD to cap it off.

And who knows what Shannon was doing in LA. It seems like her mom died at some point and she was too paralyzed to come home after (grieving, guilt, etc.), but I assume she had a job? If she inherited enough from her mom to be able to live on it for over a year, and she didn’t send any of it back home, that would be a serious dick move. But they were still legally married! I don’t know how it works when your spouse is in another state, cut off but also working, but I’m assuming that factors into things if Eddie tried to file for any kind of government programs or assistance.

That’s one year they gave him to navigate all of that alone before his parents tried to take Chris away.

Eddie was doing everything “right” before he got shot. He had a solid job, he was providing, they had two cars and a mortgage, he had insurance for Chris, Shannon could be a stay at home mom—she didn’t want to be but financially, she could be. As far as we know, that was all on Eddie. It seemed like Helena helped with Chris (even when Shannon didn’t want it) but it didn’t sound like his parents were contributing financially. Eddie was doing what he thought was his part and providing all of that.

And then he got shot. He got discharged from the military. Shannon left. And the five years it took to build all of that fell apart within a few months.

And instead of helping him get back on his feet by giving him a minute to breathe and get his bearings, his parents watched him struggle for a year and then tried to take his son.

It sounded like Helena was caring for Chris quite a bit while Eddie was working, but Ramon was a petroleum engineer at the same company for forty years. He made enough to raise three kids on one salary and send (presumably) all three to Catholic school. He was still working well after Eddie moved to LA. They couldn’t have helped him out financially during that year so he could actually spend time raising his own son? Maybe only work two jobs while he tried to figure everything out?

Nope. “Don’t drag him down with you,” Helena said, while she watched Eddie drown, only caring that Chris was safe with her.

[emmebearpaw]

Ok. I’m just going to say this is going to be a very long ramble about incredibly minor Genshin Impact lore and design choices that fill my brain. It’s loosely inspired by this prompt on the Genshin 2024 prompt meme, but this is not written in fanfic style despite being mostly headcanon. And Amber not being in it. And also a different belief in the world building of them than the prompt suggests. It’s a lovely prompt though if I ever think of how to make what I’m about to write an actual story I might claim it.

p.s: most of this ramble is just my genshin worldbuilding as related to wind gliders. Thus mostly textiles.

I’m obsessed with Wind Gliders. I fully understand they run on magic, and that attempting to design ones that don’t are nigh impossible (as explained in Sumeru wing’s). However I’m not interested in the magic that fuels them. That’s the hand waving. Necessary, yes, but boring. I’m interested in how they are made in universe.

Now. This is not something the game is interested in. So I’ve made. A lot of stuff up. I’m not surprised Genshin doesn’t really care, it’s an open world game. The basis of fabric production is something the game only lightly touches upon with the assertion that Silk Flowers can make fabric. It’s just called “fabric” in game but I am going to presume, based off its description of being “silky smooth”. That it’s silk. Which would make sense for the region of Liyue and silk has had use in parachute material, so I’m not going to rule out silk as a material wind gliders are made from.

However silk flowers only grow in Liyue, and surely Liyue is not the only country in Teyvat that can make fabric. So it’s time for my work of fiction number one. What kind of fibers are found in Teyvat? Despite everyone in this game looking like they have invented polyester, with its superior dying and fabric printing range, I don’t think Teyvat is a world that process petroleum. Only Fontaine has a level of technological development I would think would be conducive to oil and they have their own renewable energy source in indemnitium. So we will be sticking with natural fibers.

The major varieties of natural fibers that I think are most conducive to wind glider construction include: cotton, hemp (makes canvas and rope), silk, and flax (makes linen).

The locations in game these would be cultivated based on their real world cultivation histories (source is Wikipedia):

Cotton: warmer regions. Primarily Sumeru and Natlan (cotton is an old world and new world crop! We domesticated it more than once), maybe some around the chasm in Liyue but that region does not seem to be doing a lot of agriculture.

Hemp: Hemp is an old world crop. It was imported into South America but only grew well in Chile. Cultivation is a little hard because of the fact that Hemp is the same plant as Marijuana and is thus just sometimes illegal. Probably grows pretty much everywhere but is not commonly found in Natlan. Doesn’t seem like a lot of middle eastern countries grow a lot of it either, so probably not a lot in Sumeru?

Silk: Historically? Liyue and Inazuma. Sumeru has gotten into it more recently. This one is harder to think about though as a plant would have much different growing condition than insects. Plus Inazuma is a more similar climate to Sumeru jungle than Liyue. Honestly it’s 1 am I’m tired I’m not thinking about soil water logging right now.

Flax: Most prominently grown in Mondstadt and Fontaine (once again I’m not thinking about the water table).

Ok. So with the in game lore tying wind glider creation to Mondstadt the sail material being a linen originally would probably be the most likely. Sumeru’s wind gliders also specifically mention a history of attempting to create realistic wind gliders. Those would probably be cotton or maybe silk.

TLDR: different fabrics might be used.

——————

Ok but what about construction? Well to begin with, windgliders seem to have a construction style more similar to a parachute than a plane. This is evidence by the deploy animation! Go jump off a cliff in game and pop out those wings and you’ll see them bend upwards from the middle and then level out. It can also be seen by their shape! The wing tips point downwards a little bit. An internal frame would likely lead to less bowing of the wings, and is thus unlikely as part of the structure.

This, however brings us to the point that I think the wind glider frankly has more parts than they show us in game. If the wings have no internal frame, they would need strings to keep the wings level and to steer them, like a paraglider. Additionally, the game literally doesn’t depict a way that the glider connects to your character’s body. I personally think it is something similar to a parachute harness and that wind gliding posture leans far more forward. Almost horizontal instead of the near vertical posture depicted in game. Mostly because I don’t know how you could rig a vertical posture in and strap it to yourself without adding lots of extra weight.

Now onto production of wind gliders!

The basic wind glider Amber hands us at the beginning is basically the only style of wind glider that is produced ready for purchase. It’s basically only available in Mondstadt, as Mondstadt is the only region with a high enough rate of adventurers, a culture that promotes gliding and an environment conducive to gliding that is safe enough for most people to consider it a reasonable activity. Gliding is a sport in Mondstadt! Especially around the coastal cliffs, where updrafts can keep you airborne for long periods of time! In Inazuma it’s a thing insane people do (I can not imagine that a place with frequent unexpected rain storms and lightning as I imagine in Inazuma would think about a sport where if it rains people might die because the thing keeping them airborne absorbed water and got heavy). When not in the air they hang down. They don’t just disappear like in game, you actually have to pause and take them off and fold/roll them back up when you are done using them. The traveler just wears a backpack with big wings draping off their back like a cape a lot of the time.

The wings of first flight are pretailored, and can be purchased directly through the knights. It is up to the purchaser to adjust the attachment straps and steering strings as necessary to ensure they are taught and secure no matter a person’s proportions. They come in the brown and black we see in game, though color may vary slightly depending on when in the year the wings were produced as a different dye may be substituted. The color was chosen to be very visible against many surfaces, including the sky, the stone color of the area and even the soils most prevalent in Mondstadt! That way if an adventurer crashes and needs rescue they are the most visible.

There is a small craft factory that produces them by hand. They are not made directly by the Knights but are commissioned by them for sale to adventurers and sport gliders. In terms of production, there are two ways I figure gliders are made.

More reasonable due to their high variation in coloring, each “feather” is a separate piece of fabric sewn together (typically by hand, i don’t know how many places in Teyvat have sewing machines. Fontaine probably does). This style would probably have an inside fabric layer of a less breathable fabric, which is one solid piece and is the thing actually doing the work, and then a fashion layer surrounding it. More pieces of fabric sewn together introduces more possibility for air to pass through and cause a lack of drag. I figure most wings in the game are this style.

There is no inside + fashion layer. The glider is one layer that is 1-2 solid piece(s), decorated with decorative stitches and details along the center of the wings where drag production is less important. The Wings of first flight are the most likely to be this style.

“But what about other wing styles?” I hear you ask. Simple. I think those are all artisan one off productions made for the traveler. The Steambird commissioned a wind glider for you from a local artisan to repay you for helping out the city so much. They got you a wind glider because you, the traveler, are known for using a wind glider. This was less notable in Mondstadt but is much more notable as your travels continue. Yes I know the Fontaine wings description indicate you don’t know the source of them. I think the in game description of the wings is written in universe. The artisan who created your wings know things about the world and tell you things about the world in their backstory for the wings. This isn’t a great answer but this is just how I interpret it. The non reputation wind gliders I don’t know how to justify how you receive them in game. I also don’t know how the Frostbearing Tree gives you a craft project.

Anyways all this to say I still don’t actually have an answer for the prompt.

[jangillman]

Right now the average wind farm is about 150 turbines. Each wind turbine needs 80 gallons of oil as lubricant and we're not talking about vegetable oil, this is a PAO synthetic oil based on crude... 12,000 gallons of it. That oil needs to be replaced once a year.

It is estimated that a little over 3,800 turbines would be needed to power a city the size of New York... That's 304,000 gallons of refined oil for just one city.

Now you have to calculate every city across the nation, large and small, to find the grand total of yearly oil consumption from "clean" energy.

Where do you think all that oil is going to come from, the oil fairies?

Not to mention the fact that the large equipment needed to build these wind farms run on petroleum. As well as the equipment required for installation, service, maintenance, and eventual removal.

And just exactly how eco-friendly is wind energy anyway?

Each turbine requires a footprint of 1.5 acres, so a wind farm of 150 turbines needs 225 acres; In order to power a city the size of NYC you'd need 57,000 acres; and who knows the astronomical amount of land you would need to power the entire US. All of which would have to be clear-cut land because trees create a barrier & turbulence that interferes with the 20mph sustained wind velocity necessary for the turbine to work properly (also keep in mind that not all states are suitable for such sustained winds). Boy, cutting down all those trees is gonna piss off a lot of green-loving tree-huggers.

Let's talk about disposal now.

The lifespan of a modern, top quality, highly efficient wind turbine is 20 years.

After that, then what? What happens to those gigantic fiber composite blades?

They cannot economically be reused, refurbished, reduced, repurposed, or recycled so guess what..? It's off to special landfills they go.

And guess what else..? They're already running out of these special landfill spaces for the blades that have already exceeded their usefulness. Seriously! Those blades are anywhere from 120 ft. to over 200 ft. long and there are 3 per turbine. And that's with only 7% of the nation currently being supplied with wind energy. Just imagine if we had the other 93% of the nation on the wind grid... 20 years from now you'd have all those unusable blades with no place to put them... Then 20 years after that, and 20 years after that, and so on.

Golly gee, how green is that?

Oops, I almost forgot about the 500,000 birds that are killed each year from wind turbine blade collisions; most of which are endangered hawks, falcons, owls, geese, ducks, and eagles.

Apparently smaller birds are more agile and able to dart and dodge out of the way of the spinning blades, whereas the larger soaring birds aren't so lucky.

I'm sure the wildlife conservationist folks are just ecstatic about that.

I'm so glad the wind energy people are looking out for the world.

[storiesfromgaza]

Note: Tumblr deleted the video, But I have reuploaded it.

Bisan posted videos on her Instagram account, documenting all the events that occurred today. I compiled them into one clip and added a caption.

It's important to watch it to understand the suffering they are going through and to share it so that everyone knows. And don't forget to pray for her and all the people of Gaza

a Transcription of everything she said in the video:

This is Bisan from Gaza. I'm still alive. Today is the 30th day of the war in Gaza, and this might be the last update I can provide to you. I'm not sure if I will survive until tomorrow in these conditions. I will give you an update for the past two days and this night, the last night. What happened is that the Israeli army started targeting any way to survive. They are targeting any way to generate electricity. The Israeli army targeted the whole solar cells in the whole Gaza City, over buildings, over bakeries, and anywhere that contains solar cells - it was bombed. The Israeli army bombed the major petroleum and water tanks in Gaza City as well. The wheat stocks and the bakeries were threatened that if they were open, they would be bombed, and they ran out of petrol and wheat. But then after obtaining some, their stocks were bombed. Tonight, there's been no piece of bread in Gaza City for four days, and there's no clean drinking water anywhere because we need electricity to find the water. After bombing the infrastructure and any way to obtain water or bread, they dropped between 100 to 300 white phosphorus bombs over Shati refugee camp, which is near Al-Shifa hospital. The gas spread throughout Gaza City, and tonight, my eyes, nose, and mouth started burning, I had a headache, and people started coughing and trying to find shelter. They dropped the gas to evacuate us and lead us to go outside Gaza. This morning, after cutting off the internet and connections, they dropped leaflets from the sky telling people that they have to evacuate to the south. They have to evacuate to the south, walking without using any vehicle. It's planned - this is genocide, with people striving, no food, no water, white phosphorus, and then forcing us to leave. Even if we survive the white phosphorus and the bombings, if in the schools, hospitals, and our homes there is no food and clean water, all we have is salty water from the sea. They are trying to kill a million people by hunger, making them thirsty and sick. There's no aid, and 0.8 can enter the north. A million people are still in the north. There's no food, no water. This is the paper that was dropped today. They are trying to push us to the borders, near the desert, making the safe areas smaller and smaller. We are two million people still here. So, people are celebrating 100-meter airdrops, but they are not entering Gaza; they are not reaching the hospitals. They are to the south of Gaza, we're in the north. More than a million people are in the north, and a million people are in the south. These airdrops are not enough, do not contain fuel, and about going to the north, we need fuel, medical supplies, food - we cannot get anything. The media needs to talk about this; people need to talk about this - we're hungry. We used to eat once a day, but now, even this time, we cannot afford it. There's no value for our existence, for our money, and there's no product to buy - there's nothing. Many people are struggling, and people are dying because of hunger, and there is no clean water.

[vintagelasvegas]

Bunker's Service, South 5th St (Las Vegas Blvd) & Carson - c. 1936

The alignment of US Route 91 with South 5th Street in Las Vegas turned the street into a major thoroughfare with businesses catering to motorists and tourists. Bunker's Service was on the southeast corner of the intersection, across Carson from Tower Service. A modern post office was built on this corner in '75.

Standing as an example of the highest type of building construction and the latest, most modern equipment for service of motorists, the new General Petroleum service station at the corner of Fifth and Carson streets, on highway 91, opens to the public tomorrow, January 22. The new place will be officially known as Bunker's Service. - Vegas' Newest Gas Station to Open Wednesday. Review-Journal, 1/21/36

Photos: Sherwin "Scoop" Garside Photographs (PH-00067), UNLV Special Collections & Archives.

[wumblr]

there's this cruel irony of imperialism -- obviously many of them -- and there's a good chance somebody is going to call me either shortsighted, highfalutin, ungrounded, or reaching for saying this, but i've been thinking about the networked effects of extracted resources. first it was spice colonialism, then the spices all turned out to be too aphrodisiac and this eventually led to the industrialization of cornflakes

they used to construct elaborate fictions for conflict minerals, this item is unbelievably valuable and the only appropriate use for it is to commemorate a lifelong, monogamous and reproductive relationship (diamonds). now the conflict mineral (lithium) is an unnecessary substitute for an herb (tobacco) and it has become disposable

the nature and progression of imperialism requires continual growth and this means the conflict minerals can't maintain their value, they turn from precious heirloom jewelry to litter, simply because litter is less rare and so more profitable. first they had to mine the raw metals to build out an electrical grid, and then the materials to build roads and cars, and now that the grid requires baseload batteries parked in your garage we're throwing lithium on the ground. plastics have an irrevocable hold on the market simply because they're petroleum byproducts

cities could never have become as large as they did without the development of firefighting and now the baseload batteries are inextinguishable. progress of ever-smaller fragmentation for profit leads to contradiction. the city cannot move forward without the conflict mineral battery, but it can't put the fire out and it can't stop throwing them away, ostensibly to suppress use of an herb, once medicinal, now an adulterated vice. because adulterating it not only increases the rate of cancer but attributes it to personal choice, which is necessary, because otherwise it would be more attributable to the materials that keep the system running (uranium). it's incredible

the state with the lowest rate of cancer is downwind of the test site, because it's populated by yet another extremist christian wing of imperial progress, so extreme that they don't smoke or drink, because these personal choices have an outsized influence in comparison to the global contamination that the development of the bomb caused. a bit of the money made from the extraction of resources is put towards repayment for citizens of the imperial core, for exposure to the product that created their way of life, but the program expires and nobody cares because they seem to think it didn't affect them

anyway somebody threw a whole clock radio in my garden. i took the battery and now i can't do anything with it unless i want to figure out where to take it to be recycled. holding this blue plastic-wrapped cylinder of fire risk conflict mineral in my little hand and ruminating on it. do you think it traveled further than i have to get to me? i should never have left it sitting next to my keys i've been glancing at it in passing every day for weeks. of course you're not supposed to throw them on the ground, but i've already criticized the abdication of responsibility by corporations for the waste their products become. makes it into another issue of personal choice when they wouldn't have existed if they hadn't been industrialized

[alexanderwales]

Game Review: Factorio: Space Age (pt 2)

This is the second part of my review of Factorio: Space Age, covering the planets. This will have more spoilers than the previous section, but also include more cohesive thoughts on the expansion as a whole.

Vulcanus

Once you've built a spaceship, you have a choice of three planets to go to, and you can do them in any order you'd like. Each planet comes with its own researchable rewards, which require you to build up a base on the planet capable of making a science pack and shipping it into space (or alternately, to remake all sciences on the planet, but this is stupid and pointless given what lies further down the tech tree).

I chose Vulcanus first. There are five resources here, three of which can't be found anywhere else: coal, sulfuric acid, calcite, tungsten ore, and lava. Lava gets used to make anything having to do with copper and iron using the foundry, which is most of the things in Factorio. Sulfuric acid gets used with calcite to make water, which is one of the notable things missing from Vulcanus, along with oil. Plastic requires a long chain to make: coal liquefaction into heavy oil into light oil into petroleum into plastic. Because rockets require plastic twice (LDS and blue chips), you eventually need to set up a fairly sizeable build for this.

I didn't find any of this to be too interesting. Infinite resources are at least different, but there was nothing that fundamentally changed how I view the game, and I ended up setting up a bus with more fluids than usual, mostly making on-site plates, pipes, steel, etc. The art for it is cool, and impassable lava is at least a little constraining, but I didn't feel like it was all that great.

Tungsten ore is the main material from Vulcanus, and it's defended by the other major thing that makes the place unique, the worms. Each worm has a territory, and until you've killed your first worm, you don't have access to a tungsten ore patch, only loose scraps that have been laying around.

The worms are long and segmented, very distinct from the biters. They disable electronics with their attacks, making fountains of lava beneath you, and overall I think they're cool ... except that they're a little too easy to defeat. I set up a grid of 50 turrets with armor-piercing ammo, and that proved sufficient.

This is a boring solution. I wish it didn't work. It was the first thing I tried, and afterward I thought ... well, what was the point of that? I don't have a good solution to what you'd want to do to stop this from working, but I do think this is sort of bad design, since it's a "more dakka" solution. I've also seen that you can build a tank and take one out with a single uranium shell, which is even worse design. What I wanted was a fight were I needed to use poison capsules, land mines, strategically placed turrets, etc., some kind of mixed-asset offensive package, and what I got was fifty turrets in a stupid grid. I really do try to not be one of those players that optimizes myself out of having fun, but it's hard to motivate myself to do something the pointlessly hard way when there's something simple, easy, and foolproof.

The other thing about demolishers is that they have their own territory, and that territory never changes. This means that if you want to expand beyond a relatively modest starting patch, you need to kill them ... but unless you're going for a megabase, you don't need to kill more than three or four of them across the entire time playing the game, and since they only attack if you build in their territory, those worm encounters become like 1% of the Vulcanus experience.

I would have liked if the worm territories changed. I think it would have been cool if they fought each other for dominance over an area in a way you could capitalize on, or if they would expand into places that no one had claimed, or places a dead rival had left behind. It would have been cool to require the player to build up some do-nothing machines or other infrastructure to keep the worms back, like a sort of "build this at the edge of your territory to be in constant motion to convince the worms that it's occupied" type of thing. But instead, you just kill the worms and that's that, you never see them again unless you go hunting them. According to my end-of-game statistics, I killed 8 small demolishers and 2 medium demolishers, which was probably 5 more worms than I needed to kill, since I ended up with a lot of empty space I didn't do anything with.

So overall, Vulcanus is the weakest of the planets for me, and I think that's at least partly down to the under-use of the worms and the simplicity of the "new" mechanics.

Fulgora

Fulgora contains the ruins of a vast civilization, and there are no resources except the heavy oil between islands and the scrap that's left behind. Solar is terrible on Fulgora, but there are lightning storms at night, and lightning towers can collect it into accumulators to power your base.

Scrap gets "recycled" into a bunch of different things, and so it quickly because a nightmare of sorting things out, dealing with excess products, and turning complex materials into simple ones. There are no iron plates, those need to be recycled from iron gears. There are no copper platers, those need to be recycled from copper wire. Blue chips, which in any other circumstance need to be jealously guarded, are found in abundance.

I found this to be great fun. The challenge is certainly unique, turning the production chain on its head, but it has a nice "ramp" to it, as first you get a pile of crap, then you turn it into things, then you uncover excesses that are gumming it up, and the problems keep coming, but they usually come after you've solved some other problem.

When I started, I did a sushi belt (ed. - a sushi belt is a belt that contains multiple unsorted good, controlled by circuit conditions which allow certain limits of each item to go by, named after conveyor belt sushi restuarants), which was good enough for the short term and got me all the basic technologies, but ran into all the problems that come with a sushi belt, and switched over to a belt-based sorting system of splitters that could handle two full green belts of scrap input.

There is, for me, one big miss on Fulgora, which is that the lightning storms are basically not a challenge at all. You set up a grid of substations, each with a lightning rod, and that protects your base. You set up accumulator fields on one tip of the island, and this is a pretty boring solution. If you went to Gleba first, you can instead set up heating towers that burn the fuel you get from scrap, but this doesn't seem like it saves terribly much more space, and either way you need the lightning towers, so I'm not sure it's worth anything, and I never implemented that plan.

One of the other big challenges of Fulgora is that it's a set of islands, and there's no way to place anything on the oil sands. Additionally, there are two types of islands, one with a fair amount of space and minimal scrap, the other with tons of scrap and almost no room. In theory, this encourages a rail world, but in practice, the first island I plopped down on was the one I stayed on the entire time, and my rail network, such as it was, extended to only two of the smaller islands to guarantee all the scrap I would ever need. I think I rolled high on one of those islands: 63M scrap is a ton, but that's what I ended up with on default settings. With the drills from Vulcanus, expected output is double that, and with the legendary drills I can now produce, it would be 787M. There's simply not a need to place rails elsewhere.

I do feel that Fulgora would have benefitted from some enemies of some kind, either those that lived on the oil fields, so you'd have to build defenses on the edges of the islands, or some kind of robot enemy that you needed to kill to take islands from. Given the setup of an abandoned high-tech planet, and the electrical weapons you unlock there, it would have been nice to have some reason or chance to use them. I've definitely played Factorio scenarios with bot opponents and buildings that can be captured after the AI's defenses have been breached.

Still, the scrap sorting puzzle was a good one, with many solutions, and Fulgora was a ton of fun.

Gleba

Gleba is a swampy fungi planet. There are no conventional resources except for stone, and pretty much everything else is derived from two plants, jellynut and yamako, that get broken down.

The main mechanic of the planet is spoilage, where materials break down over time. Jellynut and yamako last for about an hour, the products you get from them are much less, a material made from both of them, bioflux, lasts a lot longer, and nutrients, which are fed to the new building, the biochamber, last hardly any time at all.

Spoilage is cool because it requires a very different mindset. Normally in Factorio, you're building up big buffers to minimize downtime. On Gleba, you want as little buffer as possible, just constant rivers of materials flowing by to be as fresh as possible, because if anything stays still for too long, there's a chance it'll spoil, which will stop the machine trying to take the ingredient, which can create a spoilage cascade.

My initial plan was to have some kind of circuit-based just-in-time system, where every machine would be monitored in order to see what ingredients it needed, and everything would be made fresh-to-order.

I ended up not doing this, mostly because demand stays relatively constant, and where it doesn't stay constant, you can just eat the spoilage costs. There's so much abundance that you really don't need to care about half your crops going to waste.

The other reason I didn't end up going with this is because unfortunately, the "river of goods" solution has essentially no complications to it, and you can simply dump everything into a recycler/incinerator at the end. In some of the Factorio overhaul mods, this concept is called "voiding", a way of dealing with byproducts, and if you make voiding easy, you essentially remove a logistical challenge, which means less gameplay. I kind of get why they made this easy, but ... I don't know. I did kind of want something that would require a big, complicated solution, a factory that dances on the edge of clogging itself up.

I ended up with a completely belt-based system, with a belt of jelly and mash, then a belt of bioflux, all nutrients made on demand, and production lines in defined blocks. The final build does 520 science/minute, which becomes 2Ks/m with full-prod biolabs, most of which goes into the trash, since it's not actually consumed all the time.

One of my favorite little puzzles of Gleba was the metals, which are produced with bacteria that spoil in a minute, becoming ore. There's a process, with bioflux, of having bacteria make more bacteria, but if the bacteria ever stop flowing (if, for example, you have enough ore), then they spoil and die, and the whole production line stops. So you need to build in a little kickstart system that will inject new bacteria if it's needed, and I found that to be delightful to work on.

The other major thing on Gleba are the enemies, which are pentapods. Pentapod eggs are necessary to make biochambers and science, but after you have one, you can set up breeding, which is dangerous given they can make more of themselves, but definitely the way to go. There are three forms of pentapod, all with their own weaknesses, and ...

Look, I went to Gleba last, but I put up a defensive wall fairly early on using only materials that I had gotten from Gleba, and then basically never had any cause to think about the pentapods again. Because I slapped this down with blueprints, it took all of ten minutes, most of which was spent fixing the kind of scuffed corners (skill issue). So I would say the amount that I actually got to experience the pentapods was pretty minimal. I also shipped in four artillery turrets that are crowded around a box of ammo, supplied by site-made shells using imported tungsten, and the circle almost entirely contains my pollution cloud, so in theory it's just an easily solved problem.

It might have been different if I had gone to Gleba first, I don't know and can't say without actually doing that, but I would have liked a little more of a challenge, and this might be where being a veteran hinders me.

Overall, I really enjoyed Gleba, the mechanics were new and unique, the little puzzles inherent in design were interesting, and I thought that overall it had the best art direction of the four planets, which is saying something, because I think they're all great on the front.

Aquilo

On every other planet, a "cold start" is possible, building up from just what you find laying around. Aquilo is different: it's a planet with ammonia oceans and some scattered liquid vents, and part of the point of it is that you need materials from outside, including anything made from iron, copper, or stone. You can't softlock on other planets, but you can softlock on Aquilo.

Aside from requiring pretty solid planetary logistics, Aquilo's main mechanic is heat. It's cold enough there that bots don't work very well, and everything has to have a heat pipe near it for it to function, including pipes and belts. To heat up a heat pipe takes either nuclear, fusion, or the heat towers that burn up fuel, and if the heat ever stops flowing, everything will seize up, requiring heroic efforts to get running again.

There's not all that much to Aquilo. You pull up slurry from the ocean, split it into ammonia and ice, use them together to make ice platforms, import concrete, and then combine oil and ammonia to make rocket fuel, which is used to both launch rockets and to toss into heating towers for power and heat to keep everything running.

The science pack is easy, though it require imported holmium plate, and my entire 200 science per minute production line was run off a tiny cluster of buildings that would have been pretty trivial to expand.

It seems to me that Aquilo is at least partly inspired by Seablock, an infamous mod where you start with almost nothing on a tiny island that you have to expand with the mineral sludge you dredge up with an offshore pump. But Seablock is a very long mod, one that typically takes hundreds of hours, and here ... well, there are a handful of challenges, and they're not all that challenging. I think I could probably list them out now.

Making ammonia also makes ice. You can void excess ice through repeated recycling, but ammonia can't be voided except by combining it with crude oil to make solid fuel, which can then be put in an incinerator. I solved this problem with a simple circuit condition.

Science and some crafting uses coolant, which must be cooled back down after use. If you just keep making coolant, eventually the system will seize up, since you won't be able to put more hot coolant into the system. But because this is a lossy cycle (you lose half the coolant) you can just hook a pump up to a tank and only inject more hot coolant into the system when below a threshold.

Outposts need their own heating for the pumps to work, and those outposts are, on default settings, quite far away. This requires setting up a self-sufficient little heating module that's either serviced by train or which runs entirely with materials found at the outpost. I ended up doing two different modules, one for oil outposts and the other for everywhere else ... but I never actually had to use them, because there were sufficient resources for tens of thousands of resources right next to the starting area.

As the "final boss", I am underwhelmed, and even as one of four planets I find myself a little underwhelmed. I don't know how much postgame stuff I'm going to do, but I can't see that there's going to be much challenge in going large on Aquilo, except that I might have to build another ship for moving in materials (as currently I have a single ship that makes a circuit of the solar system for materials and also handles shipments of science).

There is also, again, a lack of enemy. Once the rocket fuel setup was done, I had a single scare when ammonia backed up and stopped ice production, which shut down the water chem plant, which killed the turbines and stopped power to the entire base. But that didn't even freeze anything out, and it was fixed pretty easily from a restart module I'd built earlier, and after that, the ammonia issue was fixed to never have that problem again. If the cold is the enemy, it's not enough of one for my tastes.

Integration

With each planet you conquer, you get a new science pack, which opens up new technologies, and in theory you, can use them on other planets. These buildings are very powerful, and so there's some incentive to return to old factories, rip up old designs, and install new ones using the better buildings.

I did eventually do this, but I'm not sure how much I actually needed to. My furnace stacks were replaced by the foundries from Vulcanus, supplies by a hauler ship exclusively for calcite, though I did make an abortive attempt to just harvest calcite from space using a stationary space platform.

(I made four of them before giving up on the project, and found out only later that asteroid spawn rates depend on how many chunks large the ship is, so the ideal build has asteroid collectors on very long arms, and there's nothing in the game that tells you about the asteroid spawning thing, so ... whatever, it's opaque and very gamey hidden stuff, of the kind that I hate.)

I replaced my circuit production areas with the EMP, which saved vast quantities of resources and also made more circuits at a much faster rate within the same blueprint. I upgraded most belts to green.

I didn't end up using the biochambers much, in part because they need nutrients to run, and 50% prod with more module slots is great, but not so great that I wanted to set up a biter egg farm that could potentially blow up in my face.

Cryochambers just came too late for me to implement them anywhere, though I probably would if I kept playing to the megabase stage, or if I'm gunning for an achievement that requires updating Nauvis.

So I think, strangely, when considering how the planets impact each other, they ... kind of don't all that much? Yes, having foundries on Gleba means that you can make all your belts and things at a fraction of the cost, but how much doesn't that really impact anything? It meant that my ore production areas could be smaller, I guess. Is that worth anything? I kind of don't think so, if I'm considering the main gameplay to be in terms of design and decisions. Foundries saved me from having to lay down a furnace stack. EMPs saved me from having to have expansive red circuit lines to get the blue chips necessary for rocket launches.

Ideally, I would have liked one or two killer techs that mostly work through combining each planet's "thing". Like imagine that there was a combination recycler and foundry that melted down whatever was put into it, giving you molten copper and iron in exchange, creating a whole new kind of problem in exchange for ... I don't know, much much faster recycling, or less loss from recycling, or maybe a recipe that allowed true voiding. Or if you went to Gleba and then Vulcanus, and were able to bring biochambers that would allow the cultivation of some new specimen specific to that environment, maybe something that would allow better plastic production, or could pull water out of the air, both of which are kind of a pain in the ass on Vulcanus. Couldn't there be some kind of new bacteria swimming in the oil sands of Fulgora? Not something that would trivialize any challenge, something that would be a reward for having two flavors of research from two different planets. Ideally, there'd be six of these in total, allowing for each pair to benefit each other pair, but at that point I start to feel like I'm just asking for new content.

I cracked my game back open to check the tech tree, and all the Aquilo techs require all three planets. The are two techs that require mixed packs: Rail Support Foundations, which simplify rails for Fulgora, and Railgun Damage, which increases the power of the railgun. That's it. This screams missed opportunity to me.

So in terms of how the planets and their mechanics interact with each other ... I would say that they mostly don't, which is a bit of a shame. The biochamber in particular requires nutrients, which makes it effectively unusable on Vulcanus and Fulgora ... unless you're shipping in heroic quantities of bioflux, I guess, though I don't think that I could ever see myself doing that. I guess maybe on Vulcanus, which has the aforementioned plastics problem? But it feels like the kind of thing that would mostly be done for a stunt rather than because it was actually the right thing to do. And potentially on Nauvis, but it does seem like a megabase thing to do, rather than normal play. I will have to do the math, this too might be a skill issue.

(Real quick: 1 Bioflux makes 8 nutrients in a standard biochamber, which is 12 with prod, which is 24 MJ. A biochamber consumes 500kW, so with no spoilage nutrients allow 2 crafts of the 2 second oil cracking recipes, which means that every Bioflux can, at most, turn 960 heavy oil into 1080 light oil rather than the 720 light oil it would normally crack into. But obviously since the Bioflux has to be shipped in, it ends up being less than that. This is obviously more effective than shipping over oil itself, but ... man, I don't know, this seems very weak, even with adding in productivity to other steps. I guess the use case in Nauvis, where you're in theory shipping Bioflux anyway in order to feed captive biters, but that's still premised on an oil shortage that I never actually experienced.)

I do also want to say that quality had very little impact on my play. I tended to carry around some high quality quality modules and use them when crafting infrastructure, but in most cases it just wasn't much to write home about. It's most important for the ships, and for personal stuff, but it never felt that important.

And finally, I do want to give a shoutout to how easy and effective remote viewing was. One of the things I'm going to eventually do, after a Factorio break, is the 40 hour achievement run, and I have to imagine that a lot of that is just landing on a planet, doing the unlocks, building a rocket to get back, then having starter bots do all the actual base building for me, which is pretty cool.

Conclusion

Space Age took me about 140 hours, and I would say that about 10 of that was idle time while I was waiting for legendary ship parts or for a buildup of materials. The Jacknape-class ships have an issue with ammo production where they can more or less keep up with rockets, but the belt buffer goes from the front of the ship to the back, meaning that it empties from where it's needed most, rather than emptying where it's needed least, and yeah, having a fully stacked buffer takes a hot minute of waiting. Similarly, the quality module I made works over sufficient time scales, but especially while waiting on quality quality modules, there's a real temptation to just leave it running rather than actively playing.

130 hours for a veteran player is a long time for an expansion, much longer than I would have expected, even knowing what I knew about the expansion going in. Some of that time I don't count as expansion time, like all the parts where I was just doing normal Factorio stuff, and I did end up building adapted malls on each of the planets, which added on more time that could have been cut out by making an effective blueprint the first go-around, and which I don't really count as expansion time, because there's not much that's unique about making the new malls. But even if I'm arbitrarily cutting things out, that's still a ton of time.

Overall, I'm extremely happy with it, and I think I'll be more happy with it once there's another round of iteration, QoL, changes based on feedback, and modding. The modding scene for Factorio is really really good, and I have to imagine that the expansion is only going to make it better, particularly some of the changes that were made to implementation.

But I do think that it could have been more, and maybe this is just coming from a guy with more than a thousand hours in this game and multiple overhaul mods under his belt. It's very possible I would have had a better time with it if I'd chosen a higher difficulty, though of course that's very hard to know ahead of time. Certainly there were some design misses for me, and at least some of that is because I have enough experience that I can fix things with circuitry, plan a base that doesn't immediately become spaghetti, and see the deadlocks coming. I'm not saying that it wasn't hard, because parts of it certainly were, and I'm not saying that I made a bunch of perfect bases with no major flaws, because there were designs that needed to be ripped out and belts that needed to squeak through. But I think I would have preferred more complexity, more problems, more more more, and I'll have to hope that mods can give it to me.

All that said, this is the best expansion I've ever played, they put a ton of work into making sure that every planet was truly different from the others artistically and mechanically, and it's a 10/10 from me.

(I do plan on getting all achievements ... eventually. The "win in 40 hour" achievement seems very doable, and that's the hardest of the lot, though the others might take some significant time. It took me multiple years to finally getting around to doing the last green chip achievement, so I'm in no rush.)