@melanol said in 86% mass discount:
Would you guys say the same crap if it was 99%? Or what is your threshold?
It's a fair question. The answer is "yes," we would say the same thing.
What you're talking about is not particularly practical:
- It has high cost to get it set up (including power needs)
- it takes time to pay back the cost to build it in the first place (you always need to consider this when you're doing something purely for economic benefit)
- it's highly explosive and can chain react if attacked (if your stuff blows up, it stops generating profits for you)
So as FtX says, he has plenty of ways to punish you for it before you even break even on your investment.
But more importantly, the actual payout is not huge. Assuming that, with the discount, it costs 192 mass to make a brick every 54 seconds, and you can reclaim the dead brick for 1037 mass, that's a profit of 845 mass every 54 seconds. This translates to approximately 16 mass/second, not counting the mass generated by the fabs themselves.
(It's 54 seconds because it takes 53 seconds in the factory plus about 1 second of "roll-off time" to get out of the factory so the next one can start building. You can't assist the factory to get bricks out faster because assistance doesn't get the adjacency bonus.)
16 mass/second is less than what you get from making 2 RAS SACUs.
Even if it was 100% efficient (0 mass cost per brick) that would mean:
Every 54 seconds, you get 1037 mass, which is just above 19 mass/second.
It's less than what you'd get from making a single T3 mass fab surrounded by mass storages, or making 2 RAS SACUs. It's less than what you get from the 4 T3 mass fabs surrounding the factory.
I'm not going to do the math on this, but it's probably cheaper just to make your mass fabs adjacent to T3 pgens. This gives you an adjacency bonus in the form of needing less power to run your fabs. Which means you need to build fewer T3 pgens. So if you're spending 16 mass/second less on making T3 pgens, that's the same kind of payout you get from this brick-recycling setup.
I like your creativity and I don't mind your questions.