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Notes -
The ship I arrived in is still in orbit, and its eight asteroid collectors pull in a fairly large amount of ice while it's just sitting up there idling. It's pretty easy to periodically drop the collected ice from orbit and load it into the cracking plant. I'm a sucker for free resources, and it seems like acid neutralization is intended as a significant sink for both acid and calcite; if I can work around that step, it looks to be a free and very large productivity bonus right off the bat, with the bonus of giving me an excuse to lean into orbital infrastructure. It'll be a bottleneck until I get launches going again, but with the launch capacity Vulcanus offers I'm looking forward to building the mother of all space stations.
Acid neutralization is the best way to build a power grid on Vulcanus - a single plant generates a huge amount of steam, enough to run dozens of turbines and power the entire planet. Acid vents always produce a minimum amount, like oil patches on Nauvis, and the calcite patch at your landing zone will probably last you for the entire game, so there's no reason to be shy with the resources.
Although dropping free resources from space is indeed a useful strategy, especially once you hit advanced asteroid processing. The simplest is to harvest calcite from orbit and save the trouble of shipping it from Vulcanus.
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