Due to my seemingly uncanny ability to find bugs every day, my first post about early game balance has turned into an increasingly long wall of bug reports and resolutions. To fix this in the future, I am dumping my reports here. Anyone may use this, but I have become sort of an unofficial collaborator and frequent bug reporter, so I am locking up all the bugs here.

My template for now

Bug:
Version:
Description:
Steps to reproduce:
Possible cause:

Bug: Administrative Space Stations do not rotate
Version: 0.6.3
Description: When the recipe is set to one that has a fluid input, you can't change where the input is
Steps to reproduce:
1. Place Administrative Space Station
2. Set the recipe to making paper or ink
3. It doesn't rotate
Possible cause: Assembling machines don't rotate until a fluid input/output makes rotation matter. It is probably locked-rotation like an assembling machine, but the logic that allows the rotation when a fluid is involved might be missing.

Update: you can get around this by picking up the building with the recipe with CTRL+C or CTRL+X and rotating the ghost before placement. It doesn't rotate afterwords, so you will have to cut and paste it again.

Fixed in 0.6.5.
BTW you can use Github issues to report bugs instead of having a megathread here, it'll make easier for me to track and individually reply to issue, but thanks ! :)

I checked out the GitHub page and it is a ghost town. Of the two issues in the issues tab, one of them was from a couple hours ago and the other was posted two months ago and your reply to it took nearly a month. It doesn't seem like there is anything going on there

I have finished working on my first transport vessel for the inner planets. It doesn't work. It would appear that the physics-based defense just isn't actually good enough to keep asteroids away. The mining biters are also not powerful enough to keep destroying the swarm of asteroids that the arrays can't actually redirect. Here is the blueprint of my ship so you can see if I am just having a skill issue here. Yes, I had to use infinite power because the power draw of the arrays is diabolical. Even electromagnetic plants and telsa turrets are way less diabolical and that's Fulgora tech.

https://factoriobin.com/post/xkdm31

Note: make sure to unresearch any upgrades that wouldn't be unlocked at the point of the game this is designed for. That might inflate the performance of the arrays.

I checked out the GitHub page and it is a ghost town. Of the two issues in the issues tab, one of them was from a couple hours ago and the other was posted two months ago and your reply to it took nearly a month. It doesn't seem like there is anything going on there

It is because all the other issues are closed, so they don't show in the basic view. That is why it is easier for me to manage bugs because I can close them when they are dealt with

I tried your ship (great ship BTW) and got relatively little issues with it traveling between nauvis and fulgora continuously with all defense techs to their minimum level. I'll balance the power draw and noticed another bug that if an asteroid is perfectly aligned with the center of your platform, the arrays won't be able to move it sideways, I'll look into it but it seems to be causing damage. I think with a bit more tech and a few repair packs, walls and such you can travel between the inner planets no problem. But still I'll beef up a bit the damage speed of the space biters to make it less painful.

https://youtu.be/snHhnpuYWXE

I found a lot of bugs investigating this and your ship was very helpful, this should be much more balanced now, here is round trip between nauvis and fulgora with no stop time and running on the ship's own power, still with no damage or firing speed or biters per asteroid tech unlocked, I'd say this is better.

https://youtu.be/Bwmwu84JG5g

Can I ask what was found? I had the thing go from Nauvis to Vulcanus and it never succeeded without huge damage up front. I will try out the new changes after I figure out if Fulgora is somehow safer than Vulcanus. Also, did you make sure to remove the purple accumulator in the second test? That purple accumulator is a test item that generates infinite power, so any test of the ship's real power grid should replace it with a normal accumulator. Still, I am happy that The Rook was useful.

Yeah. You forgot to remove the Electric Energy Interface. There is no way you can power the ship in 0.6.5 without it. I will now investigate the new patch and see how the new changes work.

The last video is 0.6.6, yes I removed the infinite power but I also removed the speed module and the ship works fine now

Tested out 0.6.6. That power draw is much more reasonable, but my ship still needs that infinite energy for the remaining 20% or so extra power needed. There is also one brutal comparison to be made to vanilla here:

Compared with my vanilla vessel Chariot of similar capability, The Rook design has worse defense, roughly one-third the thrust, and costs over 400 additional platform tiles. Even after the reduced power draw, I still cannot make the defensive system reliably stop asteroids. At this point, I think the current mechanic needs either a way to directly damage asteroids or a much more fundamental redesign. My idea of escalating legal threats that actually damage asteroids might be worth considering.

If somehow you are getting better results than I am despite us using the same ship, then there is something strange at play here as my Fulgora runs on 0.6.5 were still worse than yours. I even found a new failure mode: asteroid hits, gets bounced upward, then crashes again. The central asteroid problem is somehow... worse?

I summon thee again