I"ve set it to the lowest difficulty, but still everything gets trash bombarded faster than I can build it. I am on physical projectile damage 7, but the turrets run out of ammo so hard (lvl 1 ammo) they don't help, taking on trashteroid clears a lot of lvl1 ammo. Tried building 5 crapapults, loading them with junk, in the assumption they might be destroying the trashteroids (still don't know for sure, there is a bit of animation, but still). The bacteria is westwards from the ammo, so unsure how to get ammo efficiently there without manually loading. The crapapult can load bacteria, but again not sure if its doing anything useful.

The Crapapult is not a military machine. Please see its description.

You should have the military machines you need to destroy trashsteroids already in your inventory from foraging around Rubia.

Lowering the difficulty makes trashsteroids do less damage and have lower health. But it will not stop them from obliterating your base if it has no defense (which I think is your case right now).

I hope this helps.

Thank you, second try it 'clicked'. Silly how obvious things are sometimes overlooked (pipes etc). Enjoying your content a lot.