Mobile artillery turrets

[DemonQueen]

I'd love to be able to mount an artillery turret on a vehicle - not a train wagon, a free-driving vehicle like the tank - and slowly drive it out to bring the fight to the biters. But specifically, what I' really love is this:

• Free driving artillery vehicle, not limited to rails like the train artillery wagon
• Low top speed, low acceleration - it's pretty big and heavy, it's not gonna move very fast and it'll have high inertia (maybe also be like the tank/train in that it damages/destroys things it runs into/over without taking damage itself)
• NO point defenses - it feels too overpowered to have a gun turret and artillery in a mobile vehicle, like you could just sit in your fortress and be safe from everything
• NO automatic firing - I'd like to need to use a remote to target this thing (preferably a custom remote that only targets mobile artillery, if that's possible) because otherwise, I could just drive it within a few hundred tiles of a nest and sit there for a minute, and that's too easy. As lore, you could say that maybe there just wasn't room to include auto-targeting equipment and keep it mobile?
• If possible, I'd like it to need a few seconds to switch between "driving" and "firing" modes, to simulate extending/retracting stabilisers - maybe a hotkey to toggle them, and somehow locking it in place when it's in firing mode?
• I don't think this is currently possible, but needing fuel (at a reduced rate) to target and/or fire would be a nice touch maybe? Pretty sure you can't mess with the fuel usage rates in vehicles, though - I think I heard someone say they're read only. (Mind, if you can, this thing could use fuel at double the normal rate to simulate the extra energy requirement of moving so much machinery around...)

I just want to bring heavy ordnance a bit further out to prepare for major assaults, so that I could - for example - set up an artillery bombardment to soften a massive nest and then go in with a tank and maybe some AAI chaingunners to finish them off. This would especially useful with mods that add items like the old alien artefacts that you can only get by killing enemies, which could have some interesting uses if you need them to, say, construct the rocket.

Anyway, I know that's a lot, so feel free to tell me that I'm insane and this is unrealistic/impossible to actually implement ^^;

[Schallfalke]

In making my tank mod, I have considered including a mobile artillery / self-propelled artillery as new vehicle. Maybe I share my experience of failure here and see if any experienced modders can help to make this possible:

• Free driving artillery vehicle, not limited to rails like the train artillery wagon
• Low top speed, low acceleration - it's pretty big and heavy, it's not gonna move very fast and it'll have high inertia (maybe also be like the tank/train in that it damages/destroys things it runs into/over without taking damage itself)
• NO point defenses - it feels too overpowered to have a gun turret and artillery in a mobile vehicle, like you could just sit in your fortress and be safe from everything

These are the easy part, setting a vehicle, high weight, low burner efficiency and/or power, no guns except the artillery gun.

• NO automatic firing - I'd like to need to use a remote to target this thing (preferably a custom remote that only targets mobile artillery, if that's possible) because otherwise, I could just drive it within a few hundred tiles of a nest and sit there for a minute, and that's too easy. As lore, you could say that maybe there just wasn't room to include auto-targeting equipment and keep it mobile?
• If possible, I'd like it to need a few seconds to switch between "driving" and "firing" modes, to simulate extending/retracting stabilisers - maybe a hotkey to toggle them, and somehow locking it in place when it's in firing mode?

Now this is what prevented me from making a successful artillery vehicle...
Yes, there is no automatic firing, but can't fire by the remote neither. It seems the remote does not work with other types, unless it's the type of "artillery-turret" or "artillery-wagon". I tried to look for the script of how remote works, but no success. Probably it is hard-coded in program instead of lua script.
I can only manual fire while driving, and target only within screen. So it's not a cross-screen firing artillery...

• I don't think this is currently possible, but needing fuel (at a reduced rate) to target and/or fire would be a nice touch maybe? Pretty sure you can't mess with the fuel usage rates in vehicles, though - I think I heard someone say they're read only. (Mind, if you can, this thing could use fuel at double the normal rate to simulate the extra energy requirement of moving so much machinery around...)

I have not done this but have experience to mess with fuel usage in vehicles. It's possible through events, like deduct the fuel bar when battery on vehicle is not full, using vehicle fuel to charge the batteries. But I do not know how to trigger an event upon each firing though.

If anyone know the "secret" of how remote works, I will be happy to bring such an artillery vehicle out, since I already have a mod about vehicles using different guns.

[H8UL]

There isn't much on the remote's prototype and I haven't found anything that sets it up other than being an item, in the base mod.

I've been able to fire a custom artillery-turret (same type, different name and shell) with the remote, as long as the force of the turret remains the same as the player.

I suspect only the devs know, you might want to raise it in modding interface requests in case they don't see this here.

[eradicator]

I doubt you can make a normal gun/turret react to artillery flares (the things that are spawned by the remote). Otherwise they wouldn't have introduced the special artillery-turret type prototype. @OP wants a button to deploy, so you could make the button spawn in a turret and immobilize the vehicle (.active?). No-auto-attack might be possible by manipulating the range/manual range modifiers on the spawned turret to make automatic range too small to matter.

[foodfactorio]

hi, i saw your mods on the mod portal.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SchallTankPlatoon

this looks cool, and if you like warhammer and lord of the rings,
using a tank platoon to defend your base from biters
= "they Schall not pass!"

"and they Schall know no fear"

[Schallfalke]

hi, i saw your mods on the mod portal.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SchallTankPlatoon

this looks cool, and if you like warhammer and lord of the rings,
using a tank platoon to defend your base from biters
= "they Schall not pass!"

"and they Schall know no fear"

Thank you!
This mod adds some vanilla-style tanks (fitting power armor, power armor MKII). I plan to do some extended (post-game) tanks if you like some OP stuff.
My another mod (SchallGunPod) fits perfectly to these tanks. It adds some ammo-consuming equipment like gun pod, cannon pod (works like personal laser defense but use ammo, no power needed). Please try it when you have time.
I wanted to add an artillery pod equipment. But it seems the artillery targeting behaviour is hard-coded to specific types (mentioned in above posts). So my artillery pod functions just like normal guns: firing at the closing enemy, be it a nest or a biter/spitter. So it is not useful to be included in the mod, sadly.

[foodfactorio]

ah thank you for post sorry for delay,
yes it is all good, maybe for targeting, the devs can add a new code function for you and other modders to allow different targeting methods

[Qon]

Maybe make it a tank that spawns an invisible artillery under it (with no collision box) when it stands still and despawns it when it starts moving.

[mcvey]

It might be possible to do this with a two-in-one vehicle using a tank and a semi-invisible artillery wagon ( could display as the turret but no other interaction), the Helicopter mod uses several linked vehicles to achieve animations. The artillery could then be given a low automatic range and then use a higher manual max range.

[Qon]

If you have long range artillery then you could automate artillery targeting with my new mod Artillery Combinator that can target coordinates via circuit network and https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-progr ... structures to find nests close to your tank. So similar to how I automated deforestation but with a range of maybe 100 instead of 1000 and you centre the search around the player by adding the player coordinates given by the AAI PS player scanner to the input of the AAI PS tile scanner. So the artillery that shoots are those in your base, but with enough range that's just a time difference. Then you take a normal tank and just drive by nests and they will be targeted!

Edit: bp that does it! Very simple. Turn it on/off with a the constant combinator that sends the green signal or use "remote switches" mod that gives you constant combinators that can be toggled with a gui.

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