sparr wrote:ssilk wrote:why I should count the ammo in the turrets. Either it's enough or it's too less. If too less I will see that very soon. If not I need to refill, until it is enough.
There are base defense designs on the forums where the walls have train stations to bring ammo, and the stations get turned off when there is enough ammo. They have to rely on counting ammo in chests, with no awareness of how much is in the turrets. If you want 200 ammo at a defense station, you might have 200 or 800 depending on how full the turrets around the chest are. That's annoying, and you can fix it if you can count the ammo in the turrets too.
Have you tried it yourself?? There is no such thing as "no awareness of how much is in the turrets", as said by Silk, either it is enough, or it is too less. Inserters try to insert up to 10 magazines into a turret so either you still have ammunitions in your chest, in which case each turret have 10 magazines, or their is no more ammunitions in the chest in which case the supply is a bit late.
Plus, with a very simple memory cell, you can keep track of the last inserted item and know the ammunition type, if it was ever needed.
Counting turret ammo would allow more accurate control of ammo delivery to outposts.
Counting turret ammo would allow limited ammo supplies to be more evenly balanced between multiple turrets.
addressed. Ammo count in turret is 10 (up to 12 if you don't override stack bonus), unless you do it wrong (by hand, or shortage). You really should not make an ellaborate system for reading ammunitions supply and routing trains before making a very simple automation of turret feeding with inserters, which feed them up to 10, and nullifies the need of said complex reading.
Turning laser turrets on/off would save their idle power when they aren't needed. They might need a warmup time if this gets implemented, for balance.
Again, this is a no problem, you can turn a laser turret on and off very easily with power switch. The issue is when to do so, but actually, although not at easy as with production lines, it can be currently achieved :
Have some solar panels fill an accumulator on an independant network, linked to (some of) your frontline of laser turrets (turrets that will always be on, and work, among other thing, as ennemy detectors). As soon as the turret(s) see the ennemy they will start draining power like crazy, and that is measurable. Then just connect all the laser turrets of an attacked sector whenever its accumulator is not full and turn them off when said accumulator is full. As far as my testings goes, you don't even face power switch blinking, I guess because the recharging of detector turrets discharges the accumulator enough. If really needed, the detector turret(s) might be excluded from the main power at all time, ensuring they do their detector role right (instead of pumping on the main network and letting the accu recharge). The only issue is that it will turn turrets on at night, but it can easily be circumvented with a bit of imagination (eg adding two intermediate accumulators between the current accu and the detector turrets).
Other simpler solutions exist, one with robotport and landmines, as responsive but higher tech upkeep and base cost, although you might want have a robot port there at some point anyway. And there is one by counting the ammunition of gun or fire turret. Gun turret is very bad since you are limited by its range and by bad readings, but fire turret should work excellently, if you have them installed (their range is greater than laser turrets). I've made up these solution just now, but just checked and actual implementations already exist apparently : here is the link to a much simpler solution with robotport and walls only :
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=27866, and here is a nice collection of the different setups of various degree of ellaboration :
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... need_them/ .
Glad you thought about warmup time. Currently, all drain time of processing machines can be nullified by clever circuitery, and as demonstrated above, most of laser drain also can. If you don't even have to be clever about it, a warm up time (inducing energy cost) is pretty much needed, to give an actual tradeoff for gain. Arguably, that warmup time already exists for laser turrets, however small, since they will fire whenever charged up, and require time to charge up (but they already are charged up if they were on and draining energy).
Counting or pulsing for turret shots would allow circuit activity based on biter attacks, maybe lighting up lights in the spots attacked most recently or often.
This can be done by mesuring consumed ammunitions over time. For that use, you don't need a singlle shoot precision. Turrets readings brings absolutely othing to the table for that use, the circuitery needed is rigourosly the same, up to some multiplicative constant. If you have not done it yet, you won't do it because of turret's reading.
However, it would greatly ease the activation of dormant laser turret. Less importantly, it allows to set alarms, if it is ever needed to be redundant with the already present in game ones.
Turning gun/laser turrets on/off would allow biters to be funneled to particular areas through trickery.
Turning gun/laser turrets on/off is already possible : use power switch for laser, and stack inserters for gun if fast control is needed (and pump for fire). It is not as convenient as circuit condition but can be achieved currently, and I believe it's much easier than the actual logic behind biters funneling (I'd gladly be proven wrong on that point). In short, if you can't already funnel biters, easier switching of turrets won't help much.
I think you really need to be more imaginative with what can currently be done with circuits. I'm all for more circuitery logic, but your examples seem poorly thought to me.
