I have just made a mod to illustrate kinda what I want, like a proof of concept.
Link to the mod.

What "other problems" does it cause?



also helps the problem of flashing lights and spiking consumption whenever the turret is being fired.


As well as a mismatch between stated energy consumption and actual energy consumption and how the actual energy consumption doesn't scale with the ...

TL;DR
Make the laser turret draw a constant amout of electricity to match its visuals.


What ?
The laser turret takes energy for "shots" and then recharges, which is not how the visuals for the laser turret actually look currently. (and it also causes some other problems) I think it should ...

By the way, this seems to still be an issue.

hmmm...

This is the laser being powered by 2 engines and 27 accumulators. it gives 9.9 MW, which is enough for the laser if you know it spikes to 9.6 MW when refilling the buffer after the laser empties it - which it does every shot - and extra watts for the light. The laser fills it buffer, but it takes ...

why don't we instead just change the way the laser turret operates? this whole time we've been acting like the way it was first coded is permanent, but why not just change it? they could find some way to change the buffer refill rate. that might be hard, so instead of that, it could take watts ...

i don't really know what you mean by "laser-accumulator" they don't have an accumulator in them. all things have an energy storage, but lasers instantly use it all up because they take joules instead of watts.

I choose that wording to make clear what I meant and now it confuses even more. :) I ...

Well, you can see it also from this side: the built in laser-accumulator prevents your factory from browning out during a fight. Or in other words: it shifts the unavoidable a bit into the future.
Because that’s the reason of the brownout: you’re producing too less power and not because of the ...

Operating consumption: 1.22 MW
Recharging consumption: 9.6 MW


I was thinking of words like this, but I think it implies it only takes that amount of power after the end of a lot of shooting, because it visually looks like it's always firing.


Most electric cars can charge much faster than ...

what about something like

Shot consumption: 9.6 MW
Extended consumption: 1.22 MW

I find it useful to know that having 2 steam engines + some accumulators will power my laser turret at shooting speed 1. The accumulators are needed to balance out the burst draw, but in the end the consumption over e.g. 1 minute is 1.22 MW, which the engines can supply easily. If the tooltip said ...

for laser turrets, they never consume what is displayed. they consume joules (which if you think about it is infinite watts) I can't think of any other thing that does this right now, but it means the amount of watts it takes from your factory is determined only by the input speed limit

They ...

I think it took it about 5 mins to finally get enough buffers filled that it started to run more efficiently and eventually started consuming less than what it was generating.


I kinda want to test this too now. But I feel like the buffer refill speed should be the same as the max it would ...

That would be more confusing then the current display.
Nothing can consume faster than displayed.
It's just the buffer that causes spikes in your stats.

Maybe we should rename it to average max consumption :P


for laser turrets, they never consume what is displayed. they consume joules (which ...

Everything has an internal buffer and consumes more when it tries to refill that.


that seems like it wouldn't matter much for things that just use watts except for when placing them, unless there are times other than that when it isn't using electricity but its buffer is low.

a difference ...

TL;DR
The laser turret's max consumption listed should be the amount it consumes while charging between shots rather than average consumption over time while firing.


What ?
The max consumption should be shown as 9.6 MW because that is the amount it takes while charging after each time it ...

I mean, you do need at least 9.6 MW for a turret or else when it's firing your factory's machines will flash on and off, but it doesn't say the 9.6 MW number anywhere in the game so there's no way to know how much you need to stop the flashing.

There should be something that says how much it is because for quite a while I didn't know how much electricity it used, so I kinda was against using them. The max consumption is kinda a useless value for it right now because it consumes a lot more. Technically the max consumption is actually 9.6 MW ...

Yeah, but it charges at 9.6 MW. Are they supposed to take 9.6 MW? Why does it take 8x the amount of power it says it should? What do you mean "just the storage charging," that doesn't really address anything in my post. If it's not a bug, then we should at least know it exists.