No low power warning on lasers?

[Linosaurus]

I was surprised to find that lasers don't show the red triangle that warns of low power.

I have a base that's powered by steam only. Not a lot of excess capacity. I went away fighting biters with laser turret creep for half an hour. See some messages about destroyed lasers, run back. And my base is unpowered. I have coal mines and solid-fuel producing plants, but no fuel in the boilers.

Probably my heavy laser usage made my whole base run low on power too many times, which slowed down fuel creation, which led to a doom spiral. My own fault really.... but I was surprised I never saw the red warning triangle on my lasers, still don't even when they fail to fire due to no power.

Is this normal in 0.12.21? Did you get the warning in 0.11? I am running some mods, but they aren't supposed to affect the turrets or power generation at all.

[Kalanndok]

I'm not 100% sure but I have the impression that lasers get priority treatment under low power situations.

What happened with you was probably a classical negative feedback loop with the twist that you didn't run slowly but quite fast out of energy to operate the inserters.
I'd suggest using burner inserters (as they refuel themselves if required) or at least use them on an emergency power plant which EXCLUSIVELY supplies the inserters for the main power plant with power.

[Linosaurus]

Yeah it seems lasers are prioritized. Which is nice. Though there doesn't seem to be a red low power warning even when they cannot fire due to low power - this surprised me.

But yeah, there was most likely a negative feedback loop. I have a few burner inserters, but it was the coal mines and chem plants making solid fuel that failed. An emergency power plant fueling only the power infrastructure is a good idea. I might do that, or just give in and go solar.

[vanatteveldt]

Or you can go solar for your energy infrastructure, to at least remove the possibility of hitting the spiral.*

These two are the things that most often force me to reload: (1) running out of energy, causing my energy production to stop, either because of lasers or because of coal mine depletion; and (2) removing an electricity pole somewhere, thinking that it was redundant, but cutting off my defenses somewhere (which cause the base to be overrun in no-time since I normally don't use gun turrets as soon as I get lasers).

It would be nice to be able to set custom alarms, ie for low coal in a buffer, no energy on a pole, or an intruder detected. You can hookup an indicator light to the buffer status, but you won't see it it you're not there. Is there a mod for custom warnings or something like that?


*) This would require building enough solar+capacitators to get through the night even at 100% energy use, but I guess one could calculate the amount of solar+cap per steam block (yellow inserters plus blue inserters from the buffer). I've never done any calculations in Factorio, is the below correct?

Code: Select all

boiler uses 390kw % 50% efficiency = 780kj / s input
coal is 8Mj
So one boiler uses one coal in just over 10 seconds

That means the inserter will be doing nothing for 9 seconds, and then running at full capacity for just over 1 second to insert a coal. (Is that how it works?). 
So, the coal inserter should take 400W * 90% plus 13kW * 10% = 1660W, or 23.24kW for a block of 14 inserters

Let's assume that you would want to power 1 continous blue inserter to get coal from the buffer for every block, adding another 32kW.

So, a full block of 14 inserters plus one blue inserter for the buffer needs around just over 50kW to operate at full power, i.e. around 1 solar panel and .85 accumulators. Is that correct? That feels like it would be worth it to just add to the steam block blueprint, you might even be able to fit a solar panel in between the inserter rows?

Alternatively, how inefficient is a coal inserter? It uses .1 coal per second at full use, but for a boiler that means about 1 coal every 100 seconds, or 8Mj / 100s = 80kW. Is that correct? That is quite inefficient, but on the larger scale of things I'm not sure it matters that much (especially since you're running steam at overcapacity normally, so the burner gains back a bit of efficiency since it doesn't consume power if it is idle).