Speed of Rocket Launches in Space Age

[EpicPartyGuy]

Hello all! Long time player, getting back into it for Space Age.

I'm currently looking at the changes to the Rocket Silo, and wondering if the launch cycle has indeed dropped to faster than 1/minute.

With the silo able to build the parts for a 2nd rocket while the first is loaded and launched, that eliminates 21ish seconds off of the time listed in the Wiki, but do the other animations take up the same time?

I didn't see anything about this on the forums yet, didn't know if anyone's done the math on it.

[ro011110ot]

Faster subsequent rocket launches
In the late-game, you can craft and prepare rockets pretty fast, but there was always a throughput bottleneck: The beautifully crafted animations taking a long time.

We didn't really want to increase the animation speed, as it might look a bit weird. But we figured out a compromise:

The rocket silo can craft and buffer an extra rocket inside.
After launching, if there is a buffered rocket, the door closing and opening sequence is skipped.

These changes mean that the throughput of a single rocket silo is more than doubled. This is also super important for Space age where you send a lot more rockets.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-405

Reset
The silo door must close before the cycle begins again.

368 ticks, or ~6.133 seconds.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Rocket_silo

[EpicPartyGuy]

Thanks! I saw the Wiki post with the ticks elapsed, but didn't know which steps were omitted.

My thinking, and please correct me if I'm wrong:

So with the Working phase (1250 ticks) happening in parallel in the buffer and there being no Reset phase (368 ticks) that drops the ticks elapsed from 3,684 to 2,066, or approximately 34.433 seconds! Not fully doubling the speed, but definitely a massive improvement.

At 1,000 science per launch, for 1k/5k/10km spm builds, that's 1.742/8.712/17.425 silos, (rounded up to 2/9/18).

Thanks!