Factorio Forums

Hey,

I noticed several power blackouts (base flickering) during critter invasions when my laser turrets start firing. I don't understand why that happens as I have built several accumulators to provide additional power backup.
The strange issue is that the base flickers while the accumulators are still nearly full (>80% load) and the power output bar of the accumulators is only at 50%.

Some power data of my base:

Max steam engine output: 20 MW
Average Power consumption: 14 MW

Number of Accumulators: 36
Max Power output: 10.8 MW

Number of simultaneously firing laser turrets: 5
Power consumption per laser turret: 3.1 MW
Total power consumption: 15.5 MW laser turret consumption + 14 MW base power consumption = 29.5 MW

So shouldn't that mean that 20MW from steam engines + 10.5 MW from accumulators should provide enough energy during the invasions as long as the accumulators are not empty?
Instead my base starts to flicker and the accumulators only provide ~6MW of power?!?!

Can somebody please explain?

Post a screenshot of the Electric network info (the window you get when clicking on a power pole).

if I'm reading the turret.lua correctly, it looks like the power usage shown is based on the firing rate and power per shot (since I've seen that change in game with new techs), but the recharge on the internal buffer for the turret is 9.6MW, thus causing flickering as the spikes would be the lower of your power production or your normal consumption plus 48MW

Also be aware that accumulators have a charge and discharge rate. Each accumulator can only charge/discharge at 300kw. "Several" accumulators won't be able to properly cope with the power demand spikes multiple laser turrets cause.

Gnaah, I found my mistake. My steam engines do not provide enough power. They are only producing 16.2 MW max (18 engines) + 10.8 MW accumulators = 27 MW total.
And that is surely less than the 29.5 MW I need.

But that leads to my original question and the reason why I thought that something is wrong with the game:

Look at the screenshot.
It says that I am producing 27 MW of power but my accumulators only produce 3.2 MW. For that reason I thought that I should have enough power production. But that is not true. The accumulators already produce its max output of 10.8 MW. The display is not correct on the electric info window.

Your thoughts?

If this is what I think it is, not all the information about accumulators is on the map-mouseover sidebar. Mouseover an accumulator in one of what could be called the setup screens, inventory or crafting or recipe, and you'll see the maximum output per accumulator is 300kW, so you'll need eight accumulators for each laser turret to supply the 2.4MW each they need when firing.

(edit: what Zavian said)

What you see is the 5sec average of the accumulator power production, but this is misleading since they constantly switch on and off, when they provide power they do it to 100%.

Thanks Loewchen. I forgot the 5s smoothing. That makes sense.