Please clarify

[DRBLN]

Please, could you clarify 2 issues:

1) Do labs / assembling plants / inserters / drillers consume energy in case they are idle? I mean, do they consume 0 energy / 25% of the max consumption?
2) How do I destroy gear from my inventory? For example, I do not need thepistol any more and I'd like to destroy that.

[wrtlprnft]

I don't know about the first one, but you can destroy items by placing them inside a chest and then destroying that chest (either with the flamethrower or with a gun by pressing c). The game goes out of its way to avoid that items disappear.

You can see that burner inserters, burner miners and furnances don't consume any energy if they're idle, I'd expect the same from electrically operated equipment. However, they announced that in 0.3.0, laser turrets consume energy even when idle, so maybe that's about to change.

[MF-]

You can see that burner inserters, burner miners and furnances don't consume any energy if they're idle, I'd expect the same from electrically operated equipment. However, they announced that in 0.3.0, laser turrets consume energy even when idle, so maybe that's about to change.

Well.. they are not that idle, when you think about it. They are scanning the surroundings for targets.

I guess that building a radar should remove this idle power consumption of turrets in it's range. (maybe some connection would be needed as well??)
(which might be beneficial if you have tons of turrets)

[slpwnd]

All the electrically powered machines consume a very small portion of energy even when idle. This mechanism servers to deplete their internal energy buffers so they can be marked with the blinking sign for no energy. You can check for yourselve that if you disconnect your energy source sometimes it takes a short while before the entities start blinking red (could be different for different entities). The time in between is the time needed to deplete the internal buffers.

The portion of the energy depleted when idle is proportional to the amount of energy needed to be fully operational. There is some very small ratio - something like 1 / 30 I suppose. The only difference is the laser turret because it needs a lot of energy at once and then it recharges so it would consume a lot of energy even when idle. Therefore the laser turret checks for changes compared to the previous state.

[wrtlprnft]

Well.. they are not that idle, when you think about it. They are scanning the surroundings for targets.

But so are regular turrets, and they don't require any electricity. Which contributes to the proof that making every aspect of a game logical would render it unplayable (good luck making semiconductors or even PCBs out of copper wire and iron).

Thanks to slpwnd for the clarification!

[DRBLN]

I guess that building a radar should remove this idle power consumption of turrets in it's range. (maybe some connection would be needed as well??)
(which might be beneficial if you have tons of turrets)

Plaese, could you explain the sentence about the radara. I didn't get the idea.
BTW what is the idea of building a radar?

[MF-]

I guess that building a radar should remove this idle power consumption of turrets in it's range. (maybe some connection would be needed as well??)
(which might be beneficial if you have tons of turrets)

Plaese, could you explain the sentence about the radara. I didn't get the idea.
BTW what is the idea of building a radar?

If the turrets had high idle consumption because they were scanning for targets (and not codewise reasons), one might want to build one radar to do all the scanning.
That would cost the power for the radar, but it would spare it on each turret. And that could be beneficial.
(an improvement idea)

But the idle power consumption is there only for fixing the power-missing indicator, which (it seems) appears only when the power level is exactly 0
(without the idle power consumption one could get into trouble by having, say, "10 power" which is not enough for producing another "bullet", but not zero -> broken power-failure indicator)