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I found a way to turn on laser turrets only during fight, using combinators and roboport circuit network output.

In version 0.13 there is an ability to connect roboport to the circuit newrok, and transmit count of free and total robots of each kind (4 outputs).

The basic idea is simple: if there is any damage to our base - construction robot will become busy to repair damaged objects, if count of free construction robots does not equal to count of all construction robots - turn on electricity for turrets.



After attack counter starts count to 1200 (1183 actually), ~10 seconds to turn off again.

This setup is not perfect, I do not like to spend much time with combinators.

Here is blueprint string (with default lamps).

Very nice,
I had approximately the same idea, but with the "guard" turret: all other turrets are enabled when the guard turret fires (measured via increased energy consumption in a separate accumulator). But your way is definitely simpler, although with a small damage-price.

XKnight wrote:Very nice,
I had approximately the same idea, but with the "guard" turret: all other turrets are enabled when the guard turret fires (measured via increased energy consumption in a separate accumulator). But your way is definitely simpler, although with a small damage-price.

This should be in your post

The only negative is that if a construction bot dies, how do you deal with that...?
Also, how do you measure energy consumption on a circuit network?

EDIT: Wait, you can measure accumulators now, can't you. Nevermind.

DemiPixel wrote: The only negative is that if a construction bot dies, how do you deal with that...?

Obviously, robots always may die even in the simplest build, so the only way to deal with this is to request additional robots from the main base.

XKnight wrote:

DemiPixel wrote: The only negative is that if a construction bot dies, how do you deal with that...?

Obviously, robots always may die even in the simplest build, so the only way to deal with this is to request additional robots from the main base.

I'm stating how do you know the difference between a bot dying and a bot just repairing? If you just always make sure there are 50 bots, when the attack is over, you'll have 51 bots. Each time you'd need more and more bots to go repair before you detect any issue and start shooting.

DemiPixel wrote: I'm stating how do you know the difference between a bot dying and a bot just repairing? If you just always make sure there are 50 bots, when the attack is over, you'll have 51 bots. Each time you'd need more and more bots to go repair before you detect any issue and start shooting.

From the roboport you can recieve information about "total construction bots" and "available construction bots", the difference between these numbers is busy robots (they are repairing right now), if this number is > 0 - we are under attack.
Additional you can compare the amount of total construction bots with 50 (or any predifined value) and request new bots from the main base.

Why not just use a single regular turret. Feed it ammo from a chest and wire that chest up to the power switch. I suppose that would require feeding the chest occasionally but it would take a long time to empty a chest of clips when the laser turrets doing most of the damage.

How exactly would you hook up an accumulator to do this anyways?

zkzkz wrote:Why not just use a single regular turret. Feed it ammo from a chest and wire that chest up to the power switch. I suppose that would require feeding the chest occasionally but it would take a long time to empty a chest of clips when the laser turrets doing most of the damage.

Sometimes at some point of late game - I build a huge wall around my base, I build it so huge that it includes each possible mine post I will ever use in current game.

I need A LOT of ammo (or electricity) to feed this huge wall.

The problem with electricity is solved

Use flame turrets: zero upkeep cost, only production take time.

Basic setup,

Spotter Turret
2 poles ( so that the spotter turret will feeding from accumulator and not the whole network)
2 accumulator, (1 in main network and 1 for turret)
1 laser turret
1 decider contaminator (to trigger the power switch)

The basic logic is that the power in the laser turret accumulator will always be lower than other accumulators when it starts firing as it can only recharge at a rate of 300kW while the laser turret uses 800kW per shot. Fine tune your contaminator as needed as to cater for the number of shots you want to take before the whole array of lasers come online.

Singalong wrote:Basic setup,

Spotter Turret
2 poles ( so that the spotter turret will feeding from accumulator and not the whole network)
2 accumulator, (1 in main network and 1 for turret)
1 laser turret
1 decider contaminator (to trigger the power switch)

The basic logic is that the power in the laser turret accumulator will always be lower than other accumulators when it starts firing as it can only recharge at a rate of 300kW while the laser turret uses 800kW per shot. Fine tune your contaminator as needed as to cater for the number of shots you want to take before the whole array of lasers come online.

I was imagining doing something very similar. Time to actually design it. Seems like it would work very well. I'm going to try this for large scale defense.

So I tried to set this up, and it worked great. The spotter turret draws the accumulator down below 100%, turning on the other turrets. But, when I set up the next set of turrets down the line, it doesn't work--the spotter turret fires, but never draws the accumulator down below 100%. I've checked and re-checked that everything is set up the same. I'm not at that computer now so I can't post images, but I'm 100% sure that the spotter laser is only connected to the accumulator, not my main network. In fact, I copied the working setup from a blueprint (and then adjusted the wires so they're also identical). Any ideas about what I could be missing?

Edit: I ended up using the "available construction bots < total construction bots" method because it seems easier to set up and I was able to get it working consistently. The only downer is that if you've got a bunch of personal roboports in your power armor and you're standing nearby, your personal bots will take the repair jobs and the lasers will never turn on! Running away takes care of it, though.

I have idea of using flame turret as detector. AFAIK flame turret have superior range co it can attack first. When it attack it use liquid do if we connect tank to the turret, liquid in tank will drop. That amount difference can be use as event to turn on power for laser turrets (just like bots amount in XKnight example).

Can anyone verify that theory?

Neotix wrote:I have idea of using flame turret as detector. AFAIK flame turret have superior range co it can attack first. When it attack it use liquid do if we connect tank to the turret, liquid in tank will drop. That amount difference can be use as event to turn on power for laser turrets (just like bots amount in XKnight example).

Can anyone verify that theory?

I'll try it later. I made a working laser wall that turns off power when the detector turret shoots. The drawback is that it has to be powered by steam since it uses an accumulator to detect energy spikes. And accumulators can only be charged at night by steam so that you can detect that the natives are not present any more.

With a flame turret you don't even have a drain on the detector turret. But you would need a storage tank full of flame ammo for each section of the wall that you want to power individually. A flame turret also only uses 0.12 liquid/second which means that you might have to wait a really long time before you can detect that the tank is missing a full litre of ammo since combinators work with whole numbers only. Depends on if it's rounded up or down. A pump input 0.5 litres per tick though and a turret uses 0.002 ammo/tick. So you have to limit the tank input pump to only work less than once every 250 ticks to get a lower input rate than output rate. And then you fill 4 seconds of fuel usage in a single tick which might delay detetion by another several seconds. You might get detection after 20 seconds if you have a single flame turret/detection block. You probably need a full wall of flame turrets and 10 turrets/storage tank. And you also need a lot of oil in storage since each tank holds 2500 litres which is a lot to have just sitting around every 20 tiles of wall. You might be able to not fill it up completely, but that could increase the detection time (since you might fill several litres of liquid more than you meant to with signal delays and so on).

Qon is right... the flamethrower turrets are not consuming near enough to detect the small difference. I tried it.

So unless one is willing to do weird tricks like he is suggesting it doesn't work...



But I have another idea to throw into the topic.

If one is willing to use Gun Turrets one could use them to detect the biters. For that the Gun turrets would have to build the front line and the laser turrets are in the second row.

The Gun Turrets would start firing, ammo is consumed from the chest, which then can be detected to switch on the laser turrets. Once the chest gets refilled you can shut off the laser turrets. Might need some tweaking though.


I guess the most reliable way would be an enemy sensor... that outputs signals detecting the type and amount of biters that are approaching. Could be used then for target priorization in the future.

MeduSalem wrote:I guess the most reliable way would be an enemy sensor... that outputs signals detecting the type and amount of biters that are approaching. Could be used then for target priorization in the future.

Laser turrets are reliable though. As long as it is alive it will never allow your other turrets to deactivate while there are natives close by and it activates them pretty much immediatly. As long as your setup is built correctly that is. And the drain from a single laser turret every 14 tiles or something is not a big worry. And with triple wall of laser turrets you get like 5% of the drain you would otherwise have letting all those turrets be active all the time. Seems weird to avoid laser turrets for the detector when the whole point of the technique is to be able to use for improving laser spam and laser is obviously the best detector.

Ok, this is an extremely dumb build, but it surprisingly well works.
We have several guard turrets, that are powered through the separate accumulators (these accumulators can be detached from main network during night, although I didn't worried about this). Each guard turret has an arithmetic combinator ("Red + 1") in the same network, this combinator is used to detect whether turret is firing or not.
Once turret start firing, arithmetic combinator will be disabled, because it has lower priority than turret and turret's energy consumption is bigger than 300kW (max accumulator output). As a result, "Red" signal will have the same value during 2+ ticks, and this can be detected by second combinator("Each * -1") which is powered from the main network. The last thing is a power switch with condition "Anything = 1", so it will be enabled if one guard turret detects an enemy.
That's all.

XKnight wrote:Ok, this is an extremely dumb build, but it surprisingly well works.

Looks good. The combinator non-update is a nice solution, maybe better than mine even if it also works great. But does the turrets get cut off during an attack there? Combinator logic error or is it just the detector turret not getting to shoot anything because the wall of turrets kills everything before it gets a chance?

Any ideas for how to make something reliable that works at night without steam? If the detector turret empties its own accumulator it will turn on all the laser turrets until dawn. And that is very possible since the accumulator doesn't last very long and will also be discharged by the factory if it doesn't get it's own steam powerplant and powergrid. But then your lasers aren't using free ammo anymore. And if only one thing is powered forever then shouldn't that be lasers? q:
Think we all would like to play with more electric grid control units. I'm glad we got the switches at least though.

Qon wrote: But does the turrets get cut off during an attack there? Combinator logic error or is it just the detector turret not getting to shoot anything because the wall of turrets kills everything before it gets a chance?

Sometimes guards don't have any chance to fire in biter, because main turrets have some charge left inside and it is enough to make a single shoot.

Qon wrote: Any ideas for how to make something reliable that works at night without steam? If the detector turret empties its own accumulator it will turn on all the laser turrets until dawn.

Is this really needed? Single accumulator is able to keep guard ON fire for 5000/300 = 16 sec = 1000 ticks, while night is 2500 ticks long.
So if you really expect an attack more than 16 sec long you need to build more accumulators per guard, nothing else (by the way, guards also can share accumulators).
(These accumulators should be connected in series not parallel, it means power switch should be placed between first and second accumulator with condition "first accumulator is empty". As a result, you will have a single accumulator with 300kW output but with 10MJ capacity, and this is enough for 2000 ticks).
In the worst case all turrets will be enabled so you won't lose your outpost, just a little bit more energy.

Qon wrote:will also be discharged by the factory if it doesn't get it's own steam powerplant and powergrid.

During night guard's accumulators should be disconnected from main grid. This is not present in video but it is very simple to do.

XKnight wrote:

Qon wrote: Any ideas for how to make something reliable that works at night without steam? If the detector turret empties its own accumulator it will turn on all the laser turrets until dawn.

Is this really needed? Single accumulator is able to keep guard ON fire for 5000/300 = 16 sec = 1000 ticks, while night is 2500 ticks long.
So if you really expect an attack more than 16 sec long you need to build more accumulators per guard, nothing else (by the way, guards also can share accumulators).
(These accumulators should be connected in series not parallel, it means power switch should be placed between first and second accumulator with condition "first accumulator is empty". As a result, you will have a single accumulator with 300kW output but with 10MJ capacity, and this is enough for 2000 ticks).
In the worst case all turrets will be enabled so you won't lose your outpost, just a little bit more energy.

Example of 20Mj accumulator, 4000 ticks long

I like it! Maybe I don't need it, but it's still interesting to know how to solve it. And since the security wall is fail-on for less than half a night for that particular section when the accumulator runs out it isn't that big of a deal.

XKnight wrote:

Qon wrote:will also be discharged by the factory if it doesn't get it's own steam powerplant and powergrid.

During night guard's accumulators should be disconnected from main grid. This is not present in video but it is very simple to do.

Yeah a simple daylight sensor is easy with the accumulator reading. Of course it should be disconnected from main grid at night. Why didn't I think about the power switch for that?

In general I should get used to the power switch and it's many applications. I've been so focused on megabases that I've never really used circuits either. But with the switch and other circuit addictions they get some actual practical uses.