Minimal Autonomous Radar Setup

[Lav]

A blueprint for the idea from this post.

A minimalistic setup for autonomous radar stations with 100% terrain coverage and zero downtime.

Resources required:

• 1 radar
• 1 solar panel
• 1 accumulator
• 1 power switch
• 2 arithmetic combinators
• 2 power poles

Blueprint

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Explanation.

Normally, to maintain a radar fully powered throughout the night, you would need approximately 7-8 solar panels and 6-7 accumulators (downscaling from the 25:21 ratio for stable 1MW power supply). However radar doesn't need to stay powered permanently - revealed map chunks will stay revealed for some time even if nothing is scanning them anymore. This setup will only activate the radar for short periods of time and then disconnect it for awhile, exploiting this feature.

Resulting radar power consumption is thus equivalent to ~33kW, allowing a single solar panel and a single accumulator to power a radar and keep the map revealed 100% of the time.

Same trick can be applied to grid-powered radars to reduce their power consumption if that is a problem for your base. Accumulator and solar panel can be removed, everything else should stay the same. Only the rightmost power pole must be connected to the grid, otherwise radar will stay on 100% of the time.

Primary Purpose.

1. Drive a car around the map, placing these wherever you wish. They are fully autonomous, so no need to connect them to anything, and will keep your map under constant observation.

2. Save on radar energy costs for your main base or outpost.

3. Small power poles that remain from the early stages of your base are finally useful! Sure, the setup can be made with mediums, but either it will be larger as a result, or it will need manual cable disconnecting. So this is a place where small poles are actually better than the others.

Side Effects.

1. Note that the map chunks highlighted by this setup will do a lot of flickering. If that annoys you, add a second solar panel and modify the "R = R % 480" combinator to "R = R % 300". This will disable the flickering and increase power consumption to ~45 kW, making a single solar panel insufficient. A single accumulator should still be enough.

2. Due to extremely short time that the radar stays on, terrain exploration beyond radar's scanning range will be glacially slow.

[Jap2.0]

This is a really neat idea!

[DaveMcW]

Here is a more compact version.

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The flickering is hard to calculate precisely. It usually takes 300 ticks, but sometimes it takes much more. I compensated by using a 75-tick cycle so it doesn't last long in the worst case.

[Lav]

The flickering is hard to calculate precisely. It usually takes 300 ticks, but sometimes it takes much more. I compensated by using a 75-tick cycle so it doesn't last long in the worst case.

Using integer overflow is a nice touch, like it!

And the flickering in your case is because your active cycles are too short - mere 12-13 ticks out of 87-tick cycle. I used 45 ticks of active time for radar because I found out that 30 ticks do not guarantee a visibility refresh. 45 is probably a bit higher than strictly necessary, but 12-13 is definitely not enough - a lot of active cycles in your setup are actually wasted, which is why you still get random flickering even though you supposedly scan much more frequently than I do.

[zOldBulldog]

I have been using your little setup and I must say that it is easily one of the smartest and most useful designs I came across.

Why? Because Radars are power hogs. I now use your design and DO NOT hook it up to the power grid. No more drain on the power grid.

You should post it in factorioprints.com so that others find it easily.

Thank you very much!!!

-------
EDIT:

This is how I use your radar setup for nest-clearing.

- First, I setup a perimeter rail around the base, not too close, easily 5-10 chunks away.
- If there are no aliens nearby I plop one of your radars plus a turret with 200 piercing rounds and forget about it.
- If there are aliens nearby, I clear them as follows:
--- I setup a combat/rail construction 1-4 train. 2 wagons of artillery ammo, 1 of rail construction stuff, 1 with the rest of the supplies for your radar and combat (like piercing rounds).
--- I setup a combat station in my base that preps the needed supplies in chests and auto-loads (with limits on the stack inserters).
--- I go have fun setting up the perimeter rail (or maybe a 2nd one further out), setting up the artillery outpost below, clearing all nests I see in the map, deconstruct the outpost and leave the radar+turret setup in place.

Works like a charm. And it all started with your radar setup

Screenshot:

arty.jpg (788.86 KiB) Viewed 40833 times

Blueprint:

Code: Select all

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[Hiladdar]

Within the secure area of the base I like to use a small array that consists of 1transformer, 1radar, 8 solar panes and 7 accumulates, in an almost small square box, when there is no electrical line close by. I know may have one too many accumulators, or one too many solar panels. It takes about a day / night cycle to charge up, but once it is charged up I no longer have to worry about it. The advantage of this is that there is no power draw on the power from the main base. My intent is to use the KISS principle here, where KISS stands for "Keep It Stupid Simple"

It looks as follows once it is deployed:

Independant Radar.png (277.64 KiB) Viewed 40116 times

Blue print follows:

Independant Radar.txt

(409 Bytes) Downloaded 637 times

Hiladdar

[tuliomir]

I took the liberty to add this to FactorioPrints.com with credits to you guys:

https://factorioprints.com/view/-LbFkTPqhZcGv8y5dlQr

Hope you don't mind, but it was just too good to not publish there.

[Faciro]

I have used both the blueprints posted here (one with a bit higher uptime/less flickering and the other one). None of them works for me.

I thought I only had to plop them down, get them built and that would be it. Am I missing anything?

[zOldBulldog]

@faciro: I am not sure, but try this one. It is another variant of the same that I use. Two solar panels make the flickering much less significant, and I use medium poles because they are usually in my inventory anyway.

autoRadar.png (153.47 KiB) Viewed 35435 times

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[Spaghettificator]

Within the secure area of the base I like to use a small array that consists of 1transformer, 1radar, 8 solar panes and 7 accumulates, in an almost small square box, when there is no electrical line close by. I know may have one too many accumulators, or one too many solar panels. It takes about a day / night cycle to charge up, but once it is charged up I no longer have to worry about it. The advantage of this is that there is no power draw on the power from the main base. My intent is to use the KISS principle here, where KISS stands for "Keep It Stupid Simple"

It looks as follows once it is deployed:

Independant Radar.png

Blue print follows:

Independant Radar.txt

Hiladdar

Would like to just inform that you only need 6 accumulators. Not 7. So it should be 8 solar panels and 6 accumulators. And you can even stick a light if you want, it can hold it.

[patrick12222010]

I'm stealing this... Great job!

[Magick93]

Sorry for posting after a long time, but I wanted to share my take on the minimal autonomous radar:

Dug into the radar code to see how it works internally:

-energy_per_nearby_scan is 250KJ/scan and it lasts for 10 seconds (600 ticks).
-Energy consumption is 300KJ/s thus the vanilla radar consume 5KJ/tick (to accumulate 250KJ it need to work for 50 ticks).
-Therefore it only need to work 50 ticks every 550 to 600 ticks.
-Vanilla radar updates every 300 KJ/s / 250 KJ/scan = 1.2 scans per second, but we only need 1scan/10s.
-Timed the combinator cycle to 600 ticks, radar works only the last 50 ticks
-Power savings are now enough to also power a light through the night!

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[Belter]

..."Keep It Stupid Simple"...

...you only need 6 accumulators... ...you can even stick a light...

Two lights And I also like K.I.S.S.

So I've re-arranged and made it a bit better looking/symmetrical for my taste at least. Hope some will like it:

RadarOutpostNologic-zoomed.png (612.26 KiB) Viewed 21311 times

RadarOutpostNologic-mapview.png (13.52 KiB) Viewed 21311 times

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