Friday Facts #382 - Logistic groups

[TBC_x]

Logistic groups are nice. I was just looking for a mod which does exactly that.

[Gorgothnia]

Looking great
Very minor point but the rocket capacity is listed in the GUI as 1 ton. Ton is the imperial measurement (with several different possible values because yay imperial system). The metric measurement is a tonne (t). Also the "K" of kg should not be capitalised.

[mcdjfp]

It is true that items will have different weights. However, even though it is called weight, the measure is kilograms, which means mass. The mass of the items will not change, even though the weight changes due to gravity: W = m * g. So I would expect that changing planets will have no effect on the 'weight' restriction of the rocket.

The acceleration needed to overcome gravity would be lower. This means that a rocket that could just barely accelerate upwards with 1000 kg on earth would be able to just barely accelerate upwards carrying 2000 kg on a planet where the acceleration due to gravity was half that of earth.

Plus the velocity needed for orbit would be lower on a planet with reduced gravity, which would also allow for larger payloads.

Look at Space X's Starship (At least their plans for it). It might or might not be able to reach orbit with no payload from the surface of the Earth, but the plan is to launch the return trip from the surface of Mars directly to an Earth intercept (with at least some payload).

Also, why else would the gravity of the various planets matter? I guess they could put a weight limit on the character as well, but rocket cargo seems a good use. It would make some places better for mining available everywhere resources (assuming there are any), or for production.

[Illiander42]

Logistic groups got ascended! YAAAAY!!! (Can we have a way to load some defaults into a new save like with blueprints please?)

Aww at the cargo bays (But still pushing for beacon graphics)

What size asteroid likes fire?

One thing that's making me think you missed it: "The only things you can take with you to space are your armour and weapons (not even your ammo)" And zero-weight items (blueprints/decon planners/targetters?)

Also, how are we meant to hot-drop onto a deathworld planet if we can't take our ammo with us? Can we load it once we're on the platform so we can land with it?

[sumelar]

Combinators aren't required for automatic defense supply.

[jgilmore42]

Eh, I'll double up on the "weight limits are a weird thing to do" that other people have voiced. And it's true! Are there even ANY in existence games that have both a slot and weight based inventory system. How does that work?

Given the lack of visual ques that I'm seeing even in the rocket GUI, and the "not strictly based on recipes" bit, how do we discover the weight of an item? Where are weights displayed? How much does this stack weigh vs that one? How much is just one inserter?

I guess there's a reason that factorio includes a four function calculator, but jeeze! Though personally I alt-tab to a command prompt and use python. Yay readline library! And named variables for that matter. More complicated planning and optimization projects require a spreadsheet. You've NO IDEA how my life was simplified when I figured out that a requester chest always defaults to 1 stack of an item, thus giving an in-game method of determining what the stack size is without having to make a whole stack worth of them first. Or looking it up on the wiki (eww!)

Figuring out what should be sent whole vs. what should be sent in pieces could be a non-trivial and boring task. And one that has far-reaching implications - retrofitting a base to send one type of item vs. another sounds pretty non-trivial to me.

Not saying it can't work, but there's got to be a LOT more too it that you've indicated. If it's well integrated to the rest of the game and easy to use, anyway. And I sort of doubt that there is, at least at this point, as this FFF seems to be mostly about weight.

[triplepoint217]

All the quality of life improvements are looking amazing. Any chance we can get an option to pre-order and get access to some of them sooner ?

[TRUEpicness]

So how much is the engineer going to weigh?

[Epb7304]

"I crafted this new item into my inventory, it immediately disappeared into the trash slots, and before I realized what is going on, the robots were happily carrying it away from my reach"

First of all, hilarious.

I don't feel it would be too annoying to spare any hand-crafted items from the autotrash system, this could be done by changing autotrash from an active scan of your inventory to instead check any items entering your inventory (and a single scan through whenever enabled)

[Ghoulish]

Great stuff!

[Shadow_Man]

now I need to make a mod pack to add in the voice lines from Startcraft.
*nuclear launch detected*

Here you are: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/MIRV

[mmmPI]

Also, why else would the gravity of the various planets matter? I guess they could put a weight limit on the character as well, but rocket cargo seems a good use. It would make some places better for mining available everywhere resources (assuming there are any), or for production.

You made me think, the range of turrets has to be impacted by gravity if we're being super serious about it , as with very low gravity, you can aim more precisely at a longer distance no ?

Also the speed at which fluid travel through pipes too, but i don't think many people would notice

Maybe the temperature at which the water boil will be different with low pressure as it is also one of the characteristic of the planet we were shown.

Are there even ANY in existence games that have both a slot and weight based inventory system. How does that work?

Well i can't name precisely one, but i remember playing (mmo)rpgs where you have a limited number of inventory slot, similar to the idea of volume limit, and each item have a weight, which is another limit for carrying capacity.

So you couldn't carry 6 saddle, even if combined it wouldn't be too heavy, just not enough room/hands to carry. You also couldn't carry 10000 iron ingots, even if those would only ever take one slot and stack to 10000 in chests or other because each of them would have a weight of say 1 kg, and character is only allowed to carry 50 kg before being prevented to run, and 70+ you can't even walk.

That i wouldn't want in factorio, it feels more like a punishement or mod to increase difficulty. Still i'm curious to see if weight will have an impact other than for rocket payload measurement.

[rldml]

My main problem to supply my defense with build robots which repair and rebuild destroyed stuff is the fact, that biters destroy them while repairing, because i cannot tell robots to just wait after the attack, before trying to repair and replace.

Will there be an automatic way to tell them: wait until attack ended?!

Greetings, Ronny

[ChefOfRamen]

So if you're limited to one landing pad per planet, does that mean Space Age will have a max% for botless bases? Although by my math the limit would be pretty high even for megabases.

[ElderAxe]

Since I love playing with circuits, I'm in love with the "You're far away, the factory should be able to function without you." approach on 2.0 and all new fancy automation features that come with that mindset. Thank you for that.

One thing I always find problematic is there is no way in vanilla to read the list of ghost buildings from roboports.
I think you already built a similar logic where the space platform orders required items from the planet.
But you didn't announce anything like this on the previous FFF about ghosts and stuff.

Can we expect a feature like this to be announced in the future FFFs?

[picklock]

Another great FFF with interesting news.

[kirkbauer]

Logistic groups are nice. I was just looking for a mod which does exactly that.

It's definitely not as good as what's coming up in Factorio 2.0, but I have used this mod for quite some time:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LogisticRequestManager

[Atraps003]

Logi groups is a very nice feature for base game. Thanks.

[Qon]

Some interesting stuff.

I would prefer having a "safety range" of like 10k tiles or maybe even more that prevents you from having dense landing pads for rockets, instead of a single one per planet. So if you have a landing pad, no other landing pad can be placed within that safety range. And the range is big enough that you probably prefer 1 landing pad because otherwise you are forced to transport things by train for several minutes to combine the items. And it would make faster-than-train intra-planet logistics by rocket possible for small volume of items. And it's kind of weird to have a limit of 1 for the entire planet. I think you would get the same encouragement to have a singular logistics hub around one landing pad for the most part with the "safety distance" limit feature instead. And I think that the times when people go out of their way to have multiple separate landing pads on the same surface much further apart than a train world, that the delays and distances would introduce other equally rewarding problems to play around as having a singular landing pad. But you get an alternate option and a slightly less weird restriction that you can engineer different kinds of solutions to.

[-scv-]

The weight of the cosmonaut is not important for the rocket. where is cosmonaft located? let's remember...