Factorio Forums

Laser turret max consumption is misleading and Space Age makes the problem worse.
This has been reported before many times: 121161 viewtopic.php?t=102287
The answer is always "not a bug" "deal with it" "buffer recharge" "accumulators"....
Consider this a persuasive essay on why it is a bug.

Laser turrets state they have a max consumption of 3.86 MW, regardless of quality. If a player reads that and the accumulator details (300kw output), they will calculate that they need around 12 accumulators to prevent a single laser turrets from causing a brownout.

However, laser turrets actually draw ~9 MW briefly to recharge their buffer. And what's more, this recharge rate is secretly increased for higher quality turrets, even though the power stats in the tooltip are exactly the same.

This means that for a single epic quality turret (which can draw up to 18MW in short bursts), you will need 60 accumulators just to prevent brownouts. And if you have two epic turrets, you need to be ready for them to sync their charge phase and draw up to 36MW.

Now this is all some idle complaints for Nauvis, because usually you end up with enough accumulators and power gen, and there are enough turrets over a wide area so the phases are never all synced. BUT now we have the challenge of defending a tiny space platform with a compact design. Of course laser turrets are bad for most asteroids, but they do have a slight niche with cleaning up small asteroids. This niche is unfortunately really not worth it specifically because of this issue, since you have to spam 100 accumulators on your space platform just to support 2 laser turrets without browning out.

The obvious solution from a player perspective is: reduce the buffer recharge rate for turrets to be sort of close to the average consumption. This is the only machine that has such an extreme difference between the expected and actual power drain.

The second solution, if for some reason controlling the recharge rate for turrets specifically is too much to ask for, is to list the actual buffer recharge rate somewhere. Maybe "peak consumption" or something. The fact that there is no indication that higher quality turrets have completely different accumulator requirements, and that this information is visible nowhere, seems like a dead giveaway that something is missing in the tooltip information.

The tooltip is slightly off from laser turret's real max energy consumption and always has been. The tooltip updates to the expected max consumption of 800kj per shot * total laser shooting speed but the *real* max consumption seems about 200kj more than that according to the power graph every time I test in /editor mode. I assume that 200kj extra is so that the turret can fully charge up while actively shooting? So at max laser shooting speed your real max laser power draw is a flat 4.0MW instead of the 3.86MW the tooltip says.

Though, it would be nice if the tooltip included that extra 200kj so it was perfectly accurate but it isn't a problem unless you really want lasers on the space platform. Then you just have to account for it. Or maybe the graph i a little off.

I retested with all laser turret qualities and they all behaved the same. 4MW max consumption at max laser shooting speed.

The extra ~200kj does add up fast though. 5 laser turrets and that is an entire MW more power you need. On a space platform that is a hard one to handle.


I can't explain how you have 1 epic turret pulling 18mw though. I tried and tried 40MW is all I could get.

Thanks for responding. For a normal laser turret, the power spikes up to 9.6MW briefly on each shot as the buffer recharges, the devs have stated this previously when the same issue was posted. The average power draw over time is accurate to the tooltip.

Now that there are higher quality turrets, they have higher buffer recharge rates as you can see in my screenshot. The average power draw is still the same.