0.17 Laser turret shooting speed

[leadraven]

What ?

For Laser turret replace Shooting speed and Damage with Damage per second and remove Laser turret shooting speed upgrades.

Why ?

Shooting speed does not make sense for continuous beams.

[Dudy99]

As most will know the laser turret had been changed from a laser "bolt" shooting turret to a later beam turret and laser shooting speed doesn't really make sense any more.

My suggestion is to change the name to something like "Laser intensity" as if you look into how the shooting speed affects lasers, laser intensity is the closest thing I can think of that would have the same affect.

The reason why I bring this up is because I'm aware the Devs want Factorio to be a very polished game and I believe, though it is a small change will help polish the game that little bit more.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into older topic with related suggestion

[posila]

Shooting speed does not make sense for continuous beams.

Who says it's a continuous beam? Maybe it's a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsed_laser with > 60 pulses per second and shooting speed upgrades increases frequency of pulses.

[mudcrabempire]

Well, if you really want to get technical, then "laser" turrets don't really make sense or at least are so hard to make sense of, that any debate about their realisticity is doomed to fail.

As a few examples:
-Lasers dilute the further they go, making them much less effective on long ranges.
-The laser "beam" shouldn't be visible, unless there is something in its path (compare shining a flashlight through fog). If there is something in its path, that would further dilute its power.
-The "power" of a laser actually needs to be separated into the energy per photon and the number of photons per second (or per pulse or whatever). In other words, the wavelenth (or frequency) and the intensity. Now, there's a fancy little effect called the "photoelectric effect" that says something like "if an individual photon can't hurt the target, then shooting more of those photons doesn't make a difference. But as we all know, light with a visible frequency isn't very harmfull (you need UV or higher frequencies), so a laser with a visible color can't hurt you no matter the intensity (UNLESS YOU SHINE IT AT THE EYES, DON'T SHINE LASERS AT EYES!). Those red laser beams should be at best able to blind the biters.
-You can technically argue that the red beam is not the laser beam itself but the laser ionizes the air, leaving a trace of hot plasma. That would invoke plasma physics which are a whole different beast on it's own.

So yeah, if you want to be realistic, scrap laser turrets and put more focus on physical projectiles (I think I'd like that). Laser turrents are pretty much only ruled by the rule of cool.
Edit: Talking about realistic: Might as well introduce grenade turrets and rocket turrets too and make a big turret with one of those nifty big tank guns.

[FuryoftheStars]

So yeah, if you want to be realistic, scrap laser turrets and put more focus on physical projectiles (I think I'd like that). Laser turrents are pretty much only ruled by the rule of cool.
Edit: Talking about realistic: Might as well introduce grenade turrets and rocket turrets too and make a big turret with one of those nifty big tank guns.

While I probably wouldn’t want them removed (cool rule is too cool ), I would definitely like seeing them not be the best turret and to have other turret options besides. It’d be good to have more incentive to mix the turret types. Logistics for the physical turrets I think right now is a larger draw back than the power consumption of lasers.

But on topic with the OP, yeah, I agree that it’d make more sense getting rid of shooting speed for lasers. Even if they are pulse fired at >60 /s, because this is something that can’t be seen, many people won’t understand.

[Koub]

I would definitely like seeing them not be the best turret and to have other turret options besides. It’d be good to have more incentive to mix the turret types.

What makes laser turrets so "good" is not that they are better than the others in all aspects, but they have less weak points than the others.
A gun turret chews a behemoth biter in as much time as a laser turret removes around 1/6th of the behemoth biter's HP, but has a small range, making it vulnerable to spitters.
A flamethrower turret has a better range, and outrageous aoe damage ... but often misses the first few biters.
The laser has a decent range, decent dps, needs little infrastructure to be fed (despite a nuclear plant is not what one would call insignificant, but can be replaced by square miles of solar panels).
It's very convenient without being too weak, but it's FAR from being the most powerful

BTW I was doing the math, and the numbers I calculated just don't match what I see ingame, so I just removed the math part but I did the test in creative, it's easily reproducible.

[Ultros]

As a few examples:
-Lasers dilute the further they go, making them much less effective on long ranges.
-The laser "beam" shouldn't be visible, unless there is something in its path (compare shining a flashlight through fog). If there is something in its path, that would further dilute its power.
-The "power" of a laser actually needs to be separated into the energy per photon and the number of photons per second (or per pulse or whatever). In other words, the wavelenth (or frequency) and the intensity. Now, there's a fancy little effect called the "photoelectric effect" that says something like "if an individual photon can't hurt the target, then shooting more of those photons doesn't make a difference. But as we all know, light with a visible frequency isn't very harmfull (you need UV or higher frequencies), so a laser with a visible color can't hurt you no matter the intensity (UNLESS YOU SHINE IT AT THE EYES, DON'T SHINE LASERS AT EYES!). Those red laser beams should be at best able to blind the biters.
-You can technically argue that the red beam is not the laser beam itself but the laser ionizes the air, leaving a trace of hot plasma. That would invoke plasma physics which are a whole different beast on it's own.

This is wrong on so many levels.

Lasers don't "dilute", they expand due to optics, and this is a measurable quantity known as the beam divergence, which is usually expressed as an angle (mrad).They are also scattered by the atmosphere and particles within the atmosphere, which is what makes the beam visible.

Photoelectric effect refers to the very specific quantum phenomenon regarding electrons being ejected from a material that is irradiated by light, and has nothing to do with damage from light intensity. You absolutely can be injured in places other than the eyes by an intense beam of non-ionizing radiation, just focus some noonday sunlight on a piece of paper/wood.

A laser does not have to ionize air to form a beam, the beam of a laser pointer is formed entirely from light scattered by particles in the air.

[Ultros]

What makes laser turrets so "good" is not that they are better than the others in all aspects, but they have less weak points than the others.

This is precisely the point.

It is extremely easy to supply power to a laser turret, and it is difficult for biters/spitters to take down a well designed laser turret wall except by destroying the walls and the turrets completely. Substations can be placed well behind the turrets, which forces the biters to attack the turrets themselves and makes them unable to attack the supply infrastructure easily.

A wall made of flamethrower turrets can easily be overcome by their fuel supply being destroyed, due to the low HP and lack of resistances of the pipes supplying the turrets, and because the pipes have to connect directly onto the turret. The same applies to gun turrets and the belts/inserters supplying the guns.

It's the simplified logistics that makes laser turrets such an effective defence strategy in the mid and late game.

[mudcrabempire]

This is wrong on so many levels.

As far as I can tell, your arguments are good. But I still stand by mine and I could elaborate upon it, to which you could most likely also respond, at which point 5 other people could easily join the discussion with equally good arguments. Should be fun but we should probably take that to another thread.

Proving my point that it is very hard to find a realistic description of the concept of laser weapons, so any implementations of that concept will almost certainly have big patches of the rule of cool. (This whole problem may be related to the fact that we don't have real-life laser weapons, at least none that are past the experimental stage).

[mrudat]

I'm fairly certain that a laser of sufficient power to do comparable damage to a gatling gun will have a visible beam, though not necessarily similar in appearance to the one in-game.

The beam will be visible because the beam both needs to deliever non-trivial amounts of power, and to deliver that power to as small a spot as feasible so as to maximise the damage done to the target.

On the way to the target, enough power will likely be absorbed by the atmosphere that there will be a visible line where the laser is passing through. Every erg of energy that's used this way is wasted because all it does is make pretty lights and the air warm.

It's entirely possible that the 'laser' turrets are more accurately some form of Directed Energy Weapon that might well involve a laser at some point.


Given the appearance of the beam, it could perhaps be a (high power) Electrolaser; a ranged tazer, or more accurately at the likely power levels, a miniature lighning bolt factory.


Given the range of the turrets, I suspect that acoustc DEWs would be much more likely, and probably something we can build today. Over short distances you can easily transfer enough energy in the form of sound waves to render a biological entity quite dead, without needing anything more high tech than a piezoelectric transducer, and a horn to focus the energy.

The problem with acoustic DEWs is that they just don't work at a particularly long range; the laser turret would likely be at the extreme end of effective range for a sonic weapon.


On the gripping hand, a sonic weapon to accompany the laser turrets would likely be quite useful; at intensities below instant-kill, a sonic weapon would likely cause the bugs to fall over or become disoriented, plus, unlike the laser turrets, sonic weapons are, by nature, area of effect weapons.