Factorio Forums

Can we have an explicit out of ammo mode signal for turrets, maybe as an option to the mode of the turret ammo signal to just return an empty/not empty status instead of actual ammo count presented like the hold modes for belts?

We have an ammo count signal on turrets, but for bulk monitoring of many critical turrets (such as front of a moving platform), then having a circuit to read the ammo level for each individually and then decide if it is zero to forward the signal onto an aggregator circuit gets impractical as likely you wont have the space for a circuit near every turret not to mention likely impact on UPS.

I often find that the ammo count in a turret doesnt matter, however knowing the a turret is out of ammo is much more useful. I can and do monitor belts feeding turrets as a stop gap, but simply knowing a turret itself is out of ammo allows for a much more timely response.

My immediate use case for this is when any rocket turret on the front of my ship is out of ammo, the disable ignore other targets on all the front railguns so they can take over shooting the asteroid types the rocket were targeting. Similar for gatling guns too.

Khazul wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2024 2:30 pmI often find that the ammo count in a turret doesnt matter, however knowing the a turret is out of ammo is much more useful.

This is a great point. +1

+1

In the meantime currently I have all of my ammo back up into my cargo bay (to a limited quantity) and have the ship wired to do things based on having enough reserve ammo, I'd recommend that as a way to work around this.

Khazul wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2024 2:30 pm My immediate use case for this is when any rocket turret on the front of my ship is out of ammo, the disable ignore other targets on all the front railguns so they can take over shooting the asteroid types the rocket were targeting. Similar for gatling guns too.

To this, I would also recommend having the railguns shoot big asteroids. Unless your missiles are two-shotting them the rails are arguably cheaper than the missiles and even with enough damage to two-shot big asteroids the rails very often hit multiple asteroids in a line to remain more efficient. This simple change made my ship massively more efficient once I realized it.

HadesSupreme wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2024 4:14 pm +1

In the meantime currently I have all of my ammo back up into my cargo bay (to a limited quantity) and have the ship wired to do things based on having enough reserve ammo, I'd recommend that as a way to work around this.

To this, I would also recommend having the railguns shoot big asteroids. Unless your missiles are two-shotting them the rails are arguably cheaper than the missiles and even with enough damage to two-shot big asteroids the rails very often hit multiple asteroids in a line to remain more efficient. This simple change made my ship massively more efficient once I realized it.

I already have all my turret targeting specific asteroid types. I even have a couple of railguns and rocket turrets not ignore unlisted targets to serve as a backup.
As for monitoring, I always monitor ammo level in hub as my ship produce to hub and consume from hub so watching the hub does get an indication of production vs consumption. I have also made continuous moving average circuits to directly monitor feeder belts to/from hub to try to reduce condition detection time and that helped too but ultimately didn't tell me anything that aggressive monitoring of ammo levels in hub doesnt. I have tried circuits on each turret and that worked and provided the response times I was looking for in term of emergency switching of target targetting.
So - I think I've done all I can my my end short of making a mod to do this feature request (assuming such is possible) and proved that this feature request would solve the problem of excessive circuits and provide the desired responsiveness.

I know I could fix this simply by running ship slower, but that isnt the point. Actually i can slow my ships down based on ammo supply too and while the control I have is very good, it aint much help if you cant detect problems in a timely manner.

I also wish the damage signal told you the current damage instead of a running total damage. A bit useless to know that, but knowing current unrepaired damage would be very useful, for eg, for slowing a ship down.

I have been making a ship computer circuit and it tends to throw up the missing features as y9ou automate around issues