Factorio Forums

TL;DR. : Rocket silo should have the ability to be connected to the circuit network. It should give the option to trigger the launch on a circuit condition. Also it should read whether a rocket is ready and output onto a chosen output signal or a new 'Rocket' signal.


"Why" : Manually launching many rockets is tedious and is not in the spirit of Factorio. We should have the ability to automate all the things. The rocket launch is just another of these things... Also synchronized launching would just be a cool sight to see.

The read functionality could also be useful to set up other circuit conditions in the factory or even in triggering the launch (e.g launch when rockets = 10)

This would be a fairly small enhancement for the dev team considering that the circuit window is now a separate GUI window. The rocket silo just needs that option enabled and a little additional logic for outputting a signal when the rocket is ready and triggering the launch, probably a fairly trivial enhancement (Maybe 3-4 hours of work?)

I would caution guitarmanmike not to estimate hours work, however I do agree with the request.

Being able to set an output on a user selected channel if a rocket is ready would be great.
As would launching when a circuit condition is met.

I support this idea as well. It's rather strange to me that the task that is ultimately the goal of Factorio is a manual one.

On the other hand, it would technically be anticlimatic to have your victory condition occur without you even noticing

That said, it would be nice to have some rocket silo interaction with the circuit network. There are several autolauncher mods floating around, but things like % completed, ready, ready w/satellite loaded, etc could also be used to good effect in some cases.

+1

Not sure if you have noticed but this was among the poll options listed here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=30853

Therefore I suppose it is being at least considered for 0.15 or later

The automatic rocket launch is a nice addition, but after watching it's behaviour it seems that the rocket will always launch when ready.
It ignores the output for the rocket sciences, therefore if there are already 2k of Science present the rocket will launch for nothing which kind of kills the whole idea of automation...

Seem, that you don't understand "automation" in the right sense.
Of course it makes sense to automat that kind of lookup, before you add the satellite (automatically) to the rocket (and launch it automated).

To be fair, every other entity that produces a resource will stop running and consuming inputs if its output slot is full. It would improve consistency for the rocket to not launch automatically at all if the science slot is full. I might even propose that this is a bug.

As I understand it, it's working as designed.

You can stop a launch by circuit network as things stand in 0.15 - by controlling the inserter that places the satellite. Keep the satellite out - rocket won't launch.

Forget about the rocket.

The silo is an assembler. It turns 100 rocket parts and 1 satellite into 1000 space science.

Normal assemblers refuse to run (consume inputs) if the output slot is full, even if there's a full set of input items available. The silo should, too, for consistency.

sparr wrote:Forget about the rocket.

The silo is an assembler. It turns 100 rocket parts and 1 satellite into 1000 space science.

Normal assemblers refuse to run (consume inputs) if the output slot is full, even if there's a full set of input items available. The silo should, too, for consistency.

Fair point, but as an alternative, how about putting Space Science production in some other building? Like a satellite uplink station. Keep the silo just for launches and handle the science elsewhere. There's precedent in mods for this, too. Beyond has a landing pad which can receive titanium ore from an asteroid mining drill launched in the rocket, though there's unfortunately no landing animation to go with it. Among the things the titanium ore can be used to make include a Science Pack 4, though it hasn't been updated for v0.15 yet.

sparr wrote:Forget about the rocket.

The silo is an assembler. It turns 100 rocket parts and 1 satellite into 1000 space science.

Normal assemblers refuse to run (consume inputs) if the output slot is full, even if there's a full set of input items available. The silo should, too, for consistency.

+1

What?

Ability to connect a Rocket Silo to the Circuit Network, outputting the number of rocket parts built as a signal.

Why ?

In my particular case, it's difficult for me to tell at a glance which science is bottlenecking my factory, because space science always comes in waves. I would like to be able to keep a "buffer" chest of space science, and release it into the rest of my factory slowly as I built the next rocket, to simulate the space science being built directly from the silo. There are workarounds that could achieve the same effect, but they're far more complicated and error-prone. I'm sure other people would have many other uses for the signal as well.

Have the silo unload space science into a chest. Set the silo to autolaunch with sat, but limit the satellite inserter to not insert if the chest contains more than say 2000 flasks. Now you can read space science contents from the chest. If desired you can add an alarm to trigger if the chest contains less than 10 science. Whilst this doesn't simulate a slow release of space science it does let you know if space science is a bottleneck.

Thanks, but that doesn't really help my situation. Because space science comes in waves, my other science production will go into corresponding waves of not producing enough (because it needs to match all the space science) and being backed up (because the space science is gone), and I can't tell which of those sciences is most problematic, either. The backing-up also leads to other resources being diverted into space science, which makes evaluating my entire factory's performance a pain.

There is a mod for that.

Can't the information you want be gotten by measuring one of the inputs to the rocket silo?

You can also trickle the science out over time if you want by putting it through a limited-throughput belt. Here's a blueprint for that; the constant combinator sets the throughput in items/minute:

With a few buffer chests and circuits that's easy. Every set of (1*control unit, 1*rocket fuel, 1*low density structure), produces 1% of the rocket. The rocket has 100% and produces 2000 packs, thus one set of items produces 20 packs. Now you just need to set the inserters so that every time they insert a set of items they also output 20 packs.

Optera wrote:There is a mod for that.

Perfect, thanks!