Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Modify the new tooltips so that they show inserter rotation speed in turns per second rather than in degrees per second.

What ? & Why ?

The new tooltips have exposed inserter rotation speeds in degrees per second :

However, this is IMHO a silly unit to use in vanilla, as you can at best discriminate 1/8 of a turn using the grid as a guide.

(And are there even protractor mods ? And sure, you could try to remember what exact angles the various bob's adjustable inserter configurations correspond to, but they are likely to approximate to direct fractions of a turn anyway ?)

It seems to me that using turns/s would be more appropriate.

Turns/s also roughly correspond to item stacks/s moved by vanilla inserters,
but not directly writing it as items/s hints that the correspondence is not always perfect.

There's also the question of abbreviating it as t/s or τ/s or write turns/s in full :
probably not abbreviated, as t is not clear enough, and τ is sadly still not known enough...

P.S.: Am I mis-remembering, or was red inserter speed changed recently ?
I'm pretty sure it was 1 item/s for long inserters in 0.16, or was the cheat sheet wrong all along ?
I was also pretty sure that each higher level of electric inserter was less energy and materials efficient per item moved than the previous one (yellow > red > blue > stack, for low stack bonuses)
(at least not counting the two tiles of belts that red might save you),
but this doesn't seem to be true for yellow > red any more ?

Related topics on the subject :

Add information to existing tooltips
Expose inserter rotation_speed and extension_speed
[0.17.4] Show inserter speed in tooltip
Inserters modding
Old Inserter speeds vs new belt speeds
Yellow Inserters are too slow or red ones too fast in 0.17 ?
[0.16.x] inserter rotation speed

Is a turn 360° or 180°? If it's 360°, how is the number useful when you keep in mind that inserters nearly never do 360° turns?

A (full) turn/cycle/circle is 360°.
As I showed turn is probably more useful than °.

Just compare the numbers to the ones in the cheat sheet, or better, a real in-factorio counter, anyone has a blueprint ?
Yellow : 302°/s = 0.8388.. turns/s, cheat sheet says 0.83 i/s.
Red : 432°/s = 1.2 turns/s, cheat sheet says 1.20 i/s.
Seems pretty close to me, at least for these ones !

(Or the wiki, my bad, that cheat sheet is a bit too useful ! )

It may sound weird at first, but the unit could be Hertz. Hertz are cycles per second, and correspond to 360 degrees of "rotation"/oscillations in normal contexts. Since an inserter has a cycle (grab+put+return), it DOES definitionally apply to both senses of how an inserter works.

Hertz : definitely... if Factorio only had engineering / science / math students in mind !
I'm afraid that Hertz might be pushing it too far for the general public ?

It might be pushing it a bit, but it is a definition unit, and immediately useful. In terms of degrees per second... that's a weird measurement. What members of the general public do you think would grab their calculator and divide by 360 to find the useful rate their inserter turns? I do like turns/s, no arguments against that unit, it's just not a "small" one if we're trying to cram the tooltip. I'd prefer turns/s to Hz, it is more obvious.

My bad, I didn't realize that you specifically suggested Hz because it helped a lot with the compactness !