Factorio Forums

What did you do?
I put down two railgun turrets of differing qualities (one normal, one legendary).

What happened?
The legendary railgun turret consumes electricity faster than the normal one, despite both having the same rate-of-fire. (25 MW vs 10 MW, but 0.35 shots per second for both)

What did you expect to happen instead?
The legendary railgun turret should consume electricity at the same rate as the normal railgun turret (10 MW).

Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?
Always.

More Details
Based on the wiki, all types of railgun turret consumed electricity at the same rate in 2.0. However, that was one of the limiting factors in railgun turret shooting speed, which is why in 2.1, railgun turret power consumption scales with shooting speed research. Since electricity consumption already scales with shooting speed research, scaling it with quality does not offer any benefit. A railgun turret that consumes electricity faster than necessary is a downgrade, as it can result in blackouts/brownouts in the power grid. This doesn't fit with the trend that higher qualities are always better than lower qualities, which was the case with railgun turrets back in 2.0.

The attached save shows two contrived situations. On the left, a normal-quality railgun shoots, and the EM plant does not lose any power. On the right, a legendary railgun shoots, and the EM plant loses power as the railgun recharges. Ideally, both scenarios would operate identically.

Thanks for the report however this is working as intended. Higher quality things have a faster recharge rate.

Rseding91 wrote: Mon Jul 20, 2026 6:43 am Thanks for the report however this is working as intended. Higher quality things have a faster recharge rate.

Sorry, but that isn't exactly true.

Other electric turrets like the laser turret and tesla turret do not draw more power at higher qualities. The railgun turret is the outlier here.

Of all the other items that consume electricity (or other forms of energy):

• Assembly machines, furnaces, drills, and their variants draw the same amount of power at all qualities.
• Circuits and bots also do not draw more power at higher qualities.
• Boilers/heating towers/etc draw more steam/heat/etc, but this is to keep up with their higher output.
• Accumulators draw more power as that is the core feature of the accumulator.
• Asteroid collectors draw more power at higher qualities to account for the extra arms (6x the arms, 6x the power draw)
• Inserters consume more electricity at higher qualities to account for the higher swing rate (2.5x the speed, 2.5x the power draw).
• Locomotives consume more power at higher qualities to account for their higher acceleration (which results in the same fuel efficiency.)
• Beacons consume less power at higher qualities.
• Modules do not increase power draw at higher qualities.
• Roboports consume more power at higher qualities so that they can recharge bots faster.
• In terms of equipment:
  • Belt immunity equipment consumes less power at higher qualities.
  • Personal laser defenses and discharge defenses, like the other electric turrets, do not have an increased power draw.
  • Exoskeletons and nightvision goggles have the same power draw at all qualities (despite the exoskeleton's extra speed).
  • Personal roboports, like normal roboports, consume more power so that they can recharge more bots, and recharge them faster.
  • Personal shields consume more power to account for their higher recharge rate (2.5x the recharge speed, 2.5 the power draw).

The patterns I see here are the following:

• Power draw does not always increase with quality. Sometimes it even decreases.
• When power draw does increase with quality, it is to keep the energy-per-action ratio the same (e.g., energy per swing, energy per shot, steam per heat).

The increased power draw of a quality railgun turret does not correspond to an increase in the turret's firing rate. There is no precedent in any other items for the buffed stats of a quality railgun (health and range) to scale with power draw. Therefore the extra power draw of a quality railgun turret is unjustified.

Personally, I think this change may have accidentally been left in when experimenting with how to uncap the railgun's firing rate.

In fact, laser turret do recharge faster at higher qualities. They just don't show it in the tooltip for some reason.

This is the result of letting each laser fire *once* and then recharging fully:

I stand corrected! In that case, there's a bug with the tooltip