Locomotive guns

[emk]

Wow, the Factorio modding API is fun!

I've been having fun working on game-balancing a late-game nuclear tank (see "Nuclear Vehicles" on the mod portal) with a rocket launcher and an equipment grid. And I'd like to do something similar with locomitives: a nuclear-powered, armored locomotive for operating deep inside behemoth territory. I've gotten most of it working.

But one piece is missing: There's no way to manually shoot things while driving the locomotive. This would be a fun feature.

Would it be possible to support the "guns" property on locomotives the same way that cars and tanks do? I'm less concerned about full turret support right now. It also wouldn't be necessary to add locomotive inventories, at least not beyond the specialized per-weapon ammo slots.

Thank you for a great game, and for such a well-done modding API!

[Rseding91]

This isn't likely to happen. Supporting guns on a vehicle adds a lot of overhead that every single train would have to run if they supported the properties.

[Ranakastrasz]

What we really need is the ability to attach entity modules to other modules. Essentially an entity's functionality except it always mirrors the location of what it is attached to. Would allow for a lot of cool stuff.

[Rseding91]

What we really need is the ability to attach entity modules to other modules. Essentially an entity's functionality except it always mirrors the location of what it is attached to. Would allow for a lot of cool stuff.

That does sound like it would give a large amount of flexibility but it's simply never going to happen with the way Factorio is built. It would also run much slower compared to what we have now.

[bobingabout]

The lack of being able to shoot out of a locomotive compared to being able to shoot out of the car was always a disappointment to me. Then the game was changed so that the car (and the newly added tank) hand their own weapons.

I suppose now that you can add a grid to a vehicle and equip it with your own weapons works for me, considering the automatic nature of trains, it's better that it can have a built in laser turret than requiring a gunner to shoot an SMG out of the window.

You just have to be careful when equipping my plasma artillery, they tend to blow up the track, and the train, and all kinds of stuff on the way. Yeah, during my recent testing, a leviathan ran up to my train, and the train blew itself up trying to kill the leviathan.