New spitter splash has an unexpected effect on flamethrower turrets

[Stakhanov]

Once version 0.17 was released I was excited to try out the new target leading flamethrower turrets , and they do deliver in biter slaughter for sure. However there's a problem with them - pipes feeding them will often be destroyed by spitter attacks' splash damage , and the flamethrower turrets will soon run out of fuel and stop working. So their effective health is not the intended 1400 but rather the pipe's 100 hp.

This is a lesser problem once roboports come into play , automatically replacing the pipes , though that's an extra expense to account for.
Can we have acid-proof pipes to avoid that issue ? It's silly that pipes can carry so much sulfuric acid but are destroyed by acid spit.

[BlueTemplar]

Extra-concentrated acid !

At what level of spitters (and worms) does this issue start happening ?

[Stakhanov]

We saw that happen with just medium spitters , but big spitters certainly make things worse.

[Koub]

I guess you'll have to add one or two more pipes between the flamethrower turret and the main pipeline.

[ejg]

That doesn't really solve the crippling of the flame turrets right? I mean you don't place power poles directly next to laser turrets for the same reason. It would be nice if pipes would be acid resistant. In my opinion it would be even better to give flamethrower turrets an underground pipe connection stead of a regular pipe, i.e. they are connected by building half an underground pipe. The other half of the underground pipe is incorporated in the flamethrower turret itself (and therefore shares the hitbox/hitpoints).

[BlueTemplar]

In my experience it's less problematic than I would have expected, because a full Flame turret has enough fuel for 40 seconds of continuous firing :
viewtopic.php?p=407062#p407062

[MrBuisson]

Still, it’s quite depressing. I’m not a big fan of building outpost that need permanent spare parts ... because of their target range, you can’t place flamethrowers behind without burning everything and placing them front leave their pipe unprotected. Flamethrowers have a fair amount of HP and everything tell they’re meant to take hits, but the pipe is making this target hard to achieve.
At the moment, you can either do long chain of flamethrowers and hope the ends are not attacked too often, or place tanks on each end to use their larger hit box.

+1 for underground pipe connection on flamethrowers!

[JimBarracus]

I think the times of bulletproof walls are over.

With 1.6 you could build walls which would never even let one alien close enough to do any damage at all.
Now we need bots to keep the wall up.

Minor workaround:
underground pipes have 150hp.

[stm]

It is kind of strange though, that pipes are used to transfer acid, but are not resistant to it. From my point of view pipes propably should get acid imunity (although that could be used creatively to build walls out of them, but biters don't attack with acid, do they?)
And yes, I know that acid != acid also IRL, but you would not use iron for (eg. sulfuric) acid IRL either!
Stm