Spidertron's infinite patrol

[mmmPI]

Spidertrons army running in circle to scare off ennemy.

spidertronloop.png (113.56 KiB) Viewed 5247 times

I was playing with the spidertron's remote and had this idea of telling spidertron to follow a train. Then tell another spidertron to follow the first spidertron. Then another spidertron to follow the second, and so on. hundred time at least.

Notice all the connections between the spidertrons. They are forming 4 different squad that each follows their own train. This is because they were cutting the corner if the chain was too long.

Train Station

spidertronloop2.png (1.26 MiB) Viewed 5247 times

In order to slow down the train there are 2 stations on its schedule and they sometimes disable. This makes the (4) train stop and go, and is timed to allow spidertron's to follow. They start to cut corner if the trains are too fast.

Minimalist logic

spidertronloop3.png (708.74 KiB) Viewed 5247 times

It's an upgrade planner put on a belt loop that enable the station when it is read. The 1s inactivity for the station 2 schedule is used to allow refueling .

I'm not quite sure what to do with this creation at the moment, it doesn't feel safe to give them weapon and there's no ennemy anyway, here's the map :

SPIDERTRON3.zip

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[Amarula]

*Zombie spidertrons stumbling one after another, after another.*
"Wait these are TRAINS! I thought you said BRAINS!"

Anyway, the spidey conga-line is great! Thanks for sharing!

[gGeorg]

Instead of solid fuel use coal to go slower. You can also attach a wagon in front of each locomotive and get wagon fully loaded to get weight so to slow it even more. Yellow rockets are pretty safe, I could imagine this as an escort for outpost. Outpost connected only by trains, no pols, trhu ever expanding biters territory. So when train gets thru gate of the outpost, it has nice tail of biters , idealy, Spidertons need also robport to fix rails.

[FuryoftheStars]

get wagon fully loaded to get weight so to slow it even more.

I thought something like that required a mod?

[mmmPI]

I think load on wagon doesn't impact weight, it is written 1000 for cargo and fluid wagon and 2000 for locomotives and 4000 for artillery wagon I would expect the tooltip to not write weight if it changed based on load but that could be a fun mod indeed.

The problem if you slow too much the train is that biters will catch up the spidertrons in battle.

I tried a bit of fighting spawning some behemot on the editor, i think i should have made them even a bit faster with exosqueletons !


Now there is a BIG problem doing the conga line , if 1 spidertron get destoyed, the whole rest of the squad behind him just stop all movement which leaves them very vulnerable.

otherwise with non-explosive rockets they deal with groups of behemot due to their constant movement they avoid most damage.

I wanted to use spidertrons to follow locomotives to replace wagons and use their inner reactor to power the unloading robots but it didn't worked out as i expected since you can't really automate the loading/unloading properly. Spidertrons act like a player, not like a logistic chest, the robots will not use it's cargaison to fulfill logisitic request that makes it more annoying to unload from spidertron and i postponed further experiment on that field

[gGeorg]

Here is an idea how to use Spiders falowing train for defense:

Make a wall based on mg turrets, add train stations as often as roboports. When biters attacks, then mg starts fire, it sets train station to enable, so cavalery comes. To the proper section which is under attack.

[mrvn]

get wagon fully loaded to get weight so to slow it even more.

I thought something like that required a mod?

It does. The amount of items in a cargo wagon has no effect.

Mass affects the acceleration of the train, not the max speed, making the train reach max speed slower. It adds a tiny bit of friction but either acceleration is large enough to overcome friction or the train doesn't move at all. But in vanilla a cargo wagon has a high air resistance. If placed at the front it adds a significant counter to the acceleration and can prevent the train from reaching max speed. The friction for more mass is a fixed value while the air resistance increases with speed.

EDIT: replace top speed with max speed as it's properly called in the prototype

[mmmPI]

Here is an idea how to use Spiders falowing train for defense:

Make a wall based on mg turrets, add train stations as often as roboports. When biters attacks, then mg starts fire, it sets train station to enable, so cavalery comes. To the proper section which is under attack.

Nice You can also use the spidertron to repair the proper section with their robots that required no external power and they can carry the material instead of wagon !

That's not how i envisionned the use of spidertron to carry material, but i guess it works


Also one should [Moderated by Koub : personal attack] refers to value with number such as presented here : https://calculatorio.com/train_acceleration/

and here https://wiki.factorio.com/Locomotive

Because amongst other things it's particularly ridiculous imo to say something is "significant" like the air resistance of a wagon placed in front of a train without any numbers or point to compare. One other person could say it has very low impact.

[Moderated by Koub : personal attack]

Mainly because the train keeps going on and off which means the actual impact of air_resistance is NEGLECTIBLE, because it scales with CURRENT SPEED, which means the only significant difference happens when train reach a speed that it doesn't in the current example.

On the other hand, adding or reducing the number of wagon DOES impact TOP speed, it's ridiculous to say that mass doesn't impact top speed because it only imply that you can replace cargo/wagon/fluid/artillery/backward facing locomotive without reduction of top speed. Which is irrelevant to this topic and more generally of very little use.

The more significant factor is the type of fuel used. Since using nuclear fuel makes air resistance 100% negligeable unless you have a ratio that is more than 20 wagon per locomotive.

For indication the value used in the website are : 0.0075 for locomotives 0.01 for cargon/fluid wagon and 0.015 for artillery wagon. for air resistance, which was the value in version 16 but it didn't appear to have changed. feel free to document with number otherwise.

[mrvn]

[Moderated by Koub : response to now moderated part of previous post]

I invite everyone to try the calculator app he linked or use the exact numbers from the prototypes for locomotives and wagons for weight, friction and air resistance and the formulas from the wiki to compute the speed of a train.

Sure there are configuration where the speed of the train is capped by the max speed (try using nuclear fuel in the calculator). There are also a ton of configuration where the top speed is less than the max speed. In those case the friction and air resistance have a direct effect and mass an indirect effect by way of acceleration. As I said:

can prevent the train from reaching max speed.

As for the context in which I made my post it was this:

Instead of solid fuel use coal to go slower. You can also attach a wagon in front of each locomotive and get wagon fully loaded to get weight so to slow it even more. Yellow rockets are pretty safe, I could imagine this as an escort for outpost. Outpost connected only by trains, no pols, trhu ever expanding biters territory. So when train gets thru gate of the outpost, it has nice tail of biters , idealy, Spidertons need also robport to fix rails.

So lets check out the speed calculator in that context:

LC train with coal: 258.55
CL train with coal: 193.75

So the speed calculator shows it clearly. Adding a wagon in front of the locomotive will slow it down. You decide if a 25% reduction in speed is significant or "CLEARLY IRRELEVANT BY SEVERAL ORDER OF MAGNITUDE".


To bring this discussion back on topic:

Does anyone know the exact speed of a spidertron? The speed shown in the GUI fluctuates a lot but looks to be around 44km/h.

With coal an "AL11C" train has a top speed of 50.36km/h and an "AL12C" train has a top speed of 43.16km/h. The first looks to be a bit too fast but takes 570seconds to reach top speed. Would take an outpost that is more than 8 or 9 minutes away before the "AL11C" train races ahead of spidertrons. Or having the train go around the loop in the initial post (modified so the train doesn't stop all the time) quite a few times before the spidertrons start cutting corners to keep up.

Any red signals along the way would slow down the train too. One could use circuit controlled signals to limit the top speed of the train instead of weighing it down or making it stop at train stops every so often. Would allow the train to reach spidertron speed faster.

[mmmPI]

[Moderated by Koub : response to now moderated part of previous post]

Also for something constructive the speed of the spidertron is in the wiki, saying 'does anyone knows the exact speed of a spidertron' is ridiculous because it depends on the number of exoskeletons and on the terrain spidertron is walking on.

Also the other point about using 12 wagons is ridiculous to me since it has nothing to do with the creation.

Also you take 1 edge case using coal to prove your point that in some configuration it's 25% difference top speed, but every single test made with nuclear fuel shows 0% difference in max speed unless you have more than 20 wagon per locomotive.

[Moderated by Koub : response to now moderated part of previous post]

[Koub]

[Koub] @people in this thread : mmmPI and mrvn will be unavailable for a short period of time, for educational and self thinking purpose.

[mmmPI]

Also for something constructive the speed of the spidertron is in the wiki, saying 'does anyone knows the exact speed of a spidertron' is ridiculous because it depends on the number of exoskeletons and on the terrain spidertron is walking on.

In an attempt to cut on sterile argument later, Spidertron's speed is not impacted by the difference between sand and grass like the player the car or the tank, it is impacted when walking on belts and hovering/avoiding water due to not placing its leg on the water tile.

Also the train in the example is functionning by periods of 2 second or so, far from the time needed to reach the top speed.

The speed of the train doesn't matter at all as explained earlier, it only need to be faster than spidertron, and then you can easily configure the time it waits and choose your interval appropriatly for spirdertron to have time to catch up.