TL;DR
Rocket silo animations should be sped up when the silo is affected by speed modules so that the silo can prepare to launch again sooner.What?
Right now, according to the https://wiki.factorio.com/Rocket_silo#M ... throughput, there are five parts to launching a rocket to space:- Working
- Preparing
- Waiting to launch
- Launching
- Reset
This means that there are dozens of real-time seconds -- 39 of them -- lost to the animation phases. Once players have a high degree of rocket part productivity, rockets craft extremely quickly (300% productivity means you need to make ~17 rocket part crafts to "ready" a rocket), and there is no major benefit to using speed modules, or indeed rocket silos of higher quality that offer increased craft time.
I propose that speed modules affecting rocket silos - directly in the silo and via beacons - should also speed up the animations.
Why?
Speaking for myself, I feel this limit very painfully, with nearly 300 legendary rocket silos surrounded by speed beacons on Nauvis so I can meet the peak rocket demand of my interplanetary factory empire. My silos spend the vast majority of their time in the animation state, where I'm not seeing any benefit from the surrounding speed beacons. I shudder to think what kind of performance impact this has on the system as bots need to fly to further silos and more entities must be tracked. This pain is felt especially on Gleba where science can end up spoiling while it waits for a silo to launch it into a waiting platform (there's always a waiting platform).The time spent waiting for the all of the animations make the rocket part productivity research feel particularly like it was a waste because the answer to increased throughput isn't "make your 50 rocket parts faster" it's "add more rocket silos so you can work around the animation limitation" and what was the productivity really for? You could very easily craft enough blue circuits, LDS and rocket fuel in the time you're forced to wait for the animations to render the productivity research to be redundant.
