Turrets that deploy combat robots

[Inglonias]

This is a request that feels pretty simple to me, though I've never written factorio mods. Maybe its one of those things thats easier said than done. A turret/roboport that can deploy a small number of the vanilla combat robots out to a certain range from themselves. Sort of a defense focused roboport type thing. Bonus points if its literally just a roboport network for combat bots.

[Cribbit]

I'm 99% sure this exists.

[Deadlock989]

Rampant Arsenal does this with "capsule turrets".

The catch is that turrets can only fire ammo types (beams etc are an ammo type internally). Capsules however are not ammo: an item cannot simultaneously be a capsule and ammo. So if the turrets are player-placeable, your mod needs recipes to convert capsules into "capsule ammo", so all your capsules are basically duplicated on the menu - this specialist ammo then creates the robot entities instead of an explosion or damage etc.

Also, the turret has no "follower count" limit, so it just keeps making robots until it runs of "ammo". Depending on the lifetime of the robots concerned, that could be a lot of robots on the screen.

Roboports with combat robots in them won't happen without support from the C++ engine.