Self Powered Turrets or Not?

[Sgtwisky]

Was tweeking some turrets from SkylordLuke (Resources from SkylordLuke) to be self powered, and changing a few other minor things. I started wondering, what other people prefer most of the time when it comes to powering those turrets. I can see some benefits to each type myself, but prefer to use self powered turrets most of the time. What about you guys?

 

[NeonSturm]

I have designed turrets that are both. Self-powered and not self-powered.
Basically with a docked reactor that turns inside the ships hull with one or more turret barrels on top of it.

I am not sure if these count toward self-powered turrets, because this fills 2 purposes.
Basically I don't see a reason to waste one dock for reactor and turret base when it could be 2-in-1.

I don't use these exclusively. A lot of smaller turrets are not self-powered at all and bigger turrets only get a fraction of their usage from this, thus draining or supplying energy all the time. Because of this I have voted for "Are not self powered".

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

I prefer self powered turrets myself but sometimes it's not worth it for smaller turrets which better use their limited space on more firepower while using the power from a much larger ship.

 

[Crashmaster]

I prefer the turret to not draw significant (if any) power from the main ships since managing the AI's power usage effectively is unpleasant.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

It's generally easier to manage the AI's power consumption, though the trade off is the turret doesn't care where the power is coming from, it does what entity the block is on. It depends on the build really. Generally I do a bit of both, though skimp on the turret side power.

 

[AtraUnam]

Not self powered. The way AI and power drawing is setup means that if an AI turret ever reaches 0 energy it will lock itself into a power outage; this means that partially self powering turrets tend to not actually self power and self powering turrets can stop self powering if a lag spike drops their energy to 0.

 

[Master_Artificer]

Not self powered. The way AI and power drawing is setup means that if an AI turret ever reaches 0 energy it will lock itself into a power outage; this means that partially self powering turrets tend to not actually self power and self powering turrets can stop self powering if a lag spike drops their energy to 0.

Have we confirmed this to still be the case? I thought it changed a few updates ago.

 

[AtraUnam]

Have we confirmed this to still be the case? I thought it changed a few updates ago.

AFAIK it still happens.

 

[Master_Artificer]

AFAIK it still happens.

That means it is time to test

 

[Malacodor]

Not self powered. The way AI and power drawing is setup means that if an AI turret ever reaches 0 energy it will lock itself into a power outage; this means that partially self powering turrets tend to not actually self power and self powering turrets can stop self powering if a lag spike drops their energy to 0.

Have we confirmed this to still be the case? I thought it changed a few updates ago.

This bug isn't fixed, yet.

 

[Rixxan]

What I do is a mix of both, I build my turret to be as powerful as I want, cover it in the shape I want, and fill any extra space with power systems.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

This bug isn't fixed, yet.

I'm glad that's considered a bug, having my partially powered turrets stop recharging because they pull some power from the mother-ship is kind of BS

 

[Keptick]

There's two bugs currently that affects semi-powered turrets. Basically, if the turret can't supply all the power, it'll eventually start draining from the main ship. This causes two issues (caused by bugs):

1. The AI keeps the trigger down. There's a bug that causes power to not regenerate properly if you completely drain the capacity and keep the trigger down, so the turret will only regen at a fraction of what it should. Luckily, that's only a problem if you have power in the barrels, it won't occur if you have power in the base since it's a different entity.
2. Power only gets drained from the entity down the chain when there's 0 power left. The problem is that the game interprets it as the turret running out of power and initiates the slight "power failure" delay (which causes power to not regenerate for a second or so). The problem with that is that the turret enters a constant power-deficit loop, meaning that all the power required to fire the turret will come from the main ship.

So yea, right now we're forced to make turrets that are either fully self-powered or that have 0 on-board power...

 

[Malacodor]

Power only gets drained from the entity down the chain when there's 0 power left.

Are you sure that's a bug, link maybe?

 

[Crashmaster]

There is one case for semi-powering turrets; a cannon-beam weapon with a 2 sec reload and a single output. Firing will put it's semi power reactor into outage for the first second of it's reload but it will generate power during the second second.
Now make the turret huge and dock it on a chain of 2mil e/sec reactors so that the last reactor is not drawn down to power outage on firing and has reserve to counter lag spikes.
All but the last (bottom) reactors are only 50% efficient in use but you can self-power a turret of arbitrary size as long as it is a >2 sec reload and has only one output.

 

[Sgtwisky]

I consider reactors in the base as part of the turret. That is where I put them myself. So, I never really noticed the power outage thing as most of my turrets are ether self powered or have none at all. I never saw much use in going half way. Glad to know I've been avoiding a bug by doing this though lol.

 

[Master_Artificer]

That means it is time to test

Hmm. Well, I uh, discovered some interesting properties about AI turrets, and yeah. Interesting tests.

Did reconfirm that their is no governor on AI turrets, once they are out they are out.
They also seem to be using some wacky numbers which I need to talk to my faction techies to see what I either did wrong or if we need to report a bug.
[DOUBLEPOST=1455141286,1455137705][/DOUBLEPOST]m'kay, I think I found a hidden logarithmic curve on how the AI uses cannon cannons.

needs more testing to confirm though, before I reveal what aspect the debuff is applied to.

 

[Malacodor]

I consider reactors in the base as part of the turret. That is where I put them myself. So, I never really noticed the power outage thing as most of my turrets are ether self powered or have none at all. I never saw much use in going half way. Glad to know I've been avoiding a bug by doing this though lol.

When I last tested it the power failure bug went down the complete docking chain, but it's been a while.

 

[Master_Artificer]

When I last tested it the power failure bug went down the complete docking chain, but it's been a while.

it does, it pulls from the first entity THEN from the second entity THEN from the third entity, so on and so forth.

Also when their is no power to draw from at all, shots become que'ed up or something and power consumption triples. (which doesn't matter your out of power, but might matter for power supply beams)

 

[NeonSturm]

I use beam-pulses mostly for only-partially self-powered turrets.

It runs mostly on power-storage in the base. When there is an outage, you either won or lost the battle anyway.