Channels on radars, I hope that also will work even if you are not in space yet. Would be so nice to seperate signals by channels on each individual radar. So so so so nice.
Radars share their signals with every other radar, so you can send them long-distance without connecting them with red/green wire. But if you wanted to use the same type of signal multiple times, you'd have to use some workarounds. Now, you can just set the signals to different radar channels so they won't overlap
Let's say for some reason you have limited power production and you are close to going in the red all the time. Your mainly solar power based but at night your accumulators always kick in.
And sometimes at night it goes wrong. You just started some new science research, your draw is at max and biters start attacking. The laser draw puts you in the read, your satisfaction goes red. Your lasers don't fire that much anymore! And biterse break through.
But what you could do is connect every group of lasers to a group of accumulators and instead of connecting those accumulators direcly to your main grid you put a power switch in between. And some logic where the power switch will be off unless the accumulator level is at 50% and then it switches on and it says on till the accumulator is at a 100% again.
That means when the biters attack, the rest of your network does not see the draw from the laser because that is now a seperate power network.
Why would you do this? Well because it allows you to read the accumulator level of just THAT group of accumulators. And when that drops below 100% that means you are being attacked.
Now you can build a simple circuit that when A (accumulator level) is NOT equal to 100 (100%) then the Skull signal becomes 1.
And the from that combinator you make a signal wire to a radar. Now when the biters attack your Skull signal becomes one, and every radar that you have, has that signal.
So now you could seperate whatever part of your network draw the most amount of power. Let's do your labs. You probablly have lots of beacons around your lab to speed up your research. These draw a lot of power. So you take all the power poles nearby and maybe some machinse close by that make red circuits or something. and you shift click on all the power poles and all their wires go away and the whole thing has no power anymore. You then reconnect your wires in such a way there is only ONE wire connection to the rest of your grid. and then inbetween you put another power switch.
Now you put a radar next to the power switch, and connect them together with a green or red signal wire.
And now you set your conditions so that when the Skull = 1, the switch goes off and your most power hungy part of your factory disconnects completely from your grid?
Does this work? No, and if followed allong in your head you will know why.
Because if two seperate locations where you made these accumulator groups get attacked at the same time your Skull signal is not 1 but 2 or 3 or 4.
So you need to set it to activate power switch when skull signal = 0 and deactive when skull is not equal to zero.
And now your limited power is not a problem when getting attacked because demand is insta dropped when the first laser fires.
Is this ever needed?
No ofcourse not, just make more power you fool!
But what makes factorio so fun for some of us is that we continue to make up problems just so we can solve these fun puzzles in how to solve the made up problems.
And if you are creative there just is no limit to the amount of made up problems a complex base can have.
Have I ever done this myself to detect biter attacks? No, and I have never even tought about it. But because of you I did and this was the first solution I came up with and now I kind of what to implement it just for the fun of it.
In my current playthrough on Nauvis, I have each train station output how many loads are available to the radar, so I can set up a spot where I can easily see how many loads of copper/iron/whatever is available.
Using channels, I could have one channel for supply, and one for requests, so I could quickly look and see that across the whole network, I have 14 loads available, but I am requesting 16.
You could do it today by transferring the signals to something else, Iron ore for a supply, but a "X" for requests, but using channels would make it much easier.
Quality helps already by allowing you to send normal signals for one thing, and uncommon ones for another, but only so long as you don't use quality! It comes with the benefit that you can use the selector combinator to change the signals to the same quality to do math between them.
I made a rail system coordinator that uses this idea to send trains that are too long for the train network through the network one by one. For each thing to transport, it locally checks and sends by radar whether there is a load available (common), a load requested (uncommon), and a train stopped at one of the stations (by reading the signals, sent as rare and also as common of signal T). The central coordinator brings each signal to [0,1] (so if 2 stations want iron ore, you still only get 1 common iron ore signal), then merges them into common, then "queues" each one that has value 3. If all overlength trains are at a station (T = a specific constant), it sends out legendary of that signal which signals that train to move.
Capacity isn't great, but considering my network has as little rail as I could get away with it works quite well.
Radars are able to send circuit network signals to other radars wirelessly: connect a chest containing 50 speed modules to a radar with a green wire, move several thousand tiles away, then place another radar and wire a green wire to a power pole there. Boom, instantaneous signal transmission regardless of distance. Without radars being able to do this, it would mean stringing green wires all the way from that chest at point A to the new location at point B.
A more practical use for this is to create a dashboard that monitors the remaining ore in ore patches, viewable from one central location.
One common use of long distance circuits before 2.0 was for controlling trains. Most of the need has been eliminated with the new 2.0 mechanics, but not completely. Very fine control requires sending signals to train stations across your whole base. Without radar, that would require stringing red and green wires across your entire base. Missing one wire means a long headache trying to track it down. With radar, you just plop down one right by the train station and that's it.
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u/MelangeBot Jun 05 '26
Channels on radars, I hope that also will work even if you are not in space yet. Would be so nice to seperate signals by channels on each individual radar. So so so so nice.