am I missing something with belt-fed autoloaders?

[Godfish]

it seems like everyone's always singing their praises for high firerate APS but I tried retrofitting one of my guns with belt-fed and got only a 38% increase in rpm which for me doesn't seem to be worth the lack of sustained fire. how do you make belt-fed actually work without ending up with minutes of down-time? do you just spam way more than you need, or give them far more shells in clips than they'll actually end up firing in a battle?

[luxon001]

Originally posted by Godfish:

it seems like everyone's always singing their praises for high firerate APS but I tried retrofitting one of my guns with belt-fed and got only a 38% increase in rpm which for me doesn't seem to be worth the lack of sustained fire. how do you make belt-fed actually work without ending up with minutes of down-time? do you just spam way more than you need, or give them far more shells in clips than they'll actually end up firing in a battle?

Belt fed autoloaders are only good for small rapid fire weapons...
Regular autoloaders are far better than belt-fed when building larger weapons...

[Doombringer]

Generally you want to cover them in ammo inputs to reduce the reload time.
(can get it to 6sec + 2x ammo input reloads)
I personally don't like them that much, but they can be useful.

[rditto48801]

Have you also checked to make sure there is not an issue of your gun's barrel(s) simply overheating? In which case the solution is more guague coolers.

To avoid minutes of down time, you can just use Q on the Beltfed Autoloader to adjust the time they wait without firing until they reload. The default is 60 seconds, which is a bit of a long wait.
So if you have smaller shells that reload quickly, it is a good idea to set the Beltfed Autoloaders to a fair bit lower wait time.
As a general rule, I set the delay to a little bit longer than is needed for the turret to do a full 360, so it won't start reloading if it happens to simply be turning around to engage another target. Plus a few seconds for larger shells, or if I got more than a 1m long clip/magazine attached. My smallest guns are set to 5-8 seconds (20-35mm), one of my 76mm guns is set for 15 seconds, and 88mm gun was set for 20 seconds.

I second the suggestion of packing on as many Ammo Inputs as possible onto the Beltfed Autoloader and its attached clips/magazines. When they finally start reloading, you want them to top off the clips ASAP.

[mellow]

they just multiply load time from clip to autoloader by 0.2, and it can fire as soon as its in the autoloader.
and you can just add more autoloaders, like if you have 2 then you can fire 2 shells before you have to wait for the first one to reload
and makesure its not bottlenecked by cooldown time

[Xicotencatl]

I just use them on small guns