Why are radars so power hungry?

[SWEET SCIENCE ONE TRICK GAMER]

I was just wondering why radars require so much power, even just 30 of them requires more power than something like 400 electric drills?

[AlexMBrennan]

NVM, your numbers are wrong: 300kW radar, 90kW miner. You got the power draw wrong because miners don't use power when they are not working.

[SWEET SCIENCE ONE TRICK GAMER]

Oprindeligt skrevet af AlexMBrennan:

NVM, your numbers are wrong: 300kW radar, 90kW miner. You got the power draw wrong because miners don't use powe when they are not working.

Ah I see, thanks

[Xilo The Odd]

gotta remember too, radar is a power hungry thing irl, not to say mining isnt.

[daemonworks]

also... you're not going to have many radars comapred to nearly anything else past the initial stage, so their power draw is basically nothing in the long run, unless you're playing one of the rare mods that make power a real concern.

[Elusive]

From personal experiance, radars typically make up about 1% of my power useage.
The truth is, you dont need many radars, even if you have a gigantic megabase and want to have a radar covering every single piece of it, that will still only be a tiny fraction compared to the untold amounts of other machines working.

[Astasia]

That's not always the case and doesn't really answer the OPs question, which I'm curious about as well. I'd rather use radars to explore as much as possible instead of running around myself so I sometimes build large clusters of radars to quickly sweep an area, which means it's often that radars are using far more power than anything else and I find that kind of odd. Is it some sort of PvP balance concern to deter building large arrays of them to spam ping your surroundings, effectively extending your vision range?

[ShutEye_DK]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Xilo The Odd:

gotta remember too, radar is a power hungry thing irl, not to say mining isnt.

Can you carry 10 train engines in your pocket IRL?
No point comparing a game like this to RL :)

[THE kilroy]

You can use a logic clk and to power the radars for example every 3 ticks to reduce thier consumption, this is or at least was the last time i did it, enough to maintain map view but it does slowdown the scanning extra chunks.

But in terms of time and effort its easier to make more power.

[bigdale]

Once you get nuclear on-line it's nice to put a radar at every train loading station/mining area. Helps expand the map quickly.

[astrosha]

Unless you are starved for materials, its often a good idea to have overlapping Radars in your Solar Blueprints. This allows you to use map mode and automation to extend your solar fields as necessary. The inclusion of the 300 kW machine really only means you need a few more solar panels and accumulators.

[jonbrave]

Oprindeligt skrevet af astrosha:

its often a good idea to have overlapping Radars in your Solar Blueprints. This allows you to use map mode and automation to extend your solar fields as necessary.

In what way is the "overlapping" relevant, please?

[THE kilroy]

hes just saying to make it part of your solar tile, which has a different range from the radars. just to ensure radar coverage

[johntarmac]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Oscar:

I was just wondering why radars require so much power,

This is Factorio and like everything else you should be producing enough power that you never need to consider how much something uses.

[impetus_maximus]

here is a handy self contained radar station. (bugs WILL attack it)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1439359468
credit to Jackalope_Gaming for the design

[zOldBulldog]

Radar has two purposes:

(1) To scan new areas so that you can discover stuff and biters.

(2) To allow you to zoom in and see your stuff when in map mode. That way you can check belt's load and even place blueorints from a distance.

I typically use very few radars for (1), usually placing them around the perimeter of my scanned area and hooking them up to the power grid. This usually means 4 early on, near the corners of my area.

For (2) I use a little combinator contraption I found by googling that allows a radar to operate on/off using a single solar panel and accumulator. That keeps the area visible 99% of the time. Since it does not hook up to the power grid I can use as many as I want without causing power drain... so I place them at a regular interval to achieve 100% coverage.

I hope that helps. All praise brother Google :)