Separate settings would not be bad! Although, if you create such settings, you might want to expose the main effectivity property as well to lessen confusion. I would simultaneously set the effectivity property within energy_source to 1 (normal for Factorio) and adjust other values accordingly. Startup settings with equivalent values might then look like this:
Scout helicopter weight: 1400
Scout helicopter braking force: 8333.33
Scout helicopter active fuel consumption: 1333.33kW
Scout helicopter acceleration efficiency: 0.375
Helicopter weight: 2800
Helicopter braking force: 16666.66
Helicopter active fuel consumption: 6400kW
Helicopter acceleration efficiency: 0.2
The code might look like this:
-- Helicopter:
{
weight = settings.startup["heli-weight"].value, -- 2800
effectivity = settings.startup["heli-effectivity"].value, -- 0.2
consumption = settings.startup["heli-consumption"].value, -- 6400kW (1280kW accel.)
braking_force = settings.startup["heli-braking-force"].value, -- 16666.66
energy_source = {
effectivity = 1,
},
}
(By the way, I prefer to greatly increase the breaking force on the helicopters so they are more fun to use. 25000/50000 feels about right to me.)
Tip: If you want to automatically scale the parameters of the scout helicopter without adding new settings, you can use Factorio's in-built util.parse_energy(energy) function for the consumption property (which takes a string value) to do that. It might look like this with a neat 1:4 ratio:
-- Scout helicopter:
{
consumption = util.parse_energy(settings.startup["heli-consumption"].value) * 60 / 4 .. "W", -- 1600kW
}
... My response got a bit long, but I wanted to be precise when talking about code!
[EDIT]: Fixed typos.
