While flying over some assemblers picking stuff out of chests, I suddenly see my battery chemical plant producing uranium ammo clips! No kidding. At first glance, you're totally dumbfounded. How are we putting sulfuric acid, iron, and copper into a machine and getting uranium ammo clips being put on the belt instead of batteries?

Suddenly, it dawned on me. The inserter thats pulling from the battery chemical plant and placing onto the belt was pulling the ammo clips from the helicopters inventory and placing them on the belt!

I can see some people wanting the ability for auto-loot for the heli, such as ammo, fuel, or whatever else they want to store (or not store!) in it, but not being able to while in flight mode is how it should be..

Sorry if this has been reported before, I did a bit of digging and didn't see this particular issue..

GREAT mod, love it. Dev's should add it to the game-- if we can have rockets with satellites and tanks, surely we can learn to craft a helicopter?? :)

B-but its a feature!
Jk I will see what I can do. Sadly there is no easy way to control this behaviour so it will probably result in another ugly workaround.
And I agree they should add it - firstly because its my mod, but also because I think the game really lacks an end game transport option - which is why I did this in the first place.

Just some suggestion, seems like if a vehicle has collision_box = nil, inserter have a harder time taking item from them. Still possible but the target for the inserter become much smaller.

Yeah but I can't change that at runtime. So we would be back to start where inserters can't insert when landed.
I'll probably have to overlay yet another invisible entity with no inventory space that blocks the inserters.

Is there some type of "in flight" type of variable? maybe an "allow-inserter-loot-while-flight-active" or such? When the heli is landed, the entity used for the blades doesn't rotate, so there is recognition for "flight" and "no-flight" type variables in whether its spinning the entity in flight or stationary while on the ground..

I'm not sure if its just me-- but the engine seems to play the engine start sound while in flight, sometimes repeatedly several times in a row.. Is there something in flight that calls to play the engine start sound during flight movement?

Atomic bombs and the helicopter... You can detonate one directly underneath you and recieve no damage. Aliens, fire, and running into stuff causes damage, working as intended, however, while in flight, detonate a bomb directly under the heli, nothing.. land, you go kaboom.. I know in real life, if a heli was hovering over an atomic bomb.. well, it wouldn't be hovering anymore.. :)

Is this intended, or? Another ugly work-around? :(

End game transport option along with the aerial combat warfare are ideal after you reach a certain point in the game.. much like you can craft a car, a train, and a tank very early, and then also produce a rocket with satellite soon after... also with game options like death world and the ability to just absolutely over-ride the game and give yourself the most difficult and challenging combat based world to try and survive on (pollution, expansion, evolution set to maximum, resources very low, etc), an aerial unit for combat and defenses is very ideal if we can launch rockets and satellites into space.

I understand completely that the game is in Alpha stage and there are many more features and improvements to be added, surely we will see this mod in the game at some point, possibly even with a whole other slew of other handy-dandies that we like to play with.

Oh no, that var does not exist. And the rotor is just a car which looks like a rotor, because with cars I can set the orientation and therefore the displayed sprite in code. To make things worse there is also some sort of easing applied on the orientation which I have to translate back to make it look smooth. So it's all done in code. The colliders are seperate entities because I can't toggle collision, shadows are different entities because I can't set offsets to animation layers at runtime, I need to offset body and rotor entities in the Y direction because draw order is based purely on that, ....
So it all requires crazy workarounds because the API doesn't give you control over many things.

I prefer a nil collision, so the inserters have harder time to pick things-up.
Besides, with inertia, we can't quickly align with inserters if we intend to refuel/refill ammo.
And the inventory is big enough, so it's not that often players needs to refill item.

For me it's faster just to land, or even faster if i use log bot to refill/dump while i'm hovering.

Right now, i try to avoid flying over factories.
Which is very counter intuitive. Because we fly to take direct route.

This is very worrying, does some inserters pick some item while i fly-over ?

@texanbred Sorry, I somehow overlooked the rest of what you wrote. Sound and bomb damage are known issues, I think they are related to the games collision mechanics. Found out that the sound resets when you fly over certain buildings, such as ore patches with miners on them. It's not intended and I hope I will find a fix in the future.
And yeah, there are so many things that would benefit the game a lot... Curious to see what state the game will be in 1.0.0. On the other hand, a different developer might have called it v2.0.0 already and stopped developing years ago :-)

@kyoshiharu Yes, they can. I will see what I can do once I finished the remote controlling.