never mind

finally after many maps with different modpacks and testing details without doing a complete run, i came back to some situation where i could use this mod again (and i gladly did!). I even could get it to work after a while : since i had looked only at the general info and the FAQ, and also at the patchnotes (but only the patchnotes on the forum), i was not aware that radius changed from chunks to tiles :-( it would be nice to have that info at least in the FAQ ...

but I'm still confused about the power usage : no matter whether i have the mod setting for power usage enabled or not, and no matter whether i scan with N=1, F=1, S=1, or with N=1, F=800, S=10, power usage is ALWAYS 10 MW !?

just for testing how useful different parameters are for effective scanning speed of a large area and effective power usage, i built eg 5 radars, 4 of them slowly (S=8) scanning quadrants (B=0,E=90; B=90,E=180; etc) with range N=400 and F=800, and the fifth scanning the center fast (S=10) with N=1 and F=400, to give permanent full coverage. but since all of them used 10 MW for a total of 50 MW, any attempts at optimization look useless and one radar for the whole range with max speed seems to be the easiest and cheapest method.
btw: an old version used to cap speed by setting speed to default (even if that was only 1 or 0) if speed was attempted to be set at >10. this seems to be no longer the case (THANK YOU), but is speed still capped? could you please add that info in the FAQ too?

and finally an idea which i had when accidentally connecting a radar with green AND red wires (thus doubling all values) and this caused a large area to be uncovered (new chunks generated in radius 800 to 1600 :-) ... what would you think of an option whether to cap the range of this radar and then cap it similar to the range of artillery. there would be lots of possibilities how to do such a cap, either a simple mod setting for the value which has to be adjusted manually, or a new tech to research for increased range (and one for speed?), or maybe using the artillery research and capping the radar range to a little above the artillery range (either its auto range or its manual range)

Easy enough to add range information to the FAQ here, done.

For power usage, "Additional Radar Power" entities are spawned to draw power, in 2500kW increments, when enabled. The minimum power for a scanning radar is 10 MW with zero Additional Radar Power at or below speed 5 and range 576 tiles (18 chunks). This caps out at an additional 10GW per radar. I was unable to find a way to dynamically adjust power for a single entity.

I have to admit, I don't recall noticing a bug related to speed defaulting back to default if set grater than 10. Looks like I fixed it in v0.3.0. Yes, speed is still capped at 10 which is one chunks worth of rotation on the outside edge of the scan radius every 3 ticks.

I'll consider adding distance tiers as tech. Though using up to 10GW per radar kinda achieves the same goal ;)

thanks for the answer.
i think we both need to refresh our memories :-) :-( i completely had forgotten about the radars using those "Additional Radar Power" Entities and only had looked at the power usage of the ScanningRadars themselves which stayed at a constant 10MW. and the speed problem i referred to was in my discussion post 9 months ago where you answered that you "would consider some changes" :-)

taking a close look now, i see that with minimal speed and minimal radius, power consumption statistics show two types of entities: one is the Scanning Radar with an additional scanning icon in the corner for exactly 10MW, and the second is a radar icon with a connection box icon in the corner for an additional (constant?) 333kW that shows in its tooltip "Scanning Radar > Picker Tweaks" (that mod seems to modify some power costs or one of the additional items).

thanks for giving a radius and speed for the lower limit of power consumption. with this info i could see that power consumption increases linear with the area (thus quadratic with the radius) and linear with the speed (btw: at speed 5 the entire chunk 18 is included, thus more than 10MW is used only at 611+ radius :-)
guesstimating some more values for reference: with speed 10, this limit should be reached at 13+ chunks radius, meaning that a single radar can scan an entire round small base of diameter 800+ tiles (eg to remotely build blueprints and ghosts) without extra power costs. and at speed 1 up to 40 chunks radius (2400 tiles diameter) could be scanned without exceeding 10 MW of power usage, eg to watch for slowly spreading biters.
the upper limit, 10 GW power consumption will be reached at radius 400 chunks (almost 13000 tiles or 13 kilometers) when scanning with speed 10, which would make any computer grind to a halt that has only so many GB of memory and processor speed ... lol :-)

that's also why i suggested some (variable) limitation or cap of the max radius, so that not too much area can be revealed accidentally too easily, then requiring the use of another mod to hide that excess area again for making that map playable again. and this is quite easy to achieve by accident, eg:
- using F as well as R adds up the two values !!! resulting in radius 500 when giving R=250 and F=250
- using red and green wires to connect a CoCo, further doubling this radius from 500 to 1000
- thus watch out how you build connections and edit signals and numbers: first remove a red/green wire before connecting a wire with the other color, and first remove R when you convert the radar from using R to N and F, and first delete digits from numbers before adding new digits (eg don't change 250 to 300 by typing 3-0-del-del, or you temporarily have a radius of 30250 tiles ! :-)
- the best method to avoid all this is probably to disable the CoCo (simply switch to "off") when rebuilding or editing anything. and/or have a default speed of 0 in the mod settings which also will stop all scanning. (i also always use a condition S>0 in the radar itself to enable the radar)
some tech to cap the max radius at 500/1000/1500/2000/etc or 250/500/1000/2000/etc would partially help avoiding such mishaps. the power consumption of up to 10GW doesn't help to not accidentally reveal chunks "on the next planet" and then probably not even quickly noticing the reason for the huge power drop, maybe even trying to take care of power problems first and ignoring the radar that continues to scan ...

ps: from my old post:
- blueprints include neither colored wires to scanning radars nor the condition to activate them. STILL MISSING :-(
the new 0.17 copy&paste and cut&paste also don't work, just as the deconstruction tool doesn't work correctly: on building, the wires and conditions are missing, and on deconstruction/cutting, one entity is removed, but another entity (that one that is affected by picker tweaks) remains in the world and can't be deconstructed/cut/removed by bots. removing it manually by mining it works without problems. [i haven't tested how it works out without the tweaks mod]
- making speed too fast (>10) doesn't cap it at 10, but clips it to default. FIXED, THANK YOU
- different angles on consecutive turns, thus varying outer edge. either FIXED or at least improved a lot
- low limit of speed was 1, now 0 to stop/disable it and/or synchronize several radars. REALLY BIG THANKS

I appreciate your well reasoned feedback. Another point, if you hadn't caught it yet, is that for power usage calculation, the unscanned 'near' area is subtracted. So only the area actually scanned counts.

I have also been bit by the issue of my own making regarding changing values having unintended real-time consequences. My solution thus far has been, as you observe, self training to disable before changing then reenabling. This could do with some further contemplation. Is it possible to research an added range without having to have more clutter? ie: Mk1, Mk2, etc.

The extra entity that you've seen it the repurposed 'pump' that provides access to the circuit network and an enable condition without much overhead. I don't recall why it was made to draw 333kW.

I have spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to make this multi-entity with state data and circuit connections set-up work with blueprints and copy&paste but have not really had much success. I may need to reach out to another author for an assist.

"the unscanned 'near' area is subtracted. So only the area actually scanned counts" - yes, that's nice, and i tried to use that effect to have a permanent fast scan of everything so that i can build (using deconstruction tool, blueprints and ghosts) in map view without having to walk around a lot :-) to achieve that, i had tried using 5 radars, one for the center N=1, F=600, S=10, and four for the quadrants of an outer ring (N=600, F=900, S=8, during setup S<0 to stop the radar, and then B=0,E=90; B=90,E=180; etc). it's easy to do by setting up the first quadrant and connecting all four radars with green wire, then adding 3 more CoCo with a red wire to the respective 2nd to 4th radar to add only B=90,E=90; B=180,E=180, and B=270, E=270. oops, copy and paste doesn't work :-) :-( instead of giving this lengthy description, i wanted to post a single line with a blueprint of the setup. oops, doesn't work either :-) :-(
first disabling the radars with a negative S, then starting them all at the same time and at the respective B angles for all of them (which wasn't easily possible last year), is a really nice feature and looks nice in map view (like a four-bladed fan :-)

but do you only subtract the inner area that is not scanned (thus calculating the area of the ring only), or do you also respect the reduced scan angle from B to E (subtracting the area between E and B that is not scanned) ? in one such setup, 5 radars used a total of 150MW, and a single radar that scanned the same total area with max speed used only 60 or 70 MW.
something like : factor x pi x (F²-N²) x (E-B)/360
(also checking for B<E, B>E, E>360 eg when scanning from 350 to 370, or from -10 to +10, etc)

since i did most of this testing on a normal map (except for a cheated power source since i had no nuclear power setup yet), the above values and results (eg the 333kW) may have been influenced by other mods too, as also the tooltips showed only "scanning radar" for one entity and "scanning radar > picker tweaks" for another.

and yes, having separate Mk1, MK2, etc would be a solution to capping the max range, but with the really huge max range this would clutter the crafting menu with a dozen or more radars and make it quite difficult to invent a clever method of reusing/upgrading the radars from the first smallest range to an endgame radar (and require deconstruction or upgrade planner to work on them, etc). with the huge range and most of the time only having only one or very few such radars in the entire base or even map, it probably would be "too much" and not worth the effort. probably a hint in big print on the FAQ page (to disable radars while modifying them, and that deconstruction/blueprints don't work yet) would be good enough.
of course, i would have no objection if you implement unlimited research, blueprints, etc, eg as an exercise for yourself how to do that :-) lol :-)

Blueprint/copy&paste. Ya, I know I'm dropping the ball. I'll get to it.

The beginning and end angles aren't considered in power usage because the radar doesn't stop scanning for that time. It skips or doubles back immediately, covering the same total area/time as it would unconstrained.

The 333kW is as mod stock. I think other mods tweak it because it's technically a pump. Squeak through modifies it as well, but I think only the collision box.

You've given me a few things to consider. Now I'll have to find the time to implement it

"The beginning and end angles aren't considered in power usage because the radar doesn't stop scanning for that time. It skips or doubles back immediately, covering the same total area/time as it would unconstrained."

after quite some thinking about this, i seem to understand the misunderstanding now :-)
you mean that you do the calculations per scanned segment of the circle, and thus always calculate an area from N to F, with no need to respect the total angle between B and E since the calculation is done per segment ... i was thinking of the total power for one scan, but of course you are right that what matters is the power per time.

Please add an option to configure the power scale.
Even with the additional power entities I think it consumes too little power. I would like to double it.
Thanks.