[Discussion]: Allowing pawns to reload turrets with very high ammo capacities

[sumghai]

Premise

Most machine gun turrets in CE have their ammo capacity capped below 600 rounds, which is appropriate for their rate of fire.

For miniguns, rotary cannons and other machine guns with very high rates of fire, this 600 round limit means they require much more frequent reloads than their real-life versions, even when taking into account that turrets in RimWorld are (typically) used against human-sized targets:

Weapon	Source Mod	Caliber	Cyclic RPM	Theoretical CE snap/aimed burst shot count	Actual CE snap/aimed burst shot count	Magazine size (real life)	Magazine size (CE)
M134 Minigun	Defensive Machine Gun Turret Pack	7.62×51mm NATO	~6000	300 / 150	100 / 50	3000~40001 rds	500 rds
Avenger Turret (GAU-8 Avenger)	Turret Collection	30×173 mm	3900	100 / 50	20 / 10	13502 rds	100 rds
Gatling Gun Turret (M61 Vulcan)	Turret Collection	20×102 mm	6000	200 / 100	40 / 20	11003~15504 rds	200 rds

¹Typical ammunition box sizes for air/surface applications offered by Dillon Aero, which manufactures the M134 Minigun ²A-10 Thunderbolt II ³M163 Vulcan Air Defense System (VADS) armored vehicle ⁴Phalanx CIWS or Land-Based Phalanx Weapon System

Current Issue

As of CE v2.2.1, if a turret has a capacity above 600 rounds, pawns will often get stuck in a loop trying to reload said turrets.

I suspect that this issue arises from the current behavior behind turret loading in CE - namely, every time a partially-depleted turret is reloaded, the pawn removes the existing ammo first, then (if the existing ammo is the same type as the ammo carried by the pawn) the stacks are merged in the pawn's inventory before being fully reloaded back into the turret. It seems that if the merged stack is greater than the pawn's intrinsic bulk / mass capacity, the pawn is unable to perform a full reload, causing the loop.

To compensate for this turret loading limitation, minigun weapon patches have been forced to use lower burst shot count and magazine capacity values than what is theoretically calculated using the standardized CE spreadsheets.

Possible Solutions

• When reloading turrets, have pawns temporarily ignore inventory bulk / mass limits?
• Allow pawns to reload partially-depleted turrets piecemeal without exceeding their inventory bulk / mass limits? (if the reloading involves changing ammo type, the old ammo should be extracted and dumped on the ground, rather than put back into the pawn's inventory)

[LockdownX7]

It's not CE's mass/bulk limits causing the issue (those only apply for inventory storage), but rather Core's carrying capacity stat. Modifying that stat's behaviour to accomodate turret reloads would take a fair bit of work, on top of feeling strange for the player (why do colonists suddenly carry way more bullets than normal while hauling to turrets?), so let's go with incremental reloads for turrets, which lets us fix this entirely on CE's side without patching Core.

Handling ammo type changes is straightforward, as you mentioned. One other point is that since we no longer clear the turret magazine when starting a reload, it'll keep shooting at targets within range while there are rounds left in the mag, allowing for a turret to potentially keep firing for long periods without downtime if there's a colonist and ammo nearby to keep it topped up. A minor change needs to be made to turrets to stop them from attacking while the reload is in progress.

I have made the necessary changes in #179, give it a try and let me know if that works well for the turrets you have in mind.

[sumghai]

It's not CE's mass/bulk limits causing the issue (those only apply for inventory storage), but rather Core's carrying capacity stat.

Ooh, I see.

Modifying that stat's behaviour to accomodate turret reloads would take a fair bit of work, on top of feeling strange for the player (why do colonists suddenly carry way more bullets than normal while hauling to turrets?), so let's go with incremental reloads for turrets, which lets us fix this entirely on CE's side without patching Core.

I definitely preferred incremental reloading at the outset, but I wasn't sure at the time whether it was harder to implement compared with the first option. Good thing it actually turned out to be easier.

One other point is that since we no longer clear the turret magazine when starting a reload, it'll keep shooting at targets within range while there are rounds left in the mag, allowing for a turret to potentially keep firing for long periods without downtime if there's a colonist and ammo nearby to keep it topped up. A minor change needs to be made to turrets to stop them from attacking while the reload is in progress.

Makes perfect sense!

I've done some playtesting, and I'll submit my full feedback in a moment, but in short it's working quite well.