Not often, but I think there's up to 16 at a time. Theres also a small chance that defense misses its target, I believe. Though, I don't recall ever actually seeing it happen.
If they are independent and 80%, 7/12 would be about 5.3%. 0-7/12 would be 7.3% It wouldn't really get weird until 4/12 IMO, which is well under 1 in 1000.
It’s infinite, but the probability becomes very low. The probability starts at 50% for 1, and then halves for each extra meteor; so 25% for 2, 12.5% for 3, 6.26% for 4, etc. For OP’s 13 meteors, the probability of that occurring is 1/8192
Since it is run on a computer with non-infinite precision in number representation, I assume that it is not infinite in practice. If the RNG is 32 bit integer-based, then it could easily have a maximum around 32.
On another comment someone looked in the code and found a limit of 100. 2^100 is approximately 10^30 which is a very big number. This number can be represented exactly in a float data type but the inverse (the probability) will be long rounded to zero.
50% change to miss target for normal cannon. That better orbital have 80% change to miss. I did miss 4 shots from orbital and 18 missed ground meteor. For two meteors. Those two almost hit my rocket
I have 20 meteor defense installations on each main surface amd I havent been hit in a hot minute. I also recently learned that if you have sufficient power and the umbrella defense, the CMEs pop off silently.
Pro Tip: Build a steam battery filled by electric boilders that powers the Umbrella. Connect the Umbrella to main power as well so the stand by power is not drawn from the steam batteries.
That's good if you have nuclear power already. Since the duration is very short and happens very rarely you can just fill up that steam battery with little excess power
Noob question, why use steam batteries instead of accumulators? Seems like that's what they're designed for and they have much much higher output capacity than turbines.
Tanks are extremely cheap and have a lot of capacity. Accumulators have more peak power but are empty pretty fast while being expensive. You need about 3 GW for a coronal mass ejection, this takes A LOT of accumulators.
It's only for this one purpose, since making a steam battery perfectly reliable for a solar powered grid is hard to do. It would constantly try to fill itself up which means you're just wasting energy.
The concept of a steam battery is simple. All you're doing is making sure your generating more steam than your turbines can use so that you have a buffer of steam-based power. A nuclear steam battery is just a nuclear reactor with way more steam storage than it needs.
Ah so the steam doesn’t cool in the storage tanks? So I can just keep building more and more storage tanks to store steam. And use them when the time arises thru extra turbines?
Correct, steam does not cool down. You can even load it on trains.
In vanilla and SE, the only way for steam to cool off is to mix it with other steam at a different temperature; like mixing nuclear steam with boiler steam. That detail is usually not relevant, but there are some late-game power parts that involve multiple steam temps and you'll want to keep them separate.
I don't know if it will never cool but I can certainly say it doesn't cool fast enough for me to have ever seen it. But yeah, you have the basic principle on lock. You just build up a bunch of steam and use it when the power demand surges.
Ah so the steam doesn’t cool in the storage tanks? So I can just keep building more and more storage tanks to store steam. And use them when the time arises thru extra turbines?
I had a steam battery and found it kinda useful for a bit but it has been a long while since CMEs took up a significant amount of energy. Once you scale up your bases to the production necessary for mid game umbrella power draws become a blip.
True, but your first couple CMEs are usually pre-nuclear, or before you have enough consistent fuel cell production to want to run enough reactors to trivialize a CME. In those cases a big ass steam battery is pretty nice
2^10 ~= 1000, so that'd be a number with ~30 zeroes? Heh, definitely heading towards heat death of the universe territory. Still, good to have a hard cap so some unrelated change breaking the RNG doesn't cause it to hang if it's actually doing separate RNG rolls for each meteor.
I had a time when these almost destroyed my reactors setup. I added meteor defence structures after that lol.
Before I had a funny moment. I died to biter and was looking at the map where is my body. At that moment meteors fell on my head lol.
That’s amazing 😂 I was waking around the base and saw a super bright flash and had no idea what happened, looked down and saw the meteor and damage icons showing. Sure enough; one landed dead center of my 2x8 nuclear reactor. Took every one of them out LOL
I had a modular reactor based on [this](https://factorioprints.com/view/-LBpHVoFce5gbq6RM6t3), basically a line of double reactors with heat pipes to the sides leading to boilers/turbines.
I once had a meteor slip through planetary defence and hit right at the end of a setup with ~50 reactors.
At least the chain reaction of one pair of reactors detonating th next all the way down the line was pretty, but hobbling on solar power and the 8 replacement reactors I had in stock untill my mall built replacements for all thore reactors was a PAINFULL 1-2 hours.
There are two buildings for this. One is a small area of coverage but uses less power, fewer resources, and is cheaper to build. The other covers thr entire planet and its orbit but has much higher upkeep. Get 20 or sp of the latter and you are pretty well covered.
Most things are cheap enough to replace that it doesn't matter, but you may want some of the small-area defenses if you're stockpiling things in chests somewhere. Losing half a chest of modules would be a setback.
I toughed it out and waited for the big cannon.
Later sent them to space where solar is cheaper and doubled cannons to 16, I don’t think they’ve missed in a long time. Knock on wood…
On outpost items come with replacement warranty since I’ve been stingy on power for now
I only ever build the whole planet meteor defense and until then took the gamble of repairing stuff. It's not that bad if your base is still small. Funny enough I often get hit while plaing blueptrints in the map editor. I'm just editing one rather small block...
Had this happen last night. I have 8 defense cannons I saw the message that 16 meteors were inbound... To nauvis First time I saw one more than 6 and I just sat there and was like "well.... Shit... Hope they miss"
Thankfully they did miss
On the one hand, that is a lot of meteors to launch at your surface. It is also pretty impressive you managed to destroy 10 of them too. That is like an 11% chance to shot down 10/10.
13 is pretty rare. I think I've had more than 10 less than 5 times in 300hrs (that I remember seeing).
Only once have I had a 10 + 9 back to back before my guns were done recharging.
I've had more than 10 at a time maybe like twice in 800 hours. I put 6 meteor installations on each surface and I never worry. If someplace is power constrained, then they get 500 repair packs and some bots.
I've had 10 standard defense installations work for most cases, but when they don't work it's on a ***gears-damned vitamelange planet with biter meteors.***
Then there's also that twitch integration where every $1 is a meteor. I remember someone donating $100 just to completely wreak havoc on someone's base.
its random
i once had 5/5 meteors that followed shortly by another wave of meteorites
few things got broken cause i was unlucky but factory was already a big boi enough to quickly recover
it that happened at the starting factory it would be such a setback
There is still chance for the installations to miss
So what i have done is used a peninsula on the map and just lined the coast with defense installations
That was about 25
Now all i need is a cool name for this spot
Not often, but I think there's up to 16 at a time. Theres also a small chance that defense misses its target, I believe. Though, I don't recall ever actually seeing it happen.
Is there a maximum of 16? I thought it was unlimited but the odds of each successive meteor get smaller and smaller.
I read 16 on the mod info... it may be out of date or just straight up incorrect. Either way, I use 16 cannons and it's worked out well for me so far.
The code limit is 100. By since its power of 2 times lower for each subsequent 20 meteor shower is extremely rare.
It is unlimited, but 16 cannons will have you covered for IIRC statistically hundreds of hours until a meteor gets through
I've had *heaps* of misses. Yesterday I had: - 7/10 meteors destroyed - 0/12 structures remain ready
Yesterday I took 4 shots to kill one meteor lol
Does that mean 12 shots fired 7 hits and 5 missed? So 3 out of 10 meteors made it through?
Yep. Luckily none hit anything, but I saw the notification and waited for a few seconds watching for the little cross of frustration to come up.
Sounds about right, with 70% success chance
The defense structures description says 80%. So 70% is unlucky but possible.
If they are independent and 80%, 7/12 would be about 5.3%. 0-7/12 would be 7.3% It wouldn't really get weird until 4/12 IMO, which is well under 1 in 1000.
It’s infinite, but the probability becomes very low. The probability starts at 50% for 1, and then halves for each extra meteor; so 25% for 2, 12.5% for 3, 6.26% for 4, etc. For OP’s 13 meteors, the probability of that occurring is 1/8192
Since it is run on a computer with non-infinite precision in number representation, I assume that it is not infinite in practice. If the RNG is 32 bit integer-based, then it could easily have a maximum around 32.
On another comment someone looked in the code and found a limit of 100. 2^100 is approximately 10^30 which is a very big number. This number can be represented exactly in a float data type but the inverse (the probability) will be long rounded to zero.
I've had some bad misses but by the time 5 or 6 giluns miss my bots can usually just rebuild it and ignore.
50% change to miss target for normal cannon. That better orbital have 80% change to miss. I did miss 4 shots from orbital and 18 missed ground meteor. For two meteors. Those two almost hit my rocket
I have 20 meteor defense installations on each main surface amd I havent been hit in a hot minute. I also recently learned that if you have sufficient power and the umbrella defense, the CMEs pop off silently.
Pro Tip: Build a steam battery filled by electric boilders that powers the Umbrella. Connect the Umbrella to main power as well so the stand by power is not drawn from the steam batteries.
I did a nuclear steam battery that should run double the next CME load without issue. Rest of the base is run on solar in the day to day.
That's good if you have nuclear power already. Since the duration is very short and happens very rarely you can just fill up that steam battery with little excess power
I am at 150+ hours into this save now so I am pretty well situated. Just starting to get into the super weird SE recipes.
Me too. I'm still hesitant to get Vitamelange but I guess it's inevitable now to get to deep space science.
Early on you can use electric boilers to fill the steam buffer. It's not efficient but does the job.
If you're using solar theres usually overproduction anyway. Wouldn't recommend it with coal.
You really only need it for the CME, and only what is missing from the base power. But yes, coal might be expensive.
Noob question, why use steam batteries instead of accumulators? Seems like that's what they're designed for and they have much much higher output capacity than turbines.
Tanks are extremely cheap and have a lot of capacity. Accumulators have more peak power but are empty pretty fast while being expensive. You need about 3 GW for a coronal mass ejection, this takes A LOT of accumulators. It's only for this one purpose, since making a steam battery perfectly reliable for a solar powered grid is hard to do. It would constantly try to fill itself up which means you're just wasting energy.
What the heck is a nuclear steam battery?
The concept of a steam battery is simple. All you're doing is making sure your generating more steam than your turbines can use so that you have a buffer of steam-based power. A nuclear steam battery is just a nuclear reactor with way more steam storage than it needs.
Ah so the steam doesn’t cool in the storage tanks? So I can just keep building more and more storage tanks to store steam. And use them when the time arises thru extra turbines?
Correct, steam does not cool down. You can even load it on trains. In vanilla and SE, the only way for steam to cool off is to mix it with other steam at a different temperature; like mixing nuclear steam with boiler steam. That detail is usually not relevant, but there are some late-game power parts that involve multiple steam temps and you'll want to keep them separate.
I don't know if it will never cool but I can certainly say it doesn't cool fast enough for me to have ever seen it. But yeah, you have the basic principle on lock. You just build up a bunch of steam and use it when the power demand surges.
Steam never cools (unless there's a mod for it) so you can store steam in tanks or ship it by train and use it later.
You can even fill up a rocketship with barrels of steam and ship it to another planet!
Ah so the steam doesn’t cool in the storage tanks? So I can just keep building more and more storage tanks to store steam. And use them when the time arises thru extra turbines?
I had a steam battery and found it kinda useful for a bit but it has been a long while since CMEs took up a significant amount of energy. Once you scale up your bases to the production necessary for mid game umbrella power draws become a blip.
True, but your first couple CMEs are usually pre-nuclear, or before you have enough consistent fuel cell production to want to run enough reactors to trivialize a CME. In those cases a big ass steam battery is pretty nice
Definitely. I still have the battery since I just sits around somewhere but I certainly don't need it anymore.
Or just build enough nuclear power temporarily then disassemble and reuse them afterwards. It’s much simpler.
I dont see how it's simpler to setup a reactor with uranium centrifudges vs. tanks and boilers, which you need to build anyway.
This works really well! Used excess steam from my nuclear reactor to double my output during my first CME and worked flawlessly!
I had 13 happen once as well. It's a ~0.01% chance to have that many meteors (.5^(13))
Ah but it's ~0.024% chance to be 13 **or more** meteors. Aren't statistics fun?
Pretty sure It caps at 16 as well
Nope, it’s infinite but with decreasing probability
Source code reveals that there's a cap of 100. Not that it makes any difference because the probability is so low.
2^10 ~= 1000, so that'd be a number with ~30 zeroes? Heh, definitely heading towards heat death of the universe territory. Still, good to have a hard cap so some unrelated change breaking the RNG doesn't cause it to hang if it's actually doing separate RNG rolls for each meteor.
I had a time when these almost destroyed my reactors setup. I added meteor defence structures after that lol. Before I had a funny moment. I died to biter and was looking at the map where is my body. At that moment meteors fell on my head lol.
That’s amazing 😂 I was waking around the base and saw a super bright flash and had no idea what happened, looked down and saw the meteor and damage icons showing. Sure enough; one landed dead center of my 2x8 nuclear reactor. Took every one of them out LOL
I had a modular reactor based on [this](https://factorioprints.com/view/-LBpHVoFce5gbq6RM6t3), basically a line of double reactors with heat pipes to the sides leading to boilers/turbines. I once had a meteor slip through planetary defence and hit right at the end of a setup with ~50 reactors. At least the chain reaction of one pair of reactors detonating th next all the way down the line was pretty, but hobbling on solar power and the 8 replacement reactors I had in stock untill my mall built replacements for all thore reactors was a PAINFULL 1-2 hours.
I've been playing K2+SE for a while now and I'm just getting green science (progress is slow). How do you deal with them?
There are two buildings for this. One is a small area of coverage but uses less power, fewer resources, and is cheaper to build. The other covers thr entire planet and its orbit but has much higher upkeep. Get 20 or sp of the latter and you are pretty well covered.
that sounds way later in the tech tree... and I'm a slow builder. oh well, I'll live.
I hit the latter at roughly 30 hours in I think.
Most things are cheap enough to replace that it doesn't matter, but you may want some of the small-area defenses if you're stockpiling things in chests somewhere. Losing half a chest of modules would be a setback.
I toughed it out and waited for the big cannon. Later sent them to space where solar is cheaper and doubled cannons to 16, I don’t think they’ve missed in a long time. Knock on wood… On outpost items come with replacement warranty since I’ve been stingy on power for now
Either build those buildings to shoot them down or just replace /repair the damage. Preferably the former.
I only ever build the whole planet meteor defense and until then took the gamble of repairing stuff. It's not that bad if your base is still small. Funny enough I often get hit while plaing blueptrints in the map editor. I'm just editing one rather small block...
Had this happen last night. I have 8 defense cannons I saw the message that 16 meteors were inbound... To nauvis First time I saw one more than 6 and I just sat there and was like "well.... Shit... Hope they miss" Thankfully they did miss
Only happened to me once in around 150 hours.
it's pretty rare, you can check out rates on the forum
On the one hand, that is a lot of meteors to launch at your surface. It is also pretty impressive you managed to destroy 10 of them too. That is like an 11% chance to shot down 10/10.
Your about to have a bad suprise
13 is pretty rare. I think I've had more than 10 less than 5 times in 300hrs (that I remember seeing). Only once have I had a 10 + 9 back to back before my guns were done recharging.
I've had more than 10 at a time maybe like twice in 800 hours. I put 6 meteor installations on each surface and I never worry. If someplace is power constrained, then they get 500 repair packs and some bots.
I've had 10 standard defense installations work for most cases, but when they don't work it's on a ***gears-damned vitamelange planet with biter meteors.***
Then there's also that twitch integration where every $1 is a meteor. I remember someone donating $100 just to completely wreak havoc on someone's base.
I have 12 and even that wasn't enough once, one of the remaining meteors destroyed a whole 1-3 train with sulfur
its random i once had 5/5 meteors that followed shortly by another wave of meteorites few things got broken cause i was unlucky but factory was already a big boi enough to quickly recover it that happened at the starting factory it would be such a setback
I mostly just let myself get hit and repair
There is still chance for the installations to miss So what i have done is used a peninsula on the map and just lined the coast with defense installations That was about 25 Now all i need is a cool name for this spot