Someone can probably make a more fancy one than me but I did this google sheet you can have. Ammo Calculator Google Sheets What it does: Input how many of a particular turret you have. Specify how LONG you want that turret to be able to fire for before it runs out of ammo (in minutes). E.g. You want 10 heavy plasma turrets to fire for 30 minutes. Put 30 for the minutes, and 10 for the number of turrets. It will tell you how many rounds you need which is incidentally 4500. It will tell you in sheet 2, how much of each material you need to be able to make 4500 rounds of L5 PLASMA and in sheet 1 it will also tell you how many construction rounds that is, since one round of construction produces 15 rounds of plasma (and different amounts per ammo type). So you can set your constructor to build 300 L5 plasma and it will produce 4500 rounds. So you know precise amounts now. So for 4500 rounds of L5 plasma, you actually need 300 construction runs to produce those 4500 rounds. You only need to change two figures in sheet one to see how much ammo you need and how much materials. Thats the combat time and the number of turrets column. ignore all the rest of columns and change no other numbers. Btw because L5 plasma takes 20 Elemental Pentaxid, 20 Erestrum Gel and 20 Carbon Sustrate, to make 4500 rounds you need 6000 of each of those materials. Only does heavy weapons for now. in future will do one for SV ammo and base ammo. Just have to change the numbers in two columns. Detail instructions SHEET1: How to use. Combat time = the amount of time you want your turrets to be able to fire for (IN MINUTES) BEFORE they run out of ammo. Number of turrets is how many of that type you have fitted to your ship. The bottom chart on SHEET 2 shows you the table of how much materials it cost to run construction of 1 time of that ammo type.(only included for reference and to do the formula). The top chart on SHEET 2 changes based on the values you put into SHEET 1 and tells you HOW MUCH of each material it will take to build the amount of ammo required based on your # of turrets, and the time you specified they should be able to fire for before running out of ammo. E.g. You have 10 heavy plasma turrets, you want them to have ammo lasting 30 minutes. The chart above shows you require 4500 L5 plasma ammo to do this. Switch to Sheet 2, and it'll show you how much materials you need to build 4500 L5 plasma rounds. You only need to change combat time and number of turrets NOTHING ELSE. Then look at the AMMO REQUIRED (CELL F). then switch to sheet 2 to get an idea of how many materials you need. Take note of cell H5 on this sheet (SHEET 1) based on the amount of turrets you have and the amount of time you wish them to be able to fire for, this shows you how much construction runs it will take to make that needed ammo, to make it easy to put the right build number in your constructor. So the chart is telling you that to build enough ammo to last for 30 minutes for 10 vulcan turrets, you will need to make 192 runs of their ammo in the constructor. Which will end up producing 9600 rounds. Because one construction round of vulcan ammo produces 50 rounds of vulcan ammo. The amount of ammo produced for building one round of each ammo type is also shown in column G5 on this sheet (SHEET 1)
This sounds like it was a fairly industrial-strength undertaking, and I'm sure someone will appreciate it.
This could be useful. Personally, I use an approximation formula to calculate, but it still takes long because I need to go through all weapon types. My simple calculation is: 4 x (weapon reloading capacity) x (nr. specific turrets) rounded to the next 500 for everything else than missiles, and triple this number for missiles. Try to remember this setup. This should give you enough ammo for 1/2 hour real time space battle. Missiles will probably deplete first. If I want a quick weapon reload I go to a friendly station, it's quicker than any constructor making ammo, and so I can spend my tons of credits
Interesting idea, it could be quite useful to know the minerals required for the creation, and not only of ammunition. -
And once you are pretty sure about the ammo spent for 20 min / 1/2 hour real-time battle, you can change the device name of your turrets in e.g. "Pulse Laser (5500)" saying you need 5500 ammo for all your pulse lasers. I also have a device naming telling me how many turrets I have left, e.g. "Turrets (Space)-10 (8)" tells me I lost 2 space turrets.
