thatPolarBear One idea on how you could fix this would be making crew able to carry much more ammo (like a machinegun belt worth) basically enough to run the cannon for several seconds
thatPolarBear making crew wait at the cannon (to slowly load the ammo belt on)
I also really like this idea! Right now, adding 1 block of distance between a cannon and a factory basically doubles the amount of walking time and crew needed, because walking time is the only limiting factor on crew. If crew need to wait a while at the cannon to unload their ammo, the walking time / distance becomes less important in comparison.
This would also incentivize using storages more if storages could skip the unloading delay, like how they work for power now. And visually, I suspect 4x ammo storages would look a lot more reasonable with ammo belts/crates.
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In addition to taking time to unload at the cannon, crew could also have a loading delay at the factory, where they need to get ammo belts "filled up" by the factory, like how large reactors work now.
For the same reasons, I'd support adding unloading time to energy weapons too, where crew need to wait at weapons for the plasma to transfer out of the battery (or something like that). And maybe even increasing pickup delays for the reactors, but making each battery store more energy (or making each weapon use less energy).
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For missiles, I think this could work well if each missile only needed a single missile part - a "warhead" - and the rest of the missile was constructed in-place by the missile launcher. This has a number of advantages over the current system.
It makes 4x missile storages way more plausible, if storages only need to store warheads instead of entire missiles. It also adds an in-game reason for the slow ROF of various missiles, and could let you watch the missile body being built up as the cooldown goes down.
It justifies why missile launchers are so much more expensive than storages, since they build the missile body instead of just being a tube for launching. And of course, it also has all the same benefits as ammo belts/crates.
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Walt There would still be some amount of walking time, so a closer factory would be less helpful than it is now, but not completely unhelpful.
I agree with this, but IMO that's a good thing. If there was no difference at all, then there would be no point to trying to make ships efficient.
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It might also help to make factories bigger, bulkier, and more expensive (but more powerful) - like the large reactor. Right now ammo factories are so cheap and small that it's easy to put one directly next to each cannon. If ammo factories were huge and expensive but produced a LOT of ammo, you'd want to protect them and use each to supply many cannons.
This would mean that small ships wouldn't be able to have their own ammo factories, but I don't think that's a problem. Instead they could use the buffed storages, and refill at a space station / carrier in between fights.
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Bug: when two crew stack on top of each other and are moving in the same direction, it seems neither is affected by the congestion slowdown.