Factorio – What Happens to Technology Points if Research is Canceled?

Regular rockets do their 60 damage to a single target. Explosive rockets do 40 damage to everything in a circle centered on the target (there is no falloff). While this allows doing much more total damage, it can hit things you don't want to hit, and is not more effective against a single enemy.

The pictured test (current “stable” version, 0.10.12) shows that that the radius of the explosion is apparently 6 tiles. All of the pipe sections took exactly 40 damage.

(Note that unlike the shotgun, rockets cannot be fired in an arbitrary direction; you must target an object.)

Here's what happened:

• No, it was not necessary to build a railway to launch the rocket. My copper did run out at one point, so I built a copper mining outpost and hooked it up to my base with conveyor belts. My iron never ran out.

• No, it was not necessary to research or build guns or power armor. I cleared out some nearby bases with laser turrets -- basically, I killed the ones that seemed likely to smell my pollution and attack -- and that was more than sufficient to research the rocket. I didn't get a close look at the aliens because my turrets mostly killed them when they were off screen, but it didn't look like they had evolved significantly.