Maybe increase the range of the tank cannon? I like BlakeMW's note about the tank's mobility, and kiting aliens could be more effective (and fun!) if the shells have the range to hit the main body of a biter train. Plus it might make explosive shells relevant since the cannon is slightly inaccurate....

I never thought about why plastic requires coal. Now that you mention using fuel to heat up chemical plants, that could’ve been it. Looking at real-life processes that doesn’t make too much sense though. Polymerization in plastic making, especially for ethylene, is exothermic so external heating isn...

It looks like your lasers need to kill a huge number of aliens before you can even get close to those bases (Unless if that picture you posted is defending against biter attack waves). Have you tried a shock-tactic laser turret offensive? If you can punch a line of laser turrets through a base very ...

Are these specialized assembling machines able to construct final products with just the raw materials (eg copper/iron plates => electronic circuits); or do they also need to be fed intermediate products like vanilla assemblers? Either way your mod sounds like it can make AM farms look much more int...

Nice, I'm glad it works now. I think I forgot to mention originally that the counter needs to have a maximum higher than the inserter count, oops. No problem, and of course; I'll try by best though since I'm still learning in Factorio too.

If we're trying to find ways to make solar not obsolete everything else, I like The Phoenixian's idea to get some inspiration from real life. Short of making the output of the solar panels random (I like Factorio's low load on my CPU, and I don't think anybody would notice any second-to-second varia...

No problem! I've had my own issues when I tried to pick up combinators. That's actually GopherAtl's pulse generator design that they posted here: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=14556. But it's buried down pretty far in their post. In this design the top decider is basically a f...

Sorry for the delay, I got caught up on a few things. Here's a diagram of what each of those combinators does

Maybe if the gun turrets can fire shotgun shells?

The shotgun is still pretty effective against big biters; and maybe it'll give the gun turrets a role other than compete with laser turrets for the highest concentrated DPS.

Am I missing something or do I need three posts to reply to somebody's pm as well?

I'm not koub but I think I have a setup that does what you're looking for. factoriopic1.png In this setup a counter keeps track of how many times an item is removed from a chest. The smart inserter only takes items out when the number of items removed is less than 9. It uses a pulse generator to det...