You have to be way more specific. What slow down? You mean, electrical devices operating more slowly because they're not getting enough power? You mean everything stopping because coal supply is cut off? "Filling 90 on full consumption", what is this? 90 boilers? And what is "full co...

Eh, the slowdown you refer to with insufficient burner inserters, and the time it takes to fill all boilers with coal. Filling 90 on full consumption takes like half a game day, takes forever. What's the minimum number of burner inserters that has a faster recovery time than boiler filling time?

@Blake: Argh, I hope 0.13 fixes this. For now I'll just make the best possible design I can manage to and post pics. Maybe you can see if you can optimize logic or something without reducing power/area much once you see them. Too complicated to learn by explanation. Should be ready in a day or so. @...

Oh, I meant how much stacking it in rows of 15 engines each affects stackability. Wasn't talking about perimeter. Would the main belt still only be able to support 10ish rows or would it support more? Also, I want to confirm if I'm using your quadratic equation correctly. If I have 15 steam engines ...

Well that's bad. If placement order affects this, why doesn't replacing offshore pumps and pipes make them split more evenly?

I may have to just post the imperfect version first. Accounting for all this is quite new to me.

In general whether or not this will happen is heavily sensitive to placement order and also direction. Altough placement order is a little bit of a dark art, if you place everything in the same order as the water flow (first the offshore pumps then the boilers then the steam engines), then the wate...

Ran into complications: the engines must start up at least once disconnected before it can operate normally, otherwise it outputs 43.4 MW instead of 45.9 MW, on 90 steam engines and 21 boilers per row. I don't get it - by math, 20 boilers (7800 KW) should be enough for 15 steam engines (7650), but t...

Anyways, any discussion of what is more and less important is all pointless now, because the new geometry allows for 15 steam engines each row without actually increasing width. Pretty great. Now uses 15 steam engines per row instead of 10/9, and not only does it maximize engines per row, but even i...

If anything, making a design more rectangular instead of more square INCREASES perimeter Yes. Which is exactly why I made it more rectanglular when stacked. Which is a fair tradeoff because if you have biter problems then what you need is not area optimisation, it's perimeter optimisation. You don'...

You don't get it do you? Power/area optimization is DIRECTLY linked to perimeter optimization. If anything, making a design more rectangular instead of more square INCREASES perimeter, which is exactly what your design is doing. This is elementary school math that I really don't feel like teaching. ...

That's a seriously incompact solution you have there. Area DOES matter, even if you try to convince yourself it doesn't. If you're using "outside your base" as an argument, just build everything outside your base, including your base, then nothing matters for size, including your base. The...

That post is about pipe throughput, not offshore pump output. 25 steam engines per 3-tile row (yes, including offshore pumps) is not possible, because each offshore pump only supports 10! However, as offshore pumps are 2 tiles high instead of 3, it may be possible to arrange 15 steam engines per 3-t...

Um, I'm absolutely new to Factorio (currently trying to get blue science^^) but maybe I found something interesting for you. About your problem with the boiler from the detector storing 5 coal, why not just use a normal inserter to get the coal in and a fast inserter (just to make sure) to get the ...

So that was the way to combine them! Did seem like some logic would be possible to combine the 2 binaries.

Looks like that's new to 0.12 eh.

Oh. Well seeing I'm comparing my shown setup with your shown setup, the burner inserters is what I'll use. I am calculating these numbers for readers after all, you can't expect them to just know this. Or you could always update your picture to reflect the 3 inserters. But I see where you're getting...

Eh, I think there'd be a period where both are useful. My backup system is useful anytime steam power is used, so it'd be intended for after fluid handling is researched and before the player switches completely to solar power, so during that transition time to solar power, one may actually choose t...

Corrected small pole resource costs. Confirmed the ability for the small poles on the right to stretch to 3 poles per 7 engines, so it is indeed .857 per 2 instead of 1. Stone and wood were factored in, as I took raw resource costs directly from the wiki. And what burner inserter matching? Yours has...

Also those who prefer to leave out the expense of the underground belts, for the efficiency of resource cost per power (~2.97% cheaper per power) Just counted, mine costs ~2.06% more resources. Therefore yours is ~2.02% cheaper per power, not ~2.97%. So in summary then, the difference between our b...

It actually seems like my water battery variant's small pumps could do the same thing as your backup system, but the difference is, it'd have to turn ON the small pumps when power is low, instead of turn them OFF. Power would come from solars or some other power source in your backup system, while p...

K cool, with that understanding, that wraps up the topic then. Our three designs (including my variant) should cover everything there is, with yours being 10/10 engines per 2 rows (for those who like all engine rows to have the same number of engines) and covering the aspect of using the steam engin...