There's no question the main bus concept has flaws, a lot of them tbh, but the problem with this is it's completely unworkable with an initial belt based setup. It puts you on the clock for getting to bots. To be fair all your really doing here is harping on the "bots are superior" line of...

My main thought with these sorts of setups tends to be "can i build somthing that will give a workable output with minimum level fab/inserter/belt tech that will scale upto what i want" I mean sure with beacons you can do it a LOT faster. But you basically have to max your tech to make it ...

According to my napkin math you've got more heavy oil to light oil plants thanh you need. The lube plants use half your output. Meanwhile you LO to Pet plants won't consume all the light oil produced by the refineries, never mind the LO from HO cracking. So not so much simplifying as needing work to...

http://i.imgur.com/q2jX4uB.jpg How to turn 1.5 belts of copper and 1 belt of iron into 1 belt of chips. And yes the multiple loaders/unloaders and the chests are all needed it dosen;t cost massive amounts to omit them but there is a firmly visible drop in production rates. Can elaborate on details....

Since we seem to have a couple of oil related discussions going covering the same ground i'll keep it here for now. I think there's several points to address. First the fact that your not particularly strapped for fuel suggest to me a strong and early push towards solar and either a lot of non-shotg...

No worries i know the sleep issue :). The problem with your example is your not going to just be producing those chips, you'll want a fair amount of battery production, for that matter you'll want some lubricant and fuel production. Thats going to raise your oil usage significantly. I'd be shocked i...

Yeah discovered that after the fact, still workable, currently still messing in sandbox though trying to get things working just so there so i've got the layout sorted. Trying to create a green chip setup that will fully load a belt, simple in theory but with top end assemblers and belts the chip fa...

Where are you getting 120 oil from? It takes 216 petroleum (~247 crude oil including cracking) to make 36 Advanced Circuits but it's basically accurate for batteries. If your oil processing doesn't handle that supply then doesn't matter what your stocks are, they are going to run out eventually. I ...

DoH! Obvious in hindsight thanks. Mind if i drop another one in, i'd like to setup a circuit network such that i can just flip a power switch, (or somthing else to the same effect), to turn a bunch of machines on and off without actually cutting the power. How do i do that, never touched circuit net...

Honestly i think the issue runs much deeper than that./ Without bringing in speed or productivity modules 1 refinery using advanced processing and cracking all heavy and light oil down to petroleum and then using that to feed either red chip or battery production produces a ratio of just 1 per 3.33 ...

Storage tanks are pretty good for the amount of oil players handle. You might need a dozen or so for a beefy factory but that's nothing in the grand scheme. hahaha. Pull the other one, it's got bells on it. Ignoring oil uses besides battery or red chip, (via plastics), production, your still going ...

when playing in sandbox with the cheats on is there any ways to spawn more than 5 items at once? Running some layout experiments and need to fill a bunch of chests with copper and iron plates and adding them to my inventory 5 at a time is annoying.

It's true that barrels in a chest have much greater storage density, but you pay for that storage density in steel plates. A single tank costs 20 iron plates and 5 steel plates, a total of 45 iron plates worth, or 9 steel plates worth of iron ore and stores 2500 fluid. A set of 9 chests with the 48...

Well i would have posted this there, except this isn't about splitting for the most part. Yes you can use splitters to do compression or load balancing across multiple belts but it's not what they're designed to do, thats just another use people have figured out ways to use them to do. And by and la...

Well i'm specifically talking about the point at which it does get awkward as all hell. As an admittedly extreme example my current setup for copper roe has to feed 10 lines of miners down into 8 whilst balancing and compressing. My Irone ore is 13 into 20. (both those outputs go through a belt->st...

I suppose it's a matter of opinion how big a problem this is. While current belt balancer designs are obviously more than a single space solution, you can usually combine/split quite a few lanes before things get really awkward. Well i'm specifically talking about the point at which it does get awk...

Sorry for the awkward title but i only have a rough idea of how maybe the point i'm going raise could be addressed. The core issue i'm getting at here however is when you have a large number of belts feeding into somthing, (usually ore coming off the train/miners for me though some people prone to e...

I'll plus one this, i under use lights a lot, but i'd probably get a lot of use out of them if they could be put down as part of layout basics. Sure there's mods for it, but it's certainly somthing i'd like to see in vanilla.

Gentlemen, ladies, please stop freaking the hell out and suggesting stupid crap like requiring lubricant. All Bots require is electricity and they're still way better than this will be without some significant improvements in belt throughput. Get it through your head. This is worse than bots as curr...

Just want to note, i voted for no change but that was before realising elecricity cost was included in the running cost. Given they are to compete with bots they should obviously have a cost, and a decent one too, i'd say a couple of hundred kW each. Anyone who's built a mega bot network knows what ...