I was refactoring part of my rail network today, and I ran into something I was vaguely aware of before. Namely, that for a minimum-radius rotary, the rails entering the rotary must be at least 90 degrees apart. Attaching to points 45 degrees apart makes rails cross. Thus a minimum-radius rotary can...

Does this sounds useful to you ? You seemed to have issues with clocks. While I had a clock in my example, what I wanted to bring up was circuits with timing dependencies. How to describe them cleanly? How to analyze and change them? That's the theme of the thread - the tools for doing design, rath...

What we end up with is: W': F(WCP) = W (easy!) C': F(WCP) = !WC!P (not W AND C AND not P) P': F(WCP) = !WP + !W!C ((not W AND P) OR (not W AND not C)) Let's examine those. We can re-write P' by distribution P' = not W and (P or not C) There's a common sub-term here if we invert, since P or not C = ...

A naive thought: Four states => four combinators. Correct or not? Well, not automatically, no. Four states = four combinators only works if you can test for each state with a single combinator, which isn't even assured if there are just 2 signals, and we've got 3. Zhab's 4 combinator solution has 6...

no matter how well you plan ahead the ore patches always get in the way at some point. :roll: ALL the ore must be mined! I also find it difficult to simply ignore ore patches when building. It'd be interesting to find a need to build such a huge multi-platform station, but so far it'd just be point...

Currently I'm using a huge centered through-station as main station with 2x4 platforms (4 platforms for each direction) which can be entered from both sides, so it can handle 2 arriving and 2 departing trains at once without problems, while 4 are loaded/unloaded. I don't find myself building single...

Roundabouts can have more than 3 directions. How often do you need that, though? 3-direction junctions, whether implemented as T-intersections or rotaries, are by far the most common type. I do find that occasionally I'll have a couple of 3-direction junctions near each other than might be converte...

The next general problem I want to address is how to describe timing . My "fuel priority" example has the virtue that there's no timing involved, and we can state everything in terms of tests of static conditions. But what about cases where we want to time something, or where the state tra...

coal no coal _____________ wood gas | wood wood wood no gas | wood wood no wood no gas | coal ALARM no wood gas | gas gas "ALARM" is not actually the result we want when all 3 conditions are false. In that case, we want to use gas. This is true because "no gas" is not actually a...

I've been thinking really hard to figure out what is the method my brain naturally use to come up with answers and I think I may have found it. I think talking about how you optimize is also useful. That's also talking about how to think about the logic that leads to circuits. As long as we're talk...

Trains are longer (by exactly one locomotive each). And much slower, apparently. Though a really comprehensive analysis would have to look at the real increase in travel time, vs. just displayed speed, and consider how much time is spent waiting in stations vs. moving from station to station. Which...

For that layout you can enlarge the whole intersection, making some internal blocks more than one train lenght The problem isn't the length of the internal blocks, the problem is that the rails are close enough that you can't signal some internal blocks at all, regardless of the intersection size. ...

While I can generally design most Factorio elements such as assemblers, beltways, and rail networks off the cuff in the game, I found that my head rapidly exploded when trying to do that with combinators circuits unless they were trivial. Too much abstraction, and not enough on-screen confirmation o...

Nugetto wrote: I do this sometimes, I swear it's because I'm just too lazy to take it all down.

That's the wonderful thing about construction bots, particularly now with personal roboports. I'll just mass deconstruct an entire area and design from scratch.

I didn't quite grasp "all points where tracks cross in any way must be in individual blocks" when I started laying track. I just put signals at the start and end of the intersection, and figured that it might not be efficient, but it wouldn't deadlock if it treated the entire T-intersectio...

Which points to an advantage of rotaries I hadn't expected, that rails can be arbitrarily close together and still work, whereas Y / T / Plus intersections require a minimum separation of track. Which is unimportant in the outskirts, but eats up space near the primary base, since the space between t...

Zhab wrote: I guess that this is an other way to say that the main advantage is the timer.

If you're telepathic, yeah.

You forgot at least 7 signals. No wonder that it happened. It turned out that the two spots near train 2 you highlighted are not legal locations, because they touch other rails. Putting signals there resulted in flashing errors. I tried fixing the deadlock by placing signals there, and failed. Whic...

A reflexive comment on if-then-else example - never put the same constant in two different places if you can avoid it, because you can break the circuit by changing one but not the other. Better than (Iron > 500 => Green = 1 / Iron < 501 => Red = 1) is (Iron > 500 => Green = 1 / Green = 0 => Red = 1...

I don't even know if a rotary could save that because it would be pretty tough to make one in the space given and that allows for all 4 exits. http://i.imgur.com/00hPIke.jpg It's slightly larger than the 3-way intersection, but it fits, and it wasn't a strain. The other track remains a Y-intersecti...