If you want to understand how stuff like Kirk Mcdonald's calculator works, here's the actual math that goes down. (I've built a similar tool to his tool for personal use, so I have very good knowledge of the underlying details). Let's start with a simple example. Suppose you want to make a red scien...

The trite answer: math. The longer answer: in many cases, you can model a splitter as something that distributes all of its inputs equally over its outputs. This allows you to convert any splitter network into a directed graph, with the vertices being splitters and the edges being belts connecting t...

You can't mix underground belts like that. When you place down the underground belt exit #3, it connects with #2. Exits #1 and #4 are orphaned; they no longer have any partner. If you want to do that kind of underground mixing, #1 and #3 would have to be a different tier of belt (different color) fr...

Furthering that point, the listed sinks are only consuming 25MW of power. That's 90MW of unaccounted power.

So your biggest problem here isn't a lack of roboports. It's that your roboports are poorly positioned. (Your estimate is also off by a factor of 10, you only need about 120 roboports to service 6k robots). In your factory, essentially all the roboports are lined in a vertical line. However, your fa...

You have too few roboports almost certainly. I started collating numbers on the throughput of different systems. Robots are challenging because the throughput of robots are highly dependent on distance, and the distance is challenging to reason about when you have multiple sources and sinks in the s...

I haven't tested this, but a bullpen latch might do the trick: create a long transition track between the local network and the main network (and vice versa). Create a circuit that latches the last signal to red unless a train is present in the bullpen and that latches the first signal to red when a...

I don't get why flow simulation is so hard? Two reasons: 1. Real world fluid dynamics are actually quite complicated. To give you a flavor, here's an example I considered when I was working at a water treatment plant. The incoming raw water pumping station had 6 pumps, 4 that each could pump 60 MGD...

Seablock has some customizations to Angel's, the big ones being the shift of sludge from generating bob's ores to generating angel's ores, the replacement of coal and coke with charcoal (produced via cellulose fiber -> wood bricks -> charcoal), and adding the blue algae to oil chain. I've not seen a...

Outside of arboretums for trees, bioprocessing is unfortunately waaaay underpowered for making anything useful, and even arboretums pale in comparison to Bob's greenhouses. To put it in perspective, if you look at tier-1 plastic production, you can turn 1 belt of coal into 1 belt of plastic (via coa...

You say that it's impossible to build a perfect 3-1 balancer that will still balance its inputs evenly, even if some of them are missing. It's not, at least not if you allow a little bit of circuit network. Here's how: Build a standard 4-to-1 pyramid. Hook the unused output back into the unused inpu...

The math on this is weird enough that for any particular problem it looks maybe not worth figuring, especially not for something you're doing for fun, but it turns out that this math shows up a lot. Like, everywhere . It's worth investigating how it behaves, and in the lingo of the people who did t...

Nobody wants a thing nerfed, no matter how obscenely overpowered it is. That's not true. Obscenely overpowered things generally have very strong consensus that they need to be nerfed. The old god modules of Bob's Mods is a good example. I'm not aware of anyone who campaigned against nerfing them or...

Productivity is always inherently better than the other modules, and that's because the productivity across the entire chain becomes geometric. If you have modules that reduce the power consumption of each building by 40%, your entire factory uses 40% less power. If you have modules that give a 40% ...

I'm not running these stats with seablock enabled (I aborted the last seablock playthrough when I realized that Angel's had gotten much more complicated since the last time I played, and thus I needed more practice with it first). As I said, I started out with a basic preference to minimize input re...

I was putting together a calculator based on linear programming, and so I figured I'd put it through its paces to tell me how many lines of raw ore it took to make a full belt of iron ore. Joke is on me, because the result turned out that it didn't want any raw stiratite, saphirite, or jivolite. Nop...

henke37 wrote:How does fluid and artillery wagons affect these calculations?

Fluid and artillery wagons have the same values as regular cargo wagons for friction and braking force, although artillery wagons are 4 times heavier than regular cargo wagons or fluid wagons.

lower speeds work better for higher throughput). hhhhhhhowwwwwwww did you come to this conclusion again? Slower things move slower. It's kind of implied. Granted a system that can maintain a slow but steady pace will be far more reliable than a fast system that suddenly gridlocks. Did you read my f...

Ultimately this will give you a single value: The number of cargo cars flowing through a point per second. You can get an exact measurement of this in game by using standardized train sizes and counting the number of trains that flow through a point. If you get 10 trains a minute and they are 1-3-1...

Personally, I'd rather more like to see the code that parses the data lua instead of the data lua itself. While it's easy to get a Lua parser stuck on the data, the more annoying part is getting the logic right to properly read in mods (in order, and with the right execution environment), and the es...