Fun fact: I was doing some math on what it would take to guarantee a refinery can always output, no matter what the balance in the draw between lubricant, petroleum, and light oil is. I came up with some interesting numbers, centered around a 5:2:6 prod/12 beacon layout. Pure petroleum draws are eas...

5thHorseman wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 19, 2019 12:23 am

While we're on it, I'd love an option to disable belt immunity but only for the direction you're moving. So they don't slow you down or shift you, but will speed you up.

Honestly, I think that's the way it should work by default.

Turbines cost way more than steam-engines, and you can just as easily put tanks on the nuclear reactor, and only let them discharge via a pump. A single pump can provide 116 MW of nuclear steam back into the system during brown-out. No pumps are needed at all if you add extra turbines/tanks to the ...

Why not just read the input side of things, and add exactly as many fuel cells as there are reactors, every time you activate the inserters? Loop the belt back in to the feed via a priority filter splitter so's any excess is preferentially consumed and you can send the used cells on their way from ...

Either there's a description issue or you're making a mistake. A turbine has a maximum generation from 60 units of steam per second, period. That is what the output is based on. If you're using boiler steam, you can only generate 1800 kW/sec of power if you're consuming 60 fluid per second. That's ...

If I'm understanding the turbines correctly, you feed in nuclear steam when you can produce enough (i.e. had extra in tanks), but then add boiler steam if it's insufficient? In my experience steam mixes and temperature is averaged, so it doesn't interact like two different fluids. No pumps would be...

A basic inserter with yellow belts might give enough spacing (belt fits 8 items per tile, transfers 15 items per second, so 1.875 tiles/second). If you read one one tile ahead of the fuel-dropping arm it might put down the exact amount (read all spaces in front of inserters, enable if x < total, hm...

I like to take my starting boiler banks and swap out the engines for turbines, and then use it as an emergency brownout supplemental power source. By using strictly burner inserters in the setup it can run on zero power and has zero drain. Steam-generator output is dependent on steam temperature an...

5thHorseman wrote: ↑

Fri Oct 18, 2019 2:54 am

foamy wrote: ↑

Thu Oct 17, 2019 6:15 pm

the sad one-tile gap, which can currently only be filled by a panel, really grinds at me.

You can also fill it with not filling it with anything. Having an empty spot above it is exactly the same as it being 1x2 in size.

Yes, except there's an empty space there. It's maddening!

Nope, I don't wait to need gigawatts to switch to nuclear... Heh. The point is, heavy duty pollution clouds can easily exceed a radar's scan range unless you have your radar installations way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. Artillery is a better spotting mechanic for 'nests being established...

... I've considered using solar for nuke plants, completely isolated. Pumps/inserters/etc don't take much, and even roboports have a "drain" and it's not near the cost of active bots. I've used a belt before to feed repair kits from a main-base logistic network over to a reactor logistic ...

Cribbit wrote: ↑

Fri Oct 18, 2019 1:34 am

Maybe if efficiency could still go in beacons?

To what end, though? There's no point now because of the beacon energy use, and the space the beacons waste is not really desirable even if that was re-tuned, since power's pretty cheap all told.

This is exactly why I hate bots. For all the intricacies of the early game, you unlock bots and then factorio feels like a slightly more complicated cookie clicker. Beacons do much the same thing. I adore the space and resource efficiency they give over the long term, but the endless beacon ribbons...

The additional draw required by beaconed & prod-modded furnaces (and, especially, the production of the modules :v) would've required an even larger steam layout, which is possible if I can jam more water throughput into the thing (which is doable as there's room for at least two more pipes in ...

Not that guy, but I never thought about a brownout alarm and then switch to back-up steam. Normally one compares steam engines and tanks vs accumulators for early storage, but steam turbines and tanks would be exceedingly efficient for late storage (2.425 GJ and 5.82 MW deliverable). Never ran out ...

pichutarius wrote: ↑

Thu Oct 17, 2019 11:40 pm

alternatively, dont play belts. +1 for bots!

Glugh, bots.

They're so good they feel like cheating and they give pretty much every assembly layout a serious case of same-face.

You're right, plumbing only matters for how many heat exchangers are in a row. My mistake. My point about dead cells is the same thing you just realized - if you use long arm inserters to chain chests, you will have a very hard time removing dead cells. I'm not entirely sure it's even possible, you...

... That's some steam obsession. Only once did I need to run a ton of steam engines (...hundreds). I'd probably bother a lot of people because now I run mods at all, and one of them adds higher temp boilers/steam-engines and exchangers/turbines. Also other mods that add higher-power reactors. Don't...

... I admit they are super resource efficient (why do medium poles even take steel plates? that's really costly). The main reason I probably hate them is 1) how much spaghetti wiring you end up with and 2) the smaller selection box. There's also the tiny range, they can't even cover three spaces in...

Have you stress tested your power plant to ensure it actually gives full output? I think you have a couple of bottlenecks. Not as yet. The idea of putting up fifteen thousand or so radars is kind of daunting. I am somewhat nervous about the heat pipe layout to the exchanger lines; fluid flow beyond...