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 there. Basically a sushi belt with just one item per lane. Use a priority splitter to feed a patch of yellow belt so that the cells are guaranteed to try and fill each piece of buffer in turn.Honktown wrote: ↑Fri Oct 18, 2019 3:29 amA 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, hmmm), I the timing could be perfect to catch all cells at the same time (except those bent at the end of the reactor... maybe take them out and re-insert them into storage?)
That should put your total belt buffer for the reactor proper at just 4 cells per reactor, which is probably acceptable. You'd want to do some kind of manual start routine to feed it with to that level initially, but that's not tremendously hard.