how to tackle belt saturation?

[brunzenstein]

At some point the belt supplying the research labs becomes saturated with a single colour (in that very case blue)
- even I try to balance the roundabout with intermediate boxes as shown - any hint?

[impetus maximus]

don't use any splitters, and get rid of the crates. only feed one color to each half of the the two belts.
have the belt end at your last science lab.

blender.fix.png (357.87 KiB) Viewed 4137 times

your setup as it is now is like a big blender.

[Yoyobuae]

That setup can handle all four science packs on a single belt, you don't need the two belts going around the labs.

Your problem is that you are mixing belts BEFORE the splitters. The belts before the splitters need to be, well, split. There should be two input belts split by lane, red/green belt and blue/purple belt. Then on the loopback you need to filter belt back into split lanes.

In other words you've messed up the filter inserters. The two top left filter inserters should be red, the bottom left should be green, the top right should be blue and bottom right purple.

[impetus maximus]

i don't see ANY advantage to using a single belt and mixing them. i only see problems.

[Xeorm]

Yea...I don't see much point to having one single belt. Two belts, having a single line of all the colors is best. Easy, simple, and can't back up. Especially with the way science works, not all colors are created equal. Red and green are used fairly ubiquitously, with blue not being as common nor purple being around. Not an endgame versus early game thing either, as it's easy to research some blue techs and then go back to a pure red+green.

Effectively unless your production is tailored in the right ratio for each tech that you produce, you're always going to have one color become the dominant one in the string.

Just use two belts. It's easy, simple, and can't go wrong.

[Yoyobuae]

Effectively unless your production is tailored in the right ratio for each tech that you produce, you're always going to have one color become the dominant one in the string.

The system is designed to protect against this. It's just the OP that misconfigured the filter inserters.

[Hannu]

I have solved such a problem with circuits. It begins at 9:40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klPSRSYq48s

I count items on about 10 tiles of belt and add new items only if there are less than 1-3 items on detection area. System seems to work at entity production unit without problems. I do not see why it would not work with labs too. Single multi stuff belt has not significant advantages from engineering point of view, but it is sometimes nice to try difficult ways to do simple things.

[Optera]

Try Rainbow Belt viewtopic.php?f=193&t=28414&p=237051&hi ... lt#p236578
'It will automatically mix the varying ratios for different techs and is future proof. Expanding for 0.15 to use 6 sci packs on one belt instead of 4 is easy.

[impetus maximus]

no more rainbow belt needed for the 7 science packs in 0.15

Science Packs, Inserters, and Labs

[Lav]

no more rainbow belt needed for the 7 science packs in 0.15

Science Packs, Inserters, and Labs

Luckily I didn't notice your message at all - and thus my work on sushi belt for my 0.15 game was not in vain.