Factorio Forums

Looking at the Glider contest gave me a thought: how hard would it be to design a tileable blueprint for a straight-track railroad including the roboport to build the next tile?
No mods: just smarts, plain ole' construction bots, and leveraging the v0.15 train stop smarts. With a power switch to turn off the roboports when their building job is done, to hold the power usage steady.

Seems within the realm of possibility to me. Are there any problematic vanilla limitations I've failed to consider? Anyone know of an existing BP with this capability? I poked around in the Railway Setups subforum and couldn't find one.

You still need a mod to place the blueprint.

Oh, yeah, I meant to say that I envisioned blueprint placement as the only task left to the player.

If you can afford to throw away roboports like that, why not use a personal roboport instead?

Well, that would rob you of all of the potential delight of watching a whirring, clicking, railroad-expanding machine, wouldn't it? Of course this isn't about practicality.
It's about inflicting your will upon those parts of your factory that are at that given moment far outside of your immediate corporeal reach. Long reach without the mod, you could say.
Ah, aha! Radar would absolutely need to be a part of it then. Of course!
Hmm, yes. And add a roboport collection routine to the smarts for when you give the deconstruct order.

Thanks for helping me refine the vision, Dave!

edit: In a naïve thought experiment, auto-reclamation of the roboports, power switches, and one of the poles by a smart-instructed train is possible (with player input being a simple click&drag over the lot of'em with a filtered deconstruct), but reclamation of the chests, inserters and train stops would have to be done in-person. This right, or would the deconstruct tags foul things up in one or more places?

edit #2: A certain kind of factory core + a certain kind of of factory brain + a certain kind of blueprint library + a cost-effective remote rail building solution = throne room.
Howzat for an elevator pitch? I believe it's possible in unmodded Factorio.