The Feasibility of Outpost Building Trains
Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2018 10:04 pm
So I am getting into the main course of my megabase build and I realized that I hate manually doing most construction. Love using construction bots to lay down blue prints once I finalize the blue print. One idea I that popped into mind was creating a specific train carrying all the components I would reasonably need to accomplish any remote extraction/production build.
In my game I have a 'Factory of Things' - basically if you can craft it, this factory makes it plus some. Construction Bots, Logistic Bots, Speed Modules, Railroad tracks, Roboports etc etc. So the idea is to lay track to the destination, set up a stop and then have a train carrying all manner of goods arrive at the stop and unload the building materials. Building materials are picked up from passive provider chests at the drop off station and put where they need to go by the construction bots.
So there is a lot of labor in track laying and power manually because by and large making a replicating blueprint with roboports to lay tracks over and over will prove cumbersome and power intensive. I've already tested the limits of how far construction robots can venture before I become impatient in waiting for them to show up and just manually plop down what I specified.
Material Pickup Station consists of request chests requesting all possible products to load onto the train in reasonable amounts. This includes both construction robots and logistic robots (like for nuclear power operation, I just like how easy the logistic robots make everything at the reactor stage.)
So working through a lot of this in my mind the biggest stumbling block comes down to the requester chest to train transfer. I'm struggling to find a theoretical way to have the train cars loaded with a multiple differing goods to a specific amount onto the same train. Example would be I want one train car to have 1000x Blue Track 500x Fast Loaders, 100x Power Poles. And not to overfill based on the amount of slots available on the train car.
So basically is there a way to do an item count on a train and link it to the inserters loading the train so that they turn off once they've filled the quota on the train car that I desire. I haven't been able to dive into this hands on because I'm on a business trip and just got into building my train depot before I left but my noodle is racing on solving this before I get back home.
Would one work around be to create a steel buffer chest that gets fully loaded to the quota I specify and then shuts off the requester chest inserter behind it and then turns on the loading inserter to the train until the steel chest is depleted? Is there an even simpler way than that?
In my game I have a 'Factory of Things' - basically if you can craft it, this factory makes it plus some. Construction Bots, Logistic Bots, Speed Modules, Railroad tracks, Roboports etc etc. So the idea is to lay track to the destination, set up a stop and then have a train carrying all manner of goods arrive at the stop and unload the building materials. Building materials are picked up from passive provider chests at the drop off station and put where they need to go by the construction bots.
So there is a lot of labor in track laying and power manually because by and large making a replicating blueprint with roboports to lay tracks over and over will prove cumbersome and power intensive. I've already tested the limits of how far construction robots can venture before I become impatient in waiting for them to show up and just manually plop down what I specified.
Material Pickup Station consists of request chests requesting all possible products to load onto the train in reasonable amounts. This includes both construction robots and logistic robots (like for nuclear power operation, I just like how easy the logistic robots make everything at the reactor stage.)
So working through a lot of this in my mind the biggest stumbling block comes down to the requester chest to train transfer. I'm struggling to find a theoretical way to have the train cars loaded with a multiple differing goods to a specific amount onto the same train. Example would be I want one train car to have 1000x Blue Track 500x Fast Loaders, 100x Power Poles. And not to overfill based on the amount of slots available on the train car.
So basically is there a way to do an item count on a train and link it to the inserters loading the train so that they turn off once they've filled the quota on the train car that I desire. I haven't been able to dive into this hands on because I'm on a business trip and just got into building my train depot before I left but my noodle is racing on solving this before I get back home.
Would one work around be to create a steel buffer chest that gets fully loaded to the quota I specify and then shuts off the requester chest inserter behind it and then turns on the loading inserter to the train until the steel chest is depleted? Is there an even simpler way than that?