stop production of science packs

[frustin]

i'm trying to stop production of science packs as they're sucking up resources too quickly. If i'm not researching, i dont want to produce them. When I do produce them, they travel quite far on the conveyor belt so i dont want them backing up all the way to the assembling machines

I understand the principle of circuits but they only connect to certain things.

[Kyralessa]

One way to do this would be to connect a circuit wire to a section of transport belt leading to your labs. Set the circuit to read and hold. Then set the inserter to only function if there are zero red/green/whichever science in that section of belt.

[Serenity]

I understand the principle of circuits but they only connect to certain things.

But entities like inserters and belts can both read their own content as well be turned on and off. As said you can measure how full the belt is. You don't even have to turn off the output inserters. Just disable the belt right after the production line and it will stop there.

[Koub]

Yep the most simple : read the belt a few tiles before your first lab. if it's full of science packs, stop the belts that feed your science pack production (the easiest way is to stop the first belt tile after your last assembling machine doing science packs. It will not stop at once, but quite quickly.

Or you can use a power switch, which works immediately, but I personally don't like this solution.

[frustin]

nice one thank you both!

[Yoyobuae]

You can use labs+inserters instead of belts to transport science packs:

Screenshot_2020-08-21_15-10-25.jpg (649.15 KiB) Viewed 1062 times

The benefit is that labs only hold up to 2 science packs for themselves, but they span 3 tiles. An additional 3 tiles are spanned by the long-handed inserter. So only 2 science packs are held per 6 tiles of length. Meanwhile a belt would hold 24 science packs in the same space. Any any labs which happen to hold all the required science packs will help with research.

The downside is that inserter throughput could bottleneck production.