Yoyo's Belt+Circuit contraptions

[Yoyobuae]

The furnace setup looks very elegant, but why do you rely on coal when electric furnaces are simpler to operate?

Because tech tree:
Automation --> Electronics --> Circuit Network

I will make a Steel Furnace version. Since by the time Circuit network is researched one would also have steel furnaces (or be close to getting them).

I guess I should probably mention that I haven't really gone that far playing the game normally. I barely had green science going on my normal play-through. But then I got into Circuit network and been hooked on it since.

So what I'm trying to do here is to apply these things on a new play-through as soon as research allows.

[Duegin]

Cool, I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought packet based belts would be fun to experiment with!

If its useful I approached the demultiplexer a bit differently. I designated one material to be used universally on the bus for a fixed size header, then a second material in each packet is the arbitary payload. For each demux splitter the steady state when it isn't being used is that one of the two output lanes is blocked and backfilled with the header material. The other output lane is blocked but not filled with any header material. When a packet enters the splitter I allow sufficient cycles for the packet header to backfill the 2nd output lane inside the splitter, then open whichever lane the packet should come out of. This lets the packet exit the splitter with exactly the same composition as it entered, and splitter again has one lane blocked and backfilled with header material.

On the upside I no longer needed to worry about salvaging the misdirected packet fragment that gets trapped inside the splitter. On the downside it means the system either needs to be constantly supplied with new header material at the packet sources, or a fixed amount of header material needs to continually circulate from the packet destinations back to the sources. There is also the option to insert the header just before the packet enters the switch and remove the header just after it leaves. This keeps the header requirement locally contained, but adds a bunch of inserters and extra belts around each switch.


I'm very curious to hear how the packet belt experiment continues! I wanted to get all the way to an expandable automatically routed network (like an IP network) but I haven't pushed it that far yet.