[Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

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HYPPS
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by HYPPS »

Guys I think I just broke the game, I'm pulling out 8 full express belts from each wagon. Theoretical maximum is 8.36667. That's 4 belts on each side, crazy. That's 360 items per second getting onto belts. 373.8 Items per second are being offloaded from the wagon into the tanks. The train will be stationary for 10.7 seconds before moving off (4000/373.8). That gives the next train 0.41 seconds to arrive. Highly unrealistic so the belts will not be full as no train in vanilla can accelerate/brake so fast! But if you were in a modded scenario with unlimited stuff in a cargo wagon you can get a lot out!

As you can see if you only wanted to get two belts out the design is quite simple, its just 6 inserters, 3 undergrounds and 6 splitters.
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by HYPPS »

Here are all the different designs I came up with:

nuhll
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by nuhll »

Since no one is answereing... nice work... and thanks for sharing... but like you said yourself, not very usefull without (crazy) mods... :)
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by knightelite »

For what it's worth, 8 belts is possible to use depending on the stack size of the items (the proportion of the total time the train spends moving in and out of the station is less with larger stack size). Would likely work for trains full of space science at the very least :D.
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by HYPPS »

One thing I learned from this is that if you set the stack inserter stack size to 8, two inserters can fill one side of the belt perfectly. If they are both on 12 then then there is a gap of 4 items, as the 2nd inserter drops 8 items onto the belt gap, it remains holding 4 items, then the next 8 gap doesn't get filled because it can only drop 4 off before having to swing back for more. My calculations were for 100 stack size by the way for iron plates, so space science with a 1k stack gives 4.1 seconds time in between. So somebody wanna design a train station that has a train start to accelerate into it as soon as one starts to leave, a wire from the train station to a turned off signal at the waiting bays. It would have to be perfect acceleration not sure what kind of distance but I'm sure the waiting bays will have to be further away.

I guess this design is practical if your factory is intermittent, or say its a chip factory with productivity modules where you're not actually pulling a full blue belt.
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by knightelite »

Space science actually stacks to 2K, not 1K, so you likely have twice as much time to cycle your train through. Should be easy to do in 8 seconds without anything too special.

You can also use signals every wagon length so the incoming train follows the outgoing one quite closely; at that point you can get the clear time between trains down to basically the time it takes the outgoing train to clear one block + the time it takes the incoming train to clear one block, or around 2 seconds for 1-1 trains (and likely similar for larger trains with a 1-2 locomotive to wagon ratio). There's some comments about required train speed in this discussion from when I designed something similar using cars.
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by quyxkh »

knightelite wrote: Wed Mar 13, 2019 4:07 pm Space science actually stacks to 2K, not 1K, so you likely have twice as much time to cycle your train through. Should be easy to do in 8 seconds without anything too special.

You can also use signals every wagon length so the incoming train follows the outgoing one quite closely; at that point you can get the clear time between trains down to basically the time it takes the outgoing train to clear one block + the time it takes the incoming train to clear one block, or around 2 seconds for 1-1 trains (and likely similar for larger trains with a 1-2 locomotive to wagon ratio). There's some comments about required train speed in this discussion from when I designed something similar using cars.
You can do better than that (by the time it takes to clear the first carriage, the first 7 meters of acceleration) with a a circuit condition so the entering train starts accelerating the instant the leading train leaves:
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by knightelite »

Cool, that makes sense. Let's the second train build up a little more speed before it has to brake, making it enter the station faster.
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by Vegemeister »

So, I have a few contributions to this thread.

First, a brute force 3-belt-per-side unloader, which is actually 3 single-belt unloaders neslted together:
3-belt-w6.png
3-belt-w6.png (327.09 KiB) Viewed 9815 times
It's 7 tiles wide and has no unusual alignment constraints, so it works for any number of wagons. Murder on UPS though.

Next, a 3 tile wide, 1 belt, single-sided unloader:
1-belt-w3.png
1-belt-w3.png (77.75 KiB) Viewed 9815 times
This fits OP's specification and doesn't do anything too bad for UPS. Ignore the circuit wires trailing off to the left. That's just instrumentation for measuring the inserter swing times.

Finally, a 2-tile wide, 1 belt, single-sided unloader:
1-belt-w2.png
1-belt-w2.png (272.39 KiB) Viewed 9815 times
It does use vehicles as chests, that's true, but they're blueprintable vehicles. Unfortunately, the 2-tile rail grid restricts this unloader to only align with every other wagon. So you can only use 1-1 trains, 2-2 trains, etc. But it might be necessary to do that anyway, in order to get trains into the station fast enough.
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by mrvn »

Vegemeister wrote: Sun Sep 08, 2019 8:41 pm Finally, a 2-tile wide, 1 belt, single-sided unloader:

1-belt-w2.png

It does use vehicles as chests, that's true, but they're blueprintable vehicles. Unfortunately, the 2-tile rail grid restricts this unloader to only align with every other wagon. So you can only use 1-1 trains, 2-2 trains, etc. But it might be necessary to do that anyway, in order to get trains into the station fast enough.
For the unaligned case you could use 2 rows of vehicles per belt. Or 3 rows of vehicle for 2 belts per side on one wagon. That means the construct would alternate between size 4 and size 6. That should leave enough space for power.
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by F_W »

Here's my contribution that sustains ~5.19 blue belts (14,010 items/min) of throughput and is tileable
TiledBoth.jpg
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Middle belts show the 5 compressed blue belts plus slightly more (510 items/min) on the 6th belt. Outer belts show the throughput untouched

To keep each row of boxes in the "staircase" equal in item count, I just capped the first boxes to 1 stack and adjusted the final box accordingly, like so:
BoxRows.jpg
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Details and blueprint are here in the reddit post I made, near the bottom of the post: https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... hare_some/
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by disentius »

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Last edited by disentius on Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by Vegemeister »

disentius wrote: Sun Sep 15, 2019 1:23 pm Won't work in 0.17.68. the splitter priority trick is obsolete.
Throughput ≈ 3.76 belts with priority set
Throughput ≈ 5.04 belts without priority set

sideload splitter trougput comparison.png
That's not the splitter priority trick. This is the splitter priority trick:
inserter_timing.jpg
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Still works. 37 tick swing is 19.46 i/s.
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by disentius »

AFK, buying new eyes.
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by mrvn »

F_W wrote: Sat Sep 14, 2019 6:58 pm Here's my contribution that sustains ~5.19 blue belts (14,010 items/min) of throughput and is tileable

TiledBoth.jpg

Middle belts show the 5 compressed blue belts plus slightly more (510 items/min) on the 6th belt. Outer belts show the throughput untouched

To keep each row of boxes in the "staircase" equal in item count, I just capped the first boxes to 1 stack and adjusted the final box accordingly, like so:

BoxRows.jpg

Details and blueprint are here in the reddit post I made, near the bottom of the post: https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... hare_some/
This might be possible. But is it sustainable?

How many seconds does that give you between trains for the next to arrive before the buffer chests run dry?
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by FoxLove »

I'm here to revive this thread.

Ignore the leftmost 3 belts designs. I was to lazy to make another screenshot (:

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Blueprint book: https://pastebin.com/HVNPfWSn
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by hornetDC »

Other people came up with similar design, I refined it to use less belts, while also being compact and aesthetic

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