[Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

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

Post by quyxkh »

eradicator wrote:what does sideloading onto a splitter achieve there?
Try it, there's a save. This can drain the buffer chests faster than trains can load them. That screenshot is of the gap between train arrivals, it closes up quite a lot because those are red belts on the right, The only tuning left is getting the interarrival times down, switching to single-wagon nuclear-fueled trains and circuit-controlled entry timing I can get it to 117 ticks, 150 ticks for two wagons, that works out to exactly a 52-item gap for one-wagon trains, 66⅔ for two.

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

Post by quyxkh »

This shows the effect the compressors get, right side is take it as it comes, left side has the compress-what-you-can machinery.


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

Post by disentius »

Lets do 3 belts per side (drawback: 2 cargo wagons max)
With balancer or full throughput: balanced unloading. :mrgreen:
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by disentius »

And to satisfy requirements of your original post:
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Re: [Experiment] Unloading 4 compressed blue belts per wagon.

Post by mrvn »

But what would be the point of that many belts?

You can only move items that fast between train and chests and a train is only there part of the time. If you manage to have a train in station 50% of the time then your belts should be half the speed of the train/chest speed.

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

Post by quyxkh »

With the fastest interarrival times I can get there's 117 ticks between trains, where the buffer chests aren't being loaded. That's time for 54 items to unload. For ore it's 167 items to unload per buffer so you've got 66% busy already; for chips it's 667 items/buffer so 93% busy. 93% busy is just about perfect. 100% compression in the supply belts means you don't have enough supply belts (and production capacity using your supply). Whatever's busiest, build more of it. You want to be able to compress belts, or anyway get close, but permanently stuffed buffers and belts are a disease symptom.

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

Post by eradicator »

quyxkh wrote:
eradicator wrote:what does sideloading onto a splitter achieve there?
Try it, there's a save. This can drain the buffer chests faster than trains can load them. That screenshot is of the gap between train arrivals, it closes up quite a lot because those are red belts on the right, The only tuning left is getting the interarrival times down, switching to single-wagon nuclear-fueled trains and circuit-controlled entry timing I can get it to 117 ticks, 150 ticks for two wagons, that works out to exactly a 52-item gap for one-wagon trains, 66⅔ for two.
Can't try it right now. But @disentius'es video already proves that you can just use a normal belt instead of unloading to a splitter, because the splitter in that case doesn't do anything. And regarding optimization potential...you said yourself that the output belts are red belts. So there's most definetly room for space-optimization.

@disentius: Nice built. Now you just need to add symmetry :P

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

Post by mrvn »

eradicator wrote:
quyxkh wrote:
eradicator wrote:what does sideloading onto a splitter achieve there?
Try it, there's a save. This can drain the buffer chests faster than trains can load them. That screenshot is of the gap between train arrivals, it closes up quite a lot because those are red belts on the right, The only tuning left is getting the interarrival times down, switching to single-wagon nuclear-fueled trains and circuit-controlled entry timing I can get it to 117 ticks, 150 ticks for two wagons, that works out to exactly a 52-item gap for one-wagon trains, 66⅔ for two.
Can't try it right now. But @disentius'es video already proves that you can just use a normal belt instead of unloading to a splitter, because the splitter in that case doesn't do anything. And regarding optimization potential...you said yourself that the output belts are red belts. So there's most definetly room for space-optimization.

@disentius: Nice built. Now you just need to add symmetry :P
Unloading onto splitters can change the side of the belt the items land on. Not sure if that is the case here.

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

Post by mrvn »

quyxkh wrote:With the fastest interarrival times I can get there's 117 ticks between trains, where the buffer chests aren't being loaded. That's time for 54 items to unload. For ore it's 167 items to unload per buffer so you've got 66% busy already; for chips it's 667 items/buffer so 93% busy. 93% busy is just about perfect. 100% compression in the supply belts means you don't have enough supply belts (and production capacity using your supply). Whatever's busiest, build more of it. You want to be able to compress belts, or anyway get close, but permanently stuffed buffers and belts are a disease symptom.
I'm not sure what you are calculating there. Unless you unload artillery shells (or rocket silos :) you will always load/unload the same number of items in 117 ticks. But the point was you aren't unloading in those 117 ticks. The question is then how much time do you spend loading/unloading the train, which depends on the stack size. Utilization is then <time to unload> / (<time to unload> + 117). But you won't get 117 ticks between trains in a real life situation. One red signals anywhere along the track and you get a bigger gap. Such tight schedules only work on dedicated lines.

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

Post by disentius »

@eradicator:
yeah... there go goes my social life this evening :)

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

Post by quyxkh »

eradicator wrote:the splitter in that case doesn't do anything
Perhaps I'm missing your point, you keep saying that. What I've been trying to point out is, with the splitter unloading never falls behind -- as you already know, without the splitter unloading falls behind by several per second. For chips that makes unloading the bottleneck. With the splitter, no bottleneck. Is there something else you're trying to say there?
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@mrvn: I think you forgot about stackers, and pace a typo (busy % is unload time / (unloadload time + interarrival) what you gave is exactly what I'm calculating.

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

Post by disentius »

First iteration:
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@Q:
That is a nice bug/feature, unloading to splitters actually goes faster than unloading to belts.

LesseeWhatWeCanDoWithThat...

[UPDATE:} nothing much in this quest. the output per splitter rises to about 17items/sec but unloading space per inserter is doubled (1->2 tiles)

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

Post by eradicator »

@quyxkh:
That video explains it. I wasn't aware that inserting onto splitters is that much faster. Though as that makes the belt unbalanced and requires rebalancing i don't think it's worth it for that tiny boost.

@disentius:
That looks much nicer. Though also much more similar to my original designs :D. Also i noticed you still have an unfullfilled condition:
eradicator wrote: Must provide a way to tunnel at least one belt [of unrelated items] per wagon to the other side of the track. (Doesn't have to be a full free row, undergrounds are fine)

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

Post by disentius »

This one fails your requirements 2,3 and 4 :)

Biggest difference is that mine does balanced unloading, with full throughput/always with a balancer attached

Well... you cannot have a cake and eat it.
Welcome to everlasting battle between esthetics, functionality, and usability.
(to say nothing of blueprintability or factorioability)

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

Post by Slayn25 »

Image
  • 6 Compressed belts/wagon
  • Edit: Sorry, I thought stack inserter throughput with splitter hack was twice what it would be to a belt. It is not. This design does not produce compressed belts in practice.
  • All original chests are drawn from equally and are lane balanced
  • Looks like a spaceship :-)
Last edited by Slayn25 on Sun May 20, 2018 12:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

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

Post by Demosthenex »

Slayn25 wrote:Image
  • 6 Compressed belts/wagon
  • All original chests are drawn from equally and are lane balanced
  • Looks like a spaceship :-)
Just... wow.

Now can you load 6 per wagon?

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

Post by zOldBulldog »

I read the thread and I see a lot of argument and theory but no clear agreement. Or am I reading it wrong.

To help bring some focus to the thread I have two questions:

1) Which of all of the designs have been *tested* to successfully saturate 4 unloaded belts per wagon?

2) Of those that were successful at (1), which is the most compact?

As to being able to move a train into position fast enough I don't see that being a problem, at least for 1-2 trains. I think I have a station/stacker design that seems to do that (and even faster). I am just missing the right unloaded (my current one almost saturates 3 belts :( ).

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

Post by Slayn25 »

Image
Blueprint String:

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

Post by disentius »

@Slayn:
Arkanoids! spaceship indeed :D
Beautiful, has 2 problems:
- Not extensible beyond 4 wagons
- Not enough throughput chest->inserter->belt*

*to get > 3 blue belts per wagon, you need more than 1 inserter per chest, and 12 chests per wagon.
see the OP
@zOldBulldog: DaveMcW's is brilliant, and the most efficient for 4 belts per wagon
Every design has its own pros and cons; balancing, unwieldy, asymetric, UPS intensive. wagon-limited, BIG. They do work most of the time, check the post.
And you can test the blueprinted ones yourself

After the first page it became an academic exercise, see OP.

[edit] typo

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

Post by DaveMcW »

disentius wrote:@Slayn:
- Not extensible beyond 4 wagons
- Not enough throughput chest->inserter->belt*
1. If your train is longer than 4 wagons, getting it in and out of the station before your 6 belts empty the buffer is a bigger problem.
2. Outputting to a splitter doubles inserter throughput.

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