- It's actually a set of balancers for 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 and 256 belts. But who cares about the small ones?
- Each balancer is exactly as wide as the number of belts it balances. This was important to me so that you can use it in your 256 belt bus without having to move other buses or branch it.
- Each of the larger (64+) balancers are a bit more than twice as long as the previous while the small ones (32 and less) are about twice (some more some less) as long as the previous balancer.
- The 128 balancer is significantly larger than my robot megabase (1 RPM).
- While the larger ones take up significant amounts of space they are actually fairly compressed compared to what I have seen from others.
- It takes about 5 seconds for the first items in the beginning of the 256 balancer to move when you start to unload from the end of it.
- It takes more than 70 MW to run all the stack inserters that remove the items from the 256 balancer.
- The 256 balancer stores about 1.6 million items on the belts.
- The 256 balancer doesn't fit on the minimap. It's probably slightly less than 700 tiles long.
- The 256 balancer requires 75k UG belt, 18k express belts and 2.4k express splitters. But with its size you can probably get away with basic belts and still get enough capacity for most needs anyway.
I have 60 UPS when the belts aren't moving though so I might do 512 and 1024 later... I like fractals q:
Edit: Added the 512 balancer. Someone had done a 256 belt balancer before so it had to be done. Some files (save and blueprint) added to a later post because I've reached the limit here.
Edit 2: 512 balancer savefile and blueprint added here now. Latest fixed version. Updated savefile, 512 belt balancer.
Bigger balancers
2048 balancer and code to generate them at any size on page 4: viewtopic.php?p=344279#p344279
Map view picture by JohnyDL of a 512 balancer in the new style: viewtopic.php?p=310656#p310656