Factorio Forums

Been playing Factorio for about a month. I like to try and solve problems with conceptually basic solutions while avoiding circuits and control logic as much as possible. 20 years of enterprise IT has made me a bit insane

While playing with Kovarex enrichment I came up with this rather basic solution for exporting the single additional unit of 235 that gets produced while keeping the Kovarex reactor closed loop. Maybe too basic. Somebody has to have thought of it before..or there's a drawback I haven't thought of.

Here's the design, and it's pretty simple. On the right side reactor I export product. There's a yellow inserter on top set for
manual stack of '1' and two green inserters set for a stack of '6'. When the reactor exports it's product at the end of a production cycle the yellow inserter dumps a single unit of 235 while the two green inserters dump everything else to the belt. The yellow inserter doesn't have time to dump anything else because of the faster green inserters. That single unit of 235 can be carried away while the rest of the products loop around and get cycled back into the reactor. You just feed more 238 in from the top and it's 100% reliable. Ran it for hours and the yellow inserter never flubbed up or tried to move 238. It reliably exported a single 235 every cycle. Obviously you could cluster this and share belts. Still, I thought this single node was a bit clever and wanted to share.

Nice. One could guarantee that the yellow inserter never picks the wrong product by changing it to a purple filter inserter. One could also use filter inserters for the others as well , to have tighter control over which inserters do what.

The faster speed of the purple filter inserter over the yellow might throw things off...only nit I can think of.

I built a few more and had one reactor where the yellow did start moving 238, but when I flipped one of the bottom inserters to export the problem went away. Obviously there might be a difference in behaviour with various research levels regarding stack inserter capacity, but the concept works and it's flexible. It's a quick and dirty way to get 235 going without much fuss or complexity.

Simple and extendable:

disentius wrote: ↑Wed May 27, 2020 6:52 pm Simple and extendable:
simple kovarex.png

Although there is an important difference to the OP's design - the extra U-235 will be put into the centrifuges until these are too full. You won't get it out first.

I wonder if the OP's design always works, though - apparently it does for him in his game. But the standard inserter could also chose to pick out U-238 - so an update of the game could break the behaviour. Or perhaps it might simply depend on the order in which the inserters were placed - someone building it the same way but in a different order might get a different behaviour.

A safer way to handle this might be to use a filtered inserter for filling the box and lenghtening the belt around it, so that you can put enough staple inserters to empty the rest of the U-235 which needs to remain in the centrifuge.

wseaton wrote: ↑Wed May 27, 2020 1:25 am There's a yellow inserter on top set for
manual stack of '1' and two green inserters set for a stack of '6'. When the reactor exports it's product at the end of a production cycle the yellow inserter dumps a single unit of 235 while the two green inserters dump everything else to the belt.

I see 4 output green inserters not 2 as you say. If you set stack for 6 then you need 40/6 = 8 swings to move material. When you have 4 of inserters its 2 swings each green must be faster than one Yeallow, ... althou there is 2 more pcs of 238 to handle.
I think there is some more magic you forgot to say or you described it wrong.
Check how to add blueprints export/import button to forum post, so others could re-use (check) your creation.
Anyway fresh idea.

The green inserters are faster than the yellow one. So the yellow one takes one U-235 from 41, the stack inserters take 24 U-235 at the same time. They are back in position before the yellow inserter, so three of them pick up the remaining 16 U-235 and one the U-238. Once the yellow inserter is in position to pick something up again there is nothing left, all is on the belt.