Is it possible to unload more belt?

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Circuit-free solutions of basic factory-design to achieve optimal item-throughput
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Binoculars
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Is it possible to unload more belt?

Post by Binoculars »

Hello factorian friends,

The text below will be translated from French to English on Google Translate.

Is it possible to unload more belt than the creation below, namely 12 belts for 4 wagons ?
Unload.jpg
Unload.jpg (864.79 KiB) Viewed 4471 times
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DaveMcW
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Re: Is it possible to unload more belt?

Post by DaveMcW »

viewtopic.php?f=194&t=58728

The problem becomes, you unload so fast that the train is not fast enough to keep up.
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Koub
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Re: Is it possible to unload more belt?

Post by Koub »

Iirc, when I faced this issue, the only solution I found is make shorter trains, so that the station is unavailable for the next train for a shorter time span.
Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.
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quyxkh
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Re: Is it possible to unload more belt?

Post by quyxkh »

There's also twinned stops so you can have the next train already there.
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Bauer
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Re: Is it possible to unload more belt?

Post by Bauer »

Or timed arrivals.

I use 4-4 trains with 4 tanks per wagon into 8 blue belts per wagon. If you have a "pre-station" that releases the next train just-in-time you can consistantly fill 8 belts per wagon. You also need additional signals "inside" the unloading station to allow for an arrival of the next train while the first one is still moving out.

The real challenge is to sort out the heavy train trafic at the junction forking off into the trains station buffer. Such a high throughput station only makes sense (if not an end in itself) if you build several such stations in parallel. As a result, your junction has to handle about 0.5-1 trains/second in and out. There is a separate thread covering this topic. My smelter has 12 such stations and I couldn't make it work with a single 3x3 junction to the main line.
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Re: Is it possible to unload more belt?

Post by mrvn »

If you use LC trains then you can have a train every 72 ticks using 16 stations with timed departures (iirc). That requires good placement of signals and no cross traffic. I.e. a dedicated train line just for those trains. And still it would be the equivalent of LCCCC trains every 4.8 seconds. The answer isn't more frequent trains and shorter trains.

Note: With 16 parallel stations and a train every 72 ticks that gives you 19 seconds to unload each train, I didn't optimize for that. The 16 stations are there because it's a power of 2 and allows merging traffic in a zipper style. The station departures get triggered by a 72 tick clock in the right pattern for this. I'm sure you can use fewer stations but that's what I used to test. The 72 ticks is based on how close you can pack LC trains on a single rail line.

If you want more belts then the answer isn't to unload the train faster. It's to build bigger trains. If you want 8 blue belts of items then why not build a train with 8 wagons? And if you want more belts per length of train so you don't have so much empty space in the factory then build 6 parallel station. Each having 8 wagons and unloading one blue belt per wagon. Then you have 8*6 blue belts at no hassle.

Note: That's one train every 14.8 seconds with 88.8 second intervals for each station.
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Re: Is it possible to unload more belt?

Post by Bauer »

I totally agree. Longer trains with a 1:1 L:C ratio are the answer.
This has nothing to do with the loading/unloading. But more trains jam the rail network badly.

To be honest, the place with the biggest need for high throughput is most likely the smelter. You typically also mix here at least two different inputs. Such a massiv demand cannot be fulfilled from a single ore patch. Hence, the routes of the trains arriving to/leaving from the smelter have to fork/merge at some point. And that's where the trouble starts.

My 12 stations unload into 12x5x8=480 blue belts. (I wrote LLLLCCCC, that was wrong, it's actually LLLLCCCCC or 4-5.)
(That is also not entirely true, because 2 pairs of stations are iron/copper pairs that unload into the same smelter rows depending on demand.)
In fact the smelter has 400 input belts connected to net 10 operative stations.

I didn't measure the train frequency. But the cycle time is in the order of 5-6 s. This means that you have about 2 trains/s arriving and leaving at the smelter, i.e. the junction has to handle 4 trains/s. I'm not saying that it can't be done. But it would be a massive monster, which is why I split it and connect the smelter to two far appart junctions into the outer ring "road" where only the ore trains run.
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