1) mining/pumping outposts producing raw ore, stone, coal, water, and crude
2) warehouses: For each raw good, one warehouse collects goods from all outposts and sends to all academies
3) science: Convert raw ore into scientific progress
The idea is that expansion means either adding outposts (with 2+ trains from outpost to warehouse) or adding science (with 1+ train per type to gather goods from the warehouse).
Below is the design for academies from creative mode, I have a "real" savegame that I am adjusting to the new design and will post it later.
I want to convert raw goods into science directly, aiming for all science types except military (although that would be quite easy to add), including space science and the research labs.
I'm aiming for 1/s of each type of science, and every plant will be boosted with max productivity and speed beacons as appropriate.
According to helmod, this requires 11k iron ore, 7.7k copper ore, trace amounts of stone and coal, 16k crude, and 23k water:
(never mind the positive PG output - Helmod doesn't have a very good way of dealing with refining, so I computed these externally and put in mostly OK values into Helmod, but it doesn't quite add up)
Since each rocket requires 100 parts and 1 sattelite but yields 1000 space science, 60/s space science requires 6/s rocket parts and .06/s sattelite (rounded to .1). The full helmod string is copied below, although I'm not sure it remembers beacons/plant correctly. It's too long to explain completely, but basically I just put down all plants as needed, rounding up to the nearest integer and playing with # of beacons for edge cases where useful.
I use belts for the bulk throughput of ore and the plates to cable and steel plants, bots for all other transportation.
Screenshot:
(full size available here - note that it is a slightly older version without roboports)
Top part, from left to right:
3x Steel smelting: To make the base mostly square I decided to do steel smelting in 3 columns of 10 iron : 12 steel smelters, each fed by a red belt of iron ore.
6x Green Circuits: 2 sets of 3 columns (copper->cable, iron+circuits, copper->cable) produce 3k green circuits per minute, each column consumes a blue belt of copper/iron ore. Some excess plates are produced for the rest of the factory
1x gears and mines: 1 blue belt of iron ore is converted to 680 gears per minute, of which 430 and the remaining iron are consumed to produce 43 mines per minute for blue science
1x refining and misc: crude and water are converted to plastic, sulfur gas, and solid fuel. Brick making is included here as well, since stone and coal could fit on a red belt together
The bottom part has all other processing: 2 setups for red (2x1 cable plant plus 2x4 red plants), 3 plants for blue, 3 plants each for rocket fuel and RCU, 4 for LDS, and the science packs plus some extras (engines, belts etc).
In the middle of the bottom part is the rocket installation with the science surrounding it. This layout was mostly chosen for aesthetic reasons as the rocket doesn't need speed beacons to launch every 15 minutes or so, but I like how it looks
. Status lights indicate which science pack (bottom) or rocket part (top) is the bottleneck. As the flows are controlled by backpressure there should always be a bottleneck. Roboports are (now) included at the top (between beacons), in the middle in 3 columns, and at the bottom. It seems to require about 400 logibots, which in my experience is quite a lot less than if smelters would also be bot-controlled due to the large distances between the first and last smelter.
Production stats:
Graph without space science:
As expected, the space science gives a peak every ~15 minutes. The other lines oscillate with the rocket launches, with a number of science packs dropping off before the launch every cycle as the space science is the bottleneck, especially for red and green science, and other science packs alternating in their competition for scarce materials.
So, to get 10 science/s one would simply plop down 10 of these (plus railway stations) and make sure that there are enough raw materials by adding outposts as needed. This design could be optimized further in many small ways (e.g. to reduce robot travel distances and to push more plants that don't need (full) speed boosting to the edges) and by increasing scale, but the gains are relatively minor since for most of the bulk (smelting, circuits) the ratios work out pretty well (smelters and cable plants are close to 100% capacity, green circuits >80%).
I built an earlier version into a 'real' save game, but that didn't include smelting, which is about two thirds of the total plant, so I was constantly expanding my smelters as well. Hopefully I'll have time in the near future to update that map and post it as well
. blueprint
helmod
Edit: Station to unload 1-2 trains for the science plant. I haven't actually tested throughput but it should work, using 3 iron trains, 2 copper trains, and 1 each for stone, coal, oil, and water.
Current blueprint is still from creative mode (with duplicator chests) and it is missing a key feature from my real game: the automatic supplies unloader.
I've created a train with all supplies needed to build the science plant from the station blueprint, so my strategy is: build the station blueprint with personal roboport, name the stations correctly. The supplies train should now automatically come to the supplies unloading station and supply everything that's needed to build the plant. If enough supplies are present the station is disabled. I use the same strategy for building outposts, so no need to carry around the mines, bots, chests, inserters etc.
