For the last two months, in my free time after work I've been working on a factory that consumes raw resources at the top and produces a full blue belt (2700 spm) of science, with enough labs to consume them even for researches that take 60s per science pack.
Dimensions: 399x786 (313,614 tiles)
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- production.png (317.92 KiB) Viewed 5327 times
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I started with blue-belt designs I had made for general use and worked from there. The first thing I set down was rough placements for copper and iron, with space for circuits in between. Next came oil and coal processing to the left of copper (making plastic, sulfur, sulfuric acid, and grenades), and then low-density structures, advanced circuits, and processing units below it, and then finalizing copper factory placements. I rearranged some iron factories, set down electronic circuit factories, and rearranged iron factories some more, before setting down the factories for red science, batteries, green science, military science, blue science, and purple science, as well as speed and productivity modules above them. My blue-belt blueprint for purple science included electric furnaces and rails, but there wasn't enough room for them so I saved them for later. Then I set up yellow science and space science, and started filling up the extra space with steel. I managed to squeeze in enough steel factories (and bricks and electric furnaces), combining some blue-belt steel blueprints with some extra one-off columns to fill extra space. Rails were the last thing I set up after some creative belt-squeezing.
Each set of belts splits off and leaves a belt of "spare", which is combined with full belts and prioritized so that every belt but 1 always runs at 100% capacity. As a result, most belts of one item type are connected at some point via splitters.
- spare-belts.png (441.26 KiB) Viewed 5327 times
Every input belt that mixes with other input belts is passed through a lane balancer before going to assemblers. I prefer this design without underground belts over the more-compact version that uses 3 underground belts
- lane-balancer.png (78.24 KiB) Viewed 5327 times
Oil is cracked until there is 10k of its product in a buffer tank; this ensures there is never too much or too little. In the event that the factory needs to stop, heavy and light oil will remain un-cracked because you can always crack them later but you can't un-crack them afterwards.
- oils.png (339.51 KiB) Viewed 5327 times
Rockets store spare ingredients in chests so that they can quickly load a rocket after it launches. Space science is stored in chests (one spot per chest, 4k total storage) but the long hand inserter that loads satellites stops when they have 2k so that there are always just enough rocket launches.
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It takes about 15 minutes to get stable fully-saturated belts of science after starting the flow of resources. Production science takes the longest to get going, since advanced circuits have to travel far to electric furnaces which have to travel far to get back to the science, and electric furnaces get lowest priority for advanced circuits
I calculated my ratios with this Python script I made (previously to use for no spoon) because I wanted finer control than I could get on https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/ (and also because I just didn't think to use it before I made my script in the first place)
Design rules I used:
- Use productivity module 3s in every slot on every machine that can hold them
- Inserters only take from or place on a straight above-ground belt
- Belts don't go to splitters or undergrounds belts from the side
- No substations
- Inputs are raw resources (with advanced oil processing) from the top
- No belt-belt or belt-pipe weaving
- Creative mode
- Bottleneck
That was actually my second attempt at a 2700spm factory, I first tried making the factory below, starting at the end and moving backwards. I set down space science and labs first, then low-density structures and yellow science and copper plates for them, and worked my way up with purple, military, and blue science, and engines, then steel above, and bricks on the right.
Take 1
I didn't realize how big the factory would need to be beforehand; once I had put down processing units, I decided to avoid making the factory any wider. I found that I had a giant sea of belts on the right that would need to extend way up the factory, which I could have avoided if I put more factories closer to their input resources. After determining that the factory would need to be twice as tall, I just decided to restart, making it wide instead of tall since it needed the space to avoid having too many belts travel far down.You can find full size photos of the main base and take 1 at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... egRrdS-nuP
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