Factorio Forums

Hi everyone!

If you build a large factory (really huge), you probably hit one common problem - the performance (UPS). Solar panels are great way to make free energy with low performance drain. It is also fine to not use roboport or anything else - just the most dense pattern of solar panels and accumulators as you can place. It is allready tested that even for a factory which makes more than 2000 sci packs per minute of each specie (with full prod3 support) is not so complicated to build by running with personal robort.

So i designed following pattern...

No. accumulators/solar panels = 26/32 = 0.8125 = 0.967 × 0.84
Space efficiency = (32×9 + 26×4) / (32×9 + 26×4 + 4) = 98/99 ~ 98,99 %
Substations are attached in a horizontal way only. There is also a little bias from perfect ratio. You can deal with boths by adding a border
You have to build this border per a row with 41 substations in total and you obtain...

No. accumulators/solar panels = 1092/1300 = 0.84
Space efficiency = (1092×4 + 1300×9)/(1092×4 + 1300×9 + (41+1)×4) = 1339/1353 ~ 98,97 %
Average power = 42×1300 = 54.6 MW

... a perfect ratio with 1.03 % space efficiency loss in substations and the big pole. You can place these lines on yourself thanks to the big pole on the border. With 40 of these lines (which is nearby square) you obtain about 2GW power.

In my opinion placing by hand is huge PITA. I'm approaching ~2 GW by now (or is it 3? I don't know) and I would never have laid that out with personal roboport...

quinor wrote:In my opinion placing by hand is huge PITA. I'm approaching ~2 GW by now (or is it 3? I don't know) and I would never have laid that out with personal roboport...

Making a 1GW of this is really simple. I built my first 100MW with small roboport and 10 ridiculously slow robots in about 3 minutes (?)

If you preffer version with roboport, you can search for plenty of other threads here on the forum . This one is for them who just dont use roboports inside solar farms. Mostly for multiplayer gaming where performance is a cardinal topic.

Thanks, I like this one much more than the roboport based ones, and for those complaining, you can just plop a couple roboports and leave a bp. When it's done you just pick the roboports up.