The thing to realize is that if you build half way smart balancing is a minor issue. Just keep normal production/consumption balanced on its own and then very little is needed to keep it there or get it back to balanced. Even if you only correct 1 item/s towards being balanced then after 4000s an imbalance of a whole cargo wagon is corrected. Stack inserters work more than 12 times as fast and you have 6 per wagon. So less than a minute of stopping the inserters to correct the imballance of a whole missing cargo wagon. And the usually imbalance is more like taking a stack of 100 iron plates out of a chest for personal use. Taking out one stack simply stops the inserter for under 10s and you are back in balance.mmmPI wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:01 pm1) It look awesome
2) It was a lot of fun to make
3) It function
The furnaces were spread onto 6 uneven lane because i was filling a spot on the map between a nice coastline and a diagonal rail track and wanted to make it look nice.mrvn wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:56 am Your smelters take in 4 blue belts. Assuming you put the same number of smelter per belt they all consume goods at the same speed. So why not simply have each cargo wagon fill one belt and feed that into the smelter. The wagons are balanced, the consumption is balanced the production is balanced and loading the plate is balanced too. There theoretically is 0 need to balance at all. (except for those inserters putting ore in a chest. What for? They make no sense there.) Any slight imbalance that might occur the circuit logic on the inserters will correct by halting some of them.
You don't even need splitter for merge the output from one wagon. Simply side load all the output form one wagon onto one blue belt. The circuit logic ensures all 6 buffer chests are used equally and 6 stack inserter can fill both sides of a blue belt without tricks. Overall a lot of splitters and underground belts can be saved.. Plus i trashed my things in waiting train in this no-bot base so it created always some unbalance in the wagon load. Even with that it's still probably overdone.( Hence why i call it a non-optimized mess every station is a unique weirdo in this base).
I do agree with your logic for making things simple. as in "optimized".
Note: Make sure that each satelite factory has some (not matter how small) mechanism to balance from every initial input to every final output at at least one point. For example if you build green circuit boards from 4 wagon trains then iron plates from the first wagon and copper plates from the 2nd wagon must be able to balance green circuit boards for the 4th wagon. Otherwise you could end up with a deadlock eventually. And it really only takes the smallest balancing force to keep things in line.
. Fully compressed blue belt is the lowest measurement unit in my factory. Not compressed setups are not interesting to me 
and so I addressed that, and also the annoying thing that sometimes the trains are leaving (after the timeout) not completely empty, because (indeed) the chests closest to the balancer are fuller then the others in the station. 
