TLDR: Yes to loaders.
Please. But just for
containers, as I believe was the original intent, not for assemblers and such.
frustbox wrote:Once you have sufficient production to be able to saturate a belt, a balancer is trivial. It has always been trivial. Just look it up online and copy the design – no challenge at all. It's not difficult to come up with balancer designs, it's not challenging to build them, it's just mildly annoying and fiddly to build. Actually, I guess the biggest challenge would be to find a place where they fit, but you can anticipate that and plan ahead. So, as I understand it, none of that changes. If at some late stage you are suddenly able to replace your old style balancers with a design based loaders, after hours of research ... yea, I don't see the negative side effects. I see potential for new designs and interesting applications.
This right here.
As described in the FF post, the Loader would be for
containers. No mention was made of assembling machines -- or furnaces, or chemical plants, or research labs,
or anything else. Inserters will always be the king where flexibility is concerned. And if you only want items on one side of a belt -- particularly the opposite side of the belt -- guess what? Loaders aren't going to do the job, you need inserters. But if you need to pack a belt with items, or transfer items rapidly from a belt into a single container? You
really can't do those things with inserters.
To me, containers means chests and cargo wagons, both of which require tricky and incredibly annoying builds to load and unload using current mechanics. Inserters
are not and can never be an optimal solution for either of these situations, simply because there is not enough space.
With just a chest involved, you have at maximum three sides available for loading or unloading if you want to still be able to do the opposite, and employing three of them to maximize throughput of one of those operations uses up a lot of space surrounding that chest. It's awkward and slow even in the best case. People work around this problem by running multiple small chests in parallel, using up even more space but potentially resulting in a situation where some of the chests are full and some are empty so you aren't getting full throughput anyway.
For cargo wagons, it takes stacks of inserters
and those rows of chests on both sides of a wagon, and a bunch of complicated belt layout, to unload them at the current theoretical maximum rate (which is only the theoretical maximum because there's just no space to add any more inserters), to the point where setting up a train loading / unloading station is a big hassle that is only "solved" once you can use construction robots to build them from blueprints... and not everyone is fond of robots.
Having loaders require power would be fine, since they're serving a role similar to inserters. But keep in mind that even belts should require power but don't, and neither do splitters even though they do something that's arguably much more complex than a loader. Therefore the power requirements should not be punishing. Just enough that if your power fails it stops working would be fine (and if power is limited, your output belt won't be fully packed, for instance).
Not to mention that an express splitter can process
two full express belts worth of materials (if it has two express output belts). An
express loader accepting or outputting a full express belt worth of items does not seem
at all unreasonable.
Slower (and relatively cheaper) versions of the loaders should exist for basic and fast belts as well, which would only operate (obviously enough) at the appropriate speeds. Along these lines, I see no reason for loaders to be a particularly high tech item -- as someone mentioned, we've been using systems like these for over a century,
long before we had robot arms that could pick up items from a conveyor belt and do anything with them! (The idea of picking up crumbly raw resources like ore and coal using a tool as inappropriately shaped as a grabby claw rather than a shovel is a bit ridiculous to begin with, but we can pretend they have attachments or the resources are in little boxes.) The various speeds of loaders should be unlocked at the same levels where the various belt speed options are unlocked -- for the slowest, probably in the same tech that you get your first splitters and underground belts.