Heresy!

[The Phoenixian]

Ladies and gentlemen, I must admit to a horrid heresy. I am in the mid game, and I use burner mines and inserters extensively.



But in all seriousness, I find burner mines and inserters to be very useful for coal mines and steam plants when you're worried about power failures.

[ssilk]

I use burner inserters also to feed the burners. And for filling up gun turrets (one lane magazines, the other coal, spares to lay out poles and they are so cheap!

[shipmaster4000]

So i find burner inserters and burner mining drills to be extreamly enoying. So i rush to power then make steam power plants that rivel the size of the other half of my base

[Nova]

You... You... What have you done?

Yeah, I do it ssilk. Building maybe one or two burner inserter, after that I convert to electricity.

[ssilk]

It depends on your starting map.
Ever had very low copper?
Surrounding the factory with guns feeded by burner inserters from a basic belt is far cheaper, than doing that with lasers. If you make the belt also in a circle around your base you can use inserters to feed it only with 5-20% of the possible storage on the belt.
This is also quite stable against power drops.
This saves you the copper in the early stage.

[Manti]

Now you may want to check this: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=5400

[MaxStrategy]

I'm not even mad : )

Burner inserters became a lot more useful since they gave them the ability to fuel themselves.

[Mangledpork]

I did a couple of videos on the uses of burner inserters back when 0.10 first came out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FRjELxW0kA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia7v-myc9wY
I managed to talk about them for half an hour!

[The Phoenixian]

Now you may want to check this: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=5400

I see, but the thing about burner inserters, and other burner machines, Isn't that they are on par or competitive with electric equipment in any given capacity --- in fact in many ways I expect them to be always worse --- but that they need a different kind of resource than the other machines do. The question of Burner machines is not one of "Is this superior in it's own right?" but rather "Do I have a reason not to use electricity?"

[roothorick]

Now that I've discovered construction robots, I've committed to the idea of waiting to start solar until much later in the game -- when I get construction robots, actually. Automated production of solar panels/accumulators and a blueprint of ratioed out panels and accumulators positioned around a substation makes it surprisingly easy to OVERbuild.