Factorio Forums

I was screaming at you..why didn't you hear me? Yes another copper train, and a second port (to recieve only copper at the main base) would be of great help. But no..you had to not listen to me..meh I'm used to it sI spose . You almost scared me with the train thing...yes all parts of a track are 'seen' by all other parts, even if they are down different offshoots. if you had put lights where you initially were going to..I'm afraid you would have caused a huge jam..unless trainers are smarter than I think. But I think it would have, in the end, caused no trains to ever make it to the station again (until you cleared up the lights). Nice to see you found the 50 artifacts the group was given.

Some foretelling:
A) Currently much of the stored copper in the outpost is transported. This will run out in about next episode.
B) The oil trains will run out of fuel within the next 3 or 5 episodes. (well, might be, that the series ends before that)

Fix for A: Built more copper mines.

There is also a lesson learned: For outposts try to make big storages, here about 10-20 chests, cause with that, the most copper would now already be mined, put in the chests and just need to be transported. All what had to be done was to turn the copper in the outpost from north into the chests (instead of south) and add more chests after filling the first wagon, so that when the current chests where full the overflow goes into that chests. Now, when they where filled, either the inserters are turned into the other direction or adding a feedback belt on the other side of the chests, which returns the ore back to the feeding line.

Fix for B: I've found no good way to fuel double way trains of different sizes. Well, it works here with filtering wagons.
But a better plan is, to add also a second wagon for the oil and then it is a good idea to make only two trains: One for ore, one for oil, both with two wagons; that enables also later a third iron ore train.

There is another thing about optimization: Reduce the waiting times at the stations. Cause when waiting only 20 seconds instead of 30, this will reduce one turn from about - estimate - 90 seconds (2 * 30 secs waiting on stations + moving + waiting for signals) to 60 or below, cause this will make the oil trains also having to wait not so long or the ore train will run twice, before the oil trains interrupt. By reducing the oil trains to one and also optimize his waiting time (10 secs?) it should be possible to reduce that also to about 50 seconds per trip. That is about 100% faster, than yet.

And what can be learned from that: Instead of adding another wagon and adding a second size of trains, which will make problems with fueling etc. it is - before that - more useful to optimize the existing flows, cause the above optimizations work with one and/or two wagons per train and will (about) double the capacity.
For those players, which are interested in such things: More optimization could be done by adding a second train station, one for ore, one for oil. Cause that would enable to reduce the waiting times much more and enables double sided unloading, which reduces the unload-time to < 15 secs with full stack size bonus. The ore station could unload both kinds of ores (copper, iron) and instead of filling belts directly it is moved either into a "filter" (much work) or much easier, the bots moves the ores quickly into requester chests, from where it is transported to the furnaces. How fast this works can already be seen yet.