Lane changing car belts

[buckplug]

So I've been trying to make car belts more efficient, and in order to do that I had to work out how to make cars change belts via signals.

This video is just a proof of concept. I'm not sure how efficient it could be, but it is fun to work with. It is entirely possible to use many stocking depots on the same belt system.

*edit* Because cars have filterable inventories, you can configure cars for specific factories. The car in the video is configured to deliver iron plates and copper coils in a 2:3 ratio.

http://dodgy.website/carbelts.mp4

[Cribbit]

I love how many crazy random mechanics there are in this game to take advantage of.

[Koub]

Who needs compression mods when you have vanilla ?
epicly well played, sir

[Jap2.0]

Now I want to see someone create a base with a main bus of cars, with cars splitting off the main bus when they're needed. It would be insanely high throughput, although the car loading facility would have to be quite large.

[mrvn]

Cool. I didn't know you could redirect cars by forcing them off a belt by another car.

Using an item, like your electric pole, as routing token seems to limit the complexity though unless you can put it back in. You could then use a combination of multiple tokens and their amount (0-12 with stack filter inserters) to encode a destination in a base 13 system. With 4 token types you could encode 28561 destinations.

[buckplug]

Now I want to see someone create a base with a main bus of cars, with cars splitting off the main bus when they're needed. It would be insanely high throughput, although the car loading facility would have to be quite large.

You can modularize the loading depots so they're spread out more and can service more cars at the same time.

Cool. I didn't know you could redirect cars by forcing them off a belt by another car.

Using an item, like your electric pole, as routing token seems to limit the complexity though unless you can put it back in. You could then use a combination of multiple tokens and their amount (0-12 with stack filter inserters) to encode a destination in a base 13 system. With 4 token types you could encode 28561 destinations.

The key items (or routing tokens) are put back into the car when it's finished unloading and ready to go back into the main loop. While the key hasn't been returned yet, no new cars can enter the sidetrack. That way you can have multiple groups of factories producing the same item, and cars will be assigned only to empty stations. This allows car belting to scale nicely.

Because I can't read the contents of cars, it's not possible to directly detect if a car is full or empty. Instead, I created countdown timers that are reset every time an inserter servicing a car is activated. When the countdown timer finishes, it means the car is full or empty, or that the factories are full.

[buckplug]

Who needs compression mods when you have vanilla ?
epicly well played, sir

Thanks much!