What ?
If you have played with bob's assemblers you have seen the circuit assemblers they are faster and smaller and I believe more power efficient.That is a take on how it could be done. But I would have a similar sized building or bigger because more production = more floor space.
As a example:
Imagine you need to make 10.000 gears a second this takes 4000 yellow assemblers and 500 blue belts of input and 250 belts of output
Math:
10.000 gears = 20.000 iron plates to convert the plates into gears you need 1 assembler and 0.4 second 0.4 because of the 1.25 crafting speed of the assembler that devides the crafting time.
Now my "special" assemblers get this task
to make the 10.000 gears you will need 6000 "special" assemblers and they turn 4 plates into 3 gears instead of 2, this would take the yellow assemblers 1.2 second to make but the "special" assembler is a bit slower becuase it is more efficient with resources so it takes 1.8 second to make the 3 gears and the idea behind the "extra" gear is you are using the waste of the other 2 gears to make a thirde instead of evaporating the iron.
this would have me need 2/3 of the input lane's at the expense of more space and a slowwer production per machine.
Math:
10.000 gears = 13.336 iron plates to convert the plates into gears you need 1 "special" assembler and 1.8 seconds to turn 4 plates into 3 gears and to keep it simple a crafting speed of 1
This would be a verry welcome solution in the late game where even with the mining productivety you are more or less expanding to keep the beast alive and roaring and with this the beast will atleast crave for less feed.
The way I would implement it is as a mid/lategame tech
to unlock it you will need logistics 3, automation 3 and mining productivety 8 (the one where you start using production science packs)
resoning behind this is: tech is developed as a solution to a problem, you have already developed good logistics, fast machines and have started to optimize the resource income and the first stage of of the proces and if you are optimazing the first stage why not the second one also?
I have now given a example of gears but you could also do this with circuits, advanced circuits, plastic production, steel and wires.
if the straight 50% increase is too simple for the basic and advanced circuits you could ad a intermidiate like a transistor using 10 wires and 1 coal to make 10 transistors and you need 2 transistors and 1 iron for a circuit and for the advanced circuit you need 2 circuits, 2 plastic and 2 transistors.
Why ?
The idea behind having "special" assemblers is simple. They are more resource efficient and make items in bigger batches as a positive but they are slower and can only craft a couple of items as a drawback.This is all to give the player the option to chose between visiting bitters with very fast and many high-5 bullets or high-5 bots, and building just a bit bigger and slower and being a good and ecofriendly neighboor.
