I frequently find myself having to walk around my factories in convoluted pathways to avoid buildings, conveyor belts and piping. I would love to be able to construct something that would let me bypass the solid obstructions around my factory, like a land bridge. But of course, I still want to see what's going on underneath the bridge! So I often find myself wanting some sort of wire mesh catwalk that would let me see what's going on underneath it, but also let me quickly traverse parts of my factory that would normally require walking all the way around. It would also be great to have convenient maintenance access to parts of the factory that are relatively isolated due to blockage from the surrounding structures - so it would be possible to place and maintain machinery from the access catwalk too.
Or, if it's more balanced / realistic to not maintain machinery from the catwalk, maybe the catwalk doesn't allow maintenance of machinery, but a more-advanced or more-costly access tunnel does. In that case, entering the access tunnel could trigger an augmented viewpoint where the underground tunnels (and the player, moving around in them) are overlaid on the view from above, even if it were as simple as (for example) silhouette lines on the boundary of the tunnel and an outline of the player character. And, though I think it might not be simple from an animation / development perspective, it would be nice if those tunnels would also show me what's going on with the underground sections of the underground belt / pipe machines that are already in the game on the top layer, but that's not a core feature of this concept.
So yeah - it would be nice to be able to bypass solid machines and fast-moving conveyors while traversing the factory, while still being able to see what they're doing. I already use underground pipes and belts to accomplish this effect partially but I believe there is potential for a less-powerful, less-costly solution that is designed only to enable the player to get around (but not to enhance production.)Thematically, I think it makes sense to do this as an overhead, wire mesh catwalk or else maybe an underground maintenance tunnel.
Edited to acknowledge that ssilk's Advanced Search-fu revealed a lot more catwalk-related posts and this is mostly a redundant topic given the presence of mods that accomplish most of the requested features...but add my voice to those asking for convenient traversal methods over buildings and above-ground pipes and conveyors in the vanilla game
