Underground

[jakobeng1303]

Actually at the moment you can just have pipes and conveyor belts underground. What about trains?
And another thing I wanted to ask is, why the fastest and by far most expensive belts (the blue ones) don't have a bigger range. It would be logic that the more expensive the belts are to produce the further they need to go in the underground!

[Gammro]

It would be logic that the more expensive the belts are to produce the further they need to go in the underground!

Underground train would take up a lot of space, as trains can't climb steep slopes. The gradient of real life train slopes is almost always under 2%. This means that to descent 5 metres(about the height of a train), you'd need to travel over 250 metres. Assuming 1 tile=1m in factorio, this would mean the train would take almost 8 chunks to descent to a level where it can be fully underground. Of course this is a game and you can take some liberties, but it would weird if it could ascend/descend too quickly.

Concerning underground length: I see where you're coming from, but that would only be the logical conclusion if it didn't already have a clear advantage: Speed. There have already been one or more topic about belt range. The idea I liked the most was adding a tech that increases underground belt range.

[jakobeng1303]

Concerning trains: It was just an idea. But 250 Meters are definitely too long.
It would cool indeed to research length