assembler barrel intake

[Veklim]

Except how do you handle empty barrels?

Ahhh, bots are my answer to that. You can exert pretty damned precise control via bots and logistic chests. Use a requester chest every now and then which requests the empty barrels and move them from there to the train station/belt bus/etc which you are using for transfer. My preferred method is to use a simple system whereby half of a train car has empty barrel slots and the other half has full ones, that way you wire up the loader and unloader inserters in pairs which only remove a barrel from the train when an empty one is put in. make sure you have a few spare barrels floating in buffer chests amongst the system at either or both ends and you're absolutely fine.

If using belts the same basic principle can easily be applied, merely run parallel tracks, one in either direction, or better yet a loop, since inserters always place to the far side of a belt, you can place full barrels on the nearside of the unbarrellers and the empties will always go on the other side of the belt.

[mrvn]

Except how do you handle empty barrels?

Ahhh, bots are my answer to that. You can exert pretty damned precise control via bots and logistic chests. Use a requester chest every now and then which requests the empty barrels and move them from there to the train station/belt bus/etc which you are using for transfer. My preferred method is to use a simple system whereby half of a train car has empty barrel slots and the other half has full ones, that way you wire up the loader and unloader inserters in pairs which only remove a barrel from the train when an empty one is put in. make sure you have a few spare barrels floating in buffer chests amongst the system at either or both ends and you're absolutely fine.

If using belts the same basic principle can easily be applied, merely run parallel tracks, one in either direction, or better yet a loop, since inserters always place to the far side of a belt, you can place full barrels on the nearside of the unbarrellers and the empties will always go on the other side of the belt.

A single loop works. But if you have a branch then you get a problem. Sure you can loop it but then all barrels first go down one branch and only what's left go down the other. What if you want half the crude oil going one way and the other the other way? You can't split it half way along the loop. Now you need two loops and have to split before barreling.

[Jap2.0]

Honestly I fail to see why anyone would say barrels are not useful.....

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Barrels are awesome because they are compact, logistically sanguine and offer a whole host of logistically intricate and unusual arrangements. Just lately a friend of mine made a 32 core nuke plant which can only function at the efficiency it achieves due to the space reduction allowed by water barrels instead of pipes.

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My point is this really, barrels just add more options to the table, they have a more complex set of reasons to be used and often occupy the extreme ends of the number crunching game (i.e. a fully compressed blue belt of barrels represents, afaik, the highest possible fluid throughput in the vanilla game (for a single tile wide strip of any given length, certainly)). If you want to calculate precise ratios for bot transfer of fluids to a series of production nodes (especially if you're circuit controlling them en masse, etc) then you can calculate the throughput of one assembler unbarrelling fluids and figure out precisely how many processes/second that can achieve, ergo how many assemblers you are hard-piping in a nice little box, etc. In my eperience, the further into automation you go, the more appealing the barrel becomes.

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3) Some people use barrels and logistics for getting lube to engine and blue belt plants. I could see that being helpful if a) you need lube in a bunch of different areas, or b) your factory is so dense that routing pipes is a pain. In most cases, routing pipes is pretty easy, but then, barreling and using logistics is pretty easy too. So, again, it really doesn't matter which way you pick.

Conclusion - no, you don't need barrels. But they're not useless. They could provide some tiny benefits to some people in some circumstances.

Many of you seem to be missing he main use for barrels. As Slevek and Veklim said, barrels are mainly useful in dense, bot-based factories where you can just plop down a requester chest and assemblers and not have to worry about long pipes which may not even fit in some very dense bot factories. When used this way they can have insane throughput as well- one assembler can produce 150 liquid per second (actually 112.5 for level 2 assemblers or 187.5 for level 3 assemblers). When you're using sulfuric acid, that's enough to supply 300 processing unit assemblers or 37.5 battery assemblers. That is easily supportably by a moderate size logistics network. This would just make bots too OP, but that's just my opinion.

Favorite use for barrels: Heat steam to 500C. Put into steel barrel. Flight at high speed through cold, high altitude air. Drop barrel at steam turbine setup. Extract steam, which is somehow still at 500C.

I agree .

[mrvn]

Favorite use for barrels: Heat steam to 500C. Put into steel barrel. Flight at high speed through cold, high altitude air. Drop barrel at steam turbine setup. Extract steam, which is somehow still at 500C.

I agree .

You forgot: Store in storage chest for 3 days in case of a cold night.

[Jap2.0]

Favorite use for barrels: Heat steam to 500C. Put into steel barrel. Flight at high speed through cold, high altitude air. Drop barrel at steam turbine setup. Extract steam, which is somehow still at 500C.

I agree .

You forgot: Store in storage chest for 3 days in case of a cold night.

Also put some in a sealed vault in a very cold area like the Norwegian seed vault that was in the news just over a month ago in case the biters overrun your base, so you can get a head-start on power.