TL;DR
A solution to increasing the throughput of belts over distances to be on the same order of magnitude of bots, while retaining the unique characteristics of belts. A giant artillery cannon that shoots items between each other.What ?
One of the ideas I came up when I thought about making my own factorio clone were "launches" an electromagnetic cannon for shooting items through the air to another cannon (which catches them with the same electromagnetic power). In light of the recent FFF, and being a member of the "buff belts" crowd, I think this idea might be a solution to late game belts (especially when it comes to through put as highlighted by kovarex) the devs are needing.- launches0.png (544.38 KiB) Viewed 904 times
- launches1.png (1.11 MiB) Viewed 904 times
- The cannons would provide continuous throughput like a belt would by firing their inventories constantly (should also reduce UPS like drones do, though probably less because of the recent belt update anyway).
- Each cannon can be in firing mode targeting another cannon, or in receiving mode.
- Each cannon can only receive from one other cannon at a time (or multiple cannons can shoot at one, or there can be a separate receiving structure).
- Should have a range where trains already loose anyway (e.g. load, drive, unload looses to 4 belts) for through put.
- Can use a lot of power, both where it is being caught and where it is firing from (e.g. an outpost would actually need lots of power to use this). This also makes it not overpowered compared to drones on power requirements.
- Can be made into a "puzzle" by requiring that the active firing lines don't cross (e.g. won't turn on if there are active lines in the way) this keeps the flavor of belts as things that can't really cross. Also protects trains (e.g. because trains can cross each other arbitrarily)
- Can have circuits to enable/disable firing, allowing for complex phased factories (e.g. fire all these resources around, now fire all these resources around, now fire all these resources around) keeping the flavor of belts (a sequence of assemblers) compared to bots.
- Due to the item being expensive, power hungry, and having large throughput, and being difficult to place (e.g. the crossing thing) it would encourage compressing items into a mixture to transport them and using filtering mechanics to unmix them.
- Artillery was recently added to the game and works nicely off of that, and that research. It should probably have a fraction of the range though (to not overshadow trains).
- Can have infinite research potential like with drones (though it should probably have it's own branch), the main problem here would be that it's through put is limited by it's profile (how much stuff we can actually insert). The existing range research (if scaled down or split off) would probably be a good place to start with infinite research.
- Can have a small profile to encourage messing with unfiltering belts (rather than just using filter inserters on it)
- Can have a large profile to allow infinite research increasing it's throughput.
- Can allow belts to hook up directly to it (e.g. to prevent them being used to help bots out as easily).