Containers on rails
Building on the current conveyor belt system, an upgrade in the techtree that lets you build a rail system to be used by Containers, with the purpose of moving item stacks from A to BWhat ?
Much like the current conveyor belts, the rail system would move containers along a certain path , with a 1-tile gap between containers to account for bends in the rail system.one container would take up one tile as it moves along the rail system, and it would contain a stack of a single item type.
There would be special loaders and unloaders to load/unload the containers.
For the loader, the input could be done using the familiar inserters while the loader itself can hold several stacks of items as it waits for one of the stacks to become a full stack before being loaded into a container.
For the unloader, the output could be unloaded to nearby conveyor belts and the output speed would be indicated by the conveyor belt that is part of the unloader structures, where upgrades would indicate faster unloading.
because this is a new transportation type, the movement speed of a container could be adjusted as to not create too much of a gap with robots.
Visually, the container would look like a big box where one row of items is visible.