The "Egg Basket"

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jaylawl
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The "Egg Basket"

Post by jaylawl »

/edit: Scroll down to later post for an improved MK2!

Exporting biter eggs is giving me such a headache... That is: mostly in a good way. I like the logistic challenge of having my biter eggs exported as fresh and as safe as possible. On the other hand im a bit annoyed by the seemingly arbitrary circuit network limitations which are present especially in the rocket silo and the captive biter spawner.

The attached blueprint gives you the freshest possible biter egg exports by loading the biter eggs directly into the rocket silo whenever they are requested.

It works like this:
  • Any amount of biter eggs is requested by any space platform in orbit.
  • The circuit network will wait until all the captive biter spawners are loaded with a maximum of 100 eggs each and then directly insert into the rocket silo.
  • The rocket silo fulfills the request and all components will idle until the the spawners are loaded with maximum eggs again.
How can we make sure that all the spawners are at maximum capacity? Well, we can't. But we can use the passage of time. A single normal quality spawner will take 200 seconds to produce 100 biter eggs. 200 seconds equals 12.000 game ticks. So the circuit network just waits 12.000 ticks and only then enables the inserters from the spawners to the silo. As soon as the inserters have finished loading the rocket silo with exactly 500 eggs, the timer is reset and the cycle repeats.

There are some minor downsides with this which i haven't found a solution for yet but i'm hoping it can become a community effort.
  • If you have a mulitple of this exact contraption and biter eggs are requested, all of them will start to prepare a rocket with 500 eggs each. But if you have only requested 1.000 eggs, but 4 rockets with 500 each are loaded, then the surplus 1.000 eggs will be voided and burned in heating towers. This is not really an issue, since the eggs are 100 % free to produce, but it is not exactly elegant.
eggBasket.png
eggBasket.png (689.97 KiB) Viewed 1164 times
I'd love to hear your thoughts or ideas for improving this! :space-age:
Last edited by jaylawl on Wed Dec 18, 2024 12:29 am, edited 2 times in total.
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mmmPI
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Re: The "Egg Basket"

Post by mmmPI »

you can "read platform request" from the hub, and only trigger the appropriate number of silo to be loaded if they have a unique identifier ;)
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jaylawl
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Re: The "Egg Basket"

Post by jaylawl »

mmmPI wrote: ↑Mon Dec 16, 2024 1:29 pm you can "read platform request" from the hub, and only trigger the appropriate number of silo to be loaded if they have a unique identifier ;)
The cargo landing pad? That doesn't have an option for reading orbital requests. Only the rocket silos do as far as i can tell.

I've tinkered with using identifier in my first approach, but i've "given up" on that for the benefit of first creating a working standalone version. Using a system with identifiers should do the trick, but that seems daunting to me as i'm not that experienced with circuit networks yet.
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mmmPI
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Re: The "Egg Basket"

Post by mmmPI »

jaylawl wrote: ↑Mon Dec 16, 2024 1:40 pm The cargo landing pad? That doesn't have an option for reading orbital requests. Only the rocket silos do as far as i can tell.
The silo ! the silo sorry, you can use a silo to "read platform request", like a dummy one that will never get actually loaded.
jaylawl wrote: ↑Mon Dec 16, 2024 1:40 pm I've tinkered with using identifier in my first approach, but i've "given up" on that for the benefit of first creating a working standalone version. Using a system with identifiers should do the trick, but that seems daunting to me as i'm not that experienced with circuit networks yet.
That sound like a challenge to me too and i have experience with circuits :) It's seeing your silo dedicated for eggs and not auto loaded and your comment that made me think it could do be possible "in theory". But it's not something i attempted myself, i'm gathering ideas :)
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jaylawl
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Re: The "Egg Basket"

Post by jaylawl »

Where there is a will, there is a hacky solution...

Egg basket V2

I placed the previous version of the egg basket (see OP) in a 2x4 array to be able to send 4.000 biter eggs to orbit in a moments notice. The issue of silos loading biter eggs and then immediatly voiding them to the heating towers again occurred quite often. This was, because they weren't smart enough to know yet whether a request has already been statisfied.

My somewhat hacky solution was to introduce another clock, but a master one that signals all of the silos. The logic is simple:
  • Each silo is assigned a unique index number (0-7)
  • The master clock cycles through those index numbers sequentially every 3 seconds
  • The silo may only start activating on the exact tick their index number was activated
I've set the cycle speed to 3 seconds per index, because it takes the inserters a little over 2 seconds to load all 500 biter eggs into the rocket silo. They may only begin to load the biter eggs into the silo on the exact first tick of their time-window to prevent overlaps with the other silos. The cycle speed can be increased by introducing faster inserters using quality.

Along those changes, i've spent a bit of time cleaning up the design and i did remove the speed beacons - as the rocket gets finished way before 500 biter eggs are produced anyway. Speed beacons would only become neccessary once you started using faster (quality) captive biter spawners.

Blueprint: https://factoriobin.com/post/fl5e43
eggBasketV2.png
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