Belt consolidation?

[Gus_Smedstad]

I know how to do arbitrary 1 to N belt distribution evenly. What's not clear to me is how to evenly consolidate N to 1.

The specific application is a common one - moving items from a train unloading station to a central belt. A two-car train has 14 unloading stations. What I'm seeing is that many simple designs unload some boxes much earlier than others. I've had, for example, the first four boxes empty, while boxes 12-14 were nearly full. This leads to poor performance in unloading trains.

[Boogieman14]

I the past, I've done things like this, which gave a reasonably smooth output (most likely even more so, now that inserters next to a cargo wagon all work at equal speeds). I haven't tried this layout in a 0.12 game yet, so not sure how well it'll perform now.

[Gus_Smedstad]

That's somewhat similar to the design I had which had problems. Also, I see splitters in there with 1 input and 1 output - what's the intent? Some sort of timing thing?

[Boogieman14]

Probably a lane shifter Remember this was in the time when belt corners still messed things up so in some cases a splitter was better for shifting.

[Ohlmann]

Probably a lane shifter Remember this was in the time when belt corners still messed things up so in some cases a splitter was better for shifting.

Does that mean that belt corners aren't slower than regular belt anymore ? I missed that in the updates.

[Gus_Smedstad]

Corners aren't slow anymore. Belts now model the objects they're carrying in a much simpler way, rather than moving items with their own collision rectangles.