Balancing Steel Barrels in Oil Barreling stations

[Serenity]

But you'd have to include the barrels on the train and at the outpost into that. Otherwise the barrels get loaded on the train and your barrel factory starts producing barrels

[nobodx]

You say how many want in stock at your base. Say you want to stock 200 barrels. Your train come along and take all of them. Your factory builds new ones (up to 200) while the outpost takes the empty ones, turns them into full ones and put them back into the train. When the train returns to your base, the full ones are replaced with empty ones, but the total amount of empty + full ones shouldn't change any more, unless you add another outpost, then the amount of barrels there are added. (I use a smart / logistic chest at the outposts to control the amount of empty barrels there)

If you want to go crazy, you can hook up the outpost with combinators, so that the outpost only take as many barrels as needed there.

[mngrif]

My solution is to simply load/unload directly (direct insertion, no belt or chest) from the wagon to the assemblers. You can easily fit two per wagon per side, but I don't need that kind of throughput. The best part is the same station will work for both loading and unloading, just change the recipe.

screeny

[Mensaniac]

But you'd have to include the barrels on the train and at the outpost into that. Otherwise the barrels get loaded on the train and your barrel factory starts producing barrels

No, it works by fuzzy logic. Over time it will gradually approach the optimum number of barrels, although that will probably not be a full cargo load. It is not designed to be a deterministic system. It is designed to adjust the number of barrels such that the cargo is full eventually (small backlog of 1-5 empty barrels waiting to be loaded), but not to swamp the system with excessive barrels. It is also designed to allow you to add additional loading stations without having to worry about adjusting the barrel counts, it will do this automagically.

Worst case scenario is that you have a loading station with its output queue full of full barrels, and its input queue full of empties and a train arrives that is full of barrels, In this case nothing will be transferred, and thus the system breaks down . When the train returns to the unload station however, no new barrels will be added to the system, as there will be a backlog o empties, so it at least doesn't make the problem worse. I have been thinking of a small workaround for this situation, It basically removes some empty barrels from the train at the unload station, and adds half of them back, but requeues the other half. So it works as a half speed remover, so that the input queue will always approach empty. Ill post pics when I finish testing it.

[ratchetfreak]

But you'd have to include the barrels on the train and at the outpost into that. Otherwise the barrels get loaded on the train and your barrel factory starts producing barrels

No, it works by fuzzy logic. Over time it will gradually approach the optimum number of barrels, although that will probably not be a full cargo load. It is not designed to be a deterministic system. It is designed to adjust the number of barrels such that the cargo is full eventually (small backlog of 1-5 empty barrels waiting to be loaded), but not to swamp the system with excessive barrels. It is also designed to allow you to add additional loading stations without having to worry about adjusting the barrel counts, it will do this automagically.

Worst case scenario is that you have a loading station with its output queue full of full barrels, and its input queue full of empties and a train arrives that is full of barrels, In this case nothing will be transferred, and thus the system breaks down . When the train returns to the unload station however, no new barrels will be added to the system, as there will be a backlog o empties, so it at least doesn't make the problem worse. I have been thinking of a small workaround for this situation, It basically removes some empty barrels from the train at the unload station, and adds half of them back, but requeues the other half. So it works as a half speed remover, so that the input queue will always approach empty. Ill post pics when I finish testing it.

One thing you can do is always reserve/filter some spots in the cargo wagon for full barrels so that you can guarantee that at least some oil gets transferred for each trip.

[DerivePi]

OK, this should work - Just like Nobodx's post, this uses the first item off the wagon to start a timer. It unloads all barrels from the wagon but only counts the full ones and then replaces the full barrels with empty ones plus a marginal amount (1 stack should do).

OIL STATION.jpg (392.88 KiB) Viewed 2911 times

Still need something to check if there are too many full barrels though. Maybe keep the timer from resetting until full barrels are below a maximum.