My take on a Modular factory (WIP)

[vanatteveldt]

Inspired by the "PnP factory" thread (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8377&p=146142#p146142) I decided to take a stab at creating a modular megafactory. I started with rich resources and lots of biters; and a variety of mods (RSO, underground mining, warehousing, others).

I first built a spaghetti-like base to get the basic research done; now I started building the proper base.

The design principle, similar to dee-'s, is that there is a standardized main bus from which standard-height "processing racks" branch off. Each rack should be able to be repeated to the side indefinitely, that is, until you can fully consume and/or produce a blue belt worth of stuff.

What I'm doing a bit differently is that my main bus is composed of three parts (from right to left): ore going up, plates/circuits going down, and "everything" going up again. This allows me to build all the basics (smelting, ciruits) on the right hand side of the bus, and all actual processing on the left hand side. I assume that a smelting rack will (at some point) fully consume an ore belt, so the or is replaced by the plates going up to feed the circuits, not sure if that's the nicest way to do it. I could also integrate smelting into the circuit racks, ie make all "preprocessing" racks work from ore only.

What I'm also doing differently is that my racks are higher (14 units) and have a 4 unit gap for roboports + large poles, making it exactly 3 underground belts high.

Some pictures:

overview

station and storage

circuit production

science

I figured it would be nice to insert storage between the smelting/circuit production and the main bus, but (as always) I planned it too small so it's a bit of a mess:

storage

A closer look at the blue science rack. I make the sulphur gas in-situ from sulphur (I hate fluids). Getting 6 different resources off the bus was challenging, and I messed up by not combining the two iron lanes.

close-up

Note that all designs are very much 0.1, and the smelting is not ever rackified yet. I have a bit of a deadline since I would really like to have a nice army of robot followers before the biters evolve to behemoths, so getting things going was more important than making everything perfect...

[Pajamas]

Thanks for posting this (and thanks to dee for the original thread!) - I am about to try a similar setup and was wondering what it would look like with a wider bus. What are your thoughts on integrating combinators to work out some kind of rack control system, maybe setting conditions for when each rack should function based on storage? Not necessary obviously, but it could be fun, and would fit with this whole modular concept if done properly.

[vanatteveldt]

Interesting idea! I sometimes manually disconnect a rack to preserve e.g. red circuits.

Of course, racks automatically shut off when storage is "full" and assemblers can no longer output their products, so if you just make sure that the amount of available storage fits your needs, you don't need to do anything. What kind of more sophisticated usage did you have in mind?

(A possible exception is steel smelting as that has an internal buffer of 100 per smelter - but on the scale of things 100 steel is not a lot, my current warehouse has 80k steel, so the internal buffers add something like 20k to that... )

[Pajamas]

I am still trying to find practical applications - I am a total amateur when it comes to combinators though, so I have no idea what I'm doing. I was thinking of adding another column to the east of the bus (sort of a logic bus) that would handle signals from each rack back to a command center where there would be status indicators and the ability to turn each rack on/off. I know there is built-in stop/start as things fill up and empty out, but I'm also toying with the idea of changing manufacturing priority at will. For instance: switch on "rocket mode" and unessential low tier items that are closer to the furnaces on the bus would not have to fill up first for materials to make it to anything involved in rocket part production.

I am mostly just trying to learn more about combinators and Smart Trains (with the mod), and would love to integrate both of those tools into this modular pnp bus system. Feels like they should be a good fit somehow - I just haven't been able to figure it out yet.

[Leveller]

I still wonder why people use like 1-2 belts at most for one resource. They drain way to fast.

[vanatteveldt]

Well this is still mid-game. If I find that I use more than 1 blue belt of e.g. green circuits I can expand the setup. I've left space between the bus going up and the one going down so I can add more belts as needed later.

I think dee- solves the problem by replenishing belts half-way up, that also makes sense I think.

Do you have any screenshots of your design? (too lazy to search, sorry )

[dee-]

Well this is still mid-game. If I find that I use more than 1 blue belt of e.g. green circuits I can expand the setup. I've left space between the bus going up and the one going down so I can add more belts as needed later.

I think dee- solves the problem by replenishing belts half-way up

Yeah, that's right.

Iron and copper plates get replenished everythere they begin to drain, for example after circuit or steel racks.

Other items on the belt, mainly green circuits, can be replenished wherever needed as they just get inserted as a rack and repeated horizontally as often as necessary to get the bus belt up to the desired filling.

It's beneficial to have some "do nothing" racks in between, so you can insert new or juggle around racks when production demand increases. It's flexible!