[Impractical Logic Puzzle] Bending Power to your Will!

[CherryKiss]

OK, so I had a couple of ideas that became puzzles to me. I don't think either of these are something you'd actually want to use in a serious game, but the puzzles were fun to think about, so I thought I would share them here.

First puzzle: How do you force steam power on BEFORE solar? The idea is, you want full steam going before your power grid accepts any solar power. How do you manage this?

Second puzzle: How do you make steam power behave like solar? Try to force steam power to turn itself off at night, and then turn itself back on in the morning, behaving like solar panels!

Third puzzle: How do you force boilers to only load with a single piece of coal/fuel/wood? Only allow the loading of a new piece of fuel when the last one starts to burn in the boiler.

Are all three of these puzzles possible? I'm pretty sure the first one is possible, just have to see if it actually works in game....I'm not as sure yet about the other two! Show me your power skills, ace Factorio players!

[ficolas]

Totally need to try this .
I know how to do 1 and 2 but I dont think I can do 3...

[Zourin]

Concept solutions

The solutions for 1 & 2 rely on manual wiring and 'sharing' accumulators between two separate power networks.

To separate solar power, create two substations next to one another, and shift-click the substations to remove their connecting wires. In the 'shared' area, place accumulators. manually wire one substation with the solar power network, and the other with the steam power network, and you've created a failover coupling. When power for one side or the other fails to accumulator power, the other network will power up to feed the draining accumulators bank. The rate of power exchanged depends on the number of accumulators (~300 per shared accumulator)

To 'flip' a Steam plant to only power on during the day, have a wood power pole with no connections (shift-click) that links a solar panel with an inserter that supplies fuel to the boiler line. When the power level drops, the inserter stops providing fuel to the boilers. To make this happen faster, add lamps to match daytime output so the inserter slows/stops when it starts to get dark.

The third depends on the length of the boiler line. A pyramid splitters fed by a single standard inserter can (slowly) and individually feed each boiler. This requires a power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, or 32) number of boilers, as a 'solid pyramid' will weigh the central boilers heavily compared to the ends.

[ficolas]

You cant base the 3rd one on timing, because what if the factory consumes less in some time?

[ssilk]

Tip: For the third you need to know, when a piece of coal is burned down.


Ehm. And it works only with inserter stacksize = 1.
Edit: Perhaps I will find a solution...

[ssilk]

Hehe. It works for every stacksize now.

Next Tip

To compare something you need a mirror.

[immibis]

For the third one:

Spoiler

alternate coal and wood?

[ssilk]

Next Tip

Nobody said, that we can't use a mirrored power production.

[CherryKiss]

heh heh I like that this has people thinking! I've no good ideas on the third one yet, but people definitely got the first two fast!

[immibis]

I'm pretty sure I have the third one solved, but it depends on a bugfix in 0.9.2.

[ssilk]

needed items

2 steam engines, 2 boilers, 2 smart inserter, 1 fast inserter, 1 smart chest, 3-4 green wires, 1-2 poles, some belts, pump(s), pipes, etc. For the testing also 3 radars (energy consumption), a chest with the coal filled into (works with any type of fuel, but not mixed), and a fast inserter, which puts them on the belts. For starting I need to put one coal in any boiler.

@ CherryKiss: yeah, the third one was hard. want to see such stuff in the game.

[Marqee]

is there a wat to turn off steam engines during daytime and power them on during night ?
mean automatically.

[ssilk]

https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... ailable.3F

Replace the accu with a solar panel.

[ssilk]

Solution for number 3

Bildschirmfoto 2014-02-28 um 21.17.02.png (520.58 KiB) Viewed 6814 times

The both smart inserters are just configured to "Coal < 1".
It starts by placing one or two coal in any boiler. The left inserter begins to work. Lower inserter puts coal in chest. blue inserter in burner. This goes on, until 5 coal are in the lower boiler.
The coal runs thru to the upper boiler and waits for inserting. When one coal in the lower is burned, both smart inserters will insert. Because both boilers are on the same network and both burn the same type of fuel they both burn in the same speed, so in the upper boiler is never more than 1 coal.

[CherryKiss]

oooh, very nice, ssilk!

A couple minor things I don't like:

- that this system requires to be started in a certain way, with the top inserter not getting access to fuel on the belt until after the bottom is full, and if it is not started correctly, it won't work right.
- the system requires readjustments if the fuel type gets changed
- the system assumes both boilers are on or off together

Other than that though, I really like the solution

[immibis]

Puzzle 3 solution

Pretend the chest on the right, above the power pole, has a piece of wood in it.

The piece of wood is detected by the middle-left smart inserter, which moves one piece of copper to the second chest in the chain. Then the middle-right smart inserter detects the copper in the second chest, and removes it. At the same time, the top-left smart inserter also detects the copper in the second chest, and extracts a piece of coal, which gets placed in the boiler.

A moment later, the inserter chain at the bottom right finishes moving the copper plate into the bottom chest. The bottom smart inserter detects this, and moves it back to the chest it was originally in. At the same time, the top-right smart inserter detects it and extracts the piece of wood. The top-left normal inserter (the one feeding into the boiler) will wait until the boiler slot has no coal in it, and then move the wood into the boiler. The boiler won't burn the wood as it's still burning the last piece of coal, so the top smart inserter extracts the wood from the boiler (in 0.9.2+), resetting the machine.

For a slightly improved response time, the top conveyor can be replaced by an inserter chain, or even a smart-inserter-chain that keeps a spare piece of wood at the end of the chain.

This is built in 0.8.8, but requires a bugfix from 0.9.2 (which is not released yet) to be able to

remove items from the boiler using an inserter

. Until then, it still works if you manually

remove the wood from the boiler and place it on the conveyor belt

.

Unlike ssilk's, this does not need a "mirror" boiler and steam engine.

[ssilk]

- that this system requires to be started in a certain way, with the top inserter not getting access to fuel on the belt until after the bottom is full, and if it is not started correctly, it won't work right.
- the system requires readjustments if the fuel type gets changed
- the system assumes both boilers are on or off together

1: Well, another smart inserter, which puts the coal to the upper only, if the chest is filled. But without defining the exact start and finish conditions this is a correct solution.
2: well, yes, that can't be solved like so. But the conditions don't say, that it may change. And this works with any electrical load and for much bigger power production, cause it is small. and guarantees that there is really only one coal in it. Any solution, which works by outputting from a boiler cannot guarantee that.
3: that's the point of this construction. there is no way to really find out the exact time, when a fuel was burned like so. The system reacts within 0.21 seconds and it just mirrors the movements to the other side.

This construction can be used for things like "insert also this, if I insert that".

[MF-]

I think immibis's solution is elegant.

If you needed to reduce latency, perhaps one could prepare alternating coal-wood input on a belt.
+ force the boiler-loading inserter to load them in order by "duplicating" it (ie. to have one inserter to move one item from belt to ground and then another inserter to move from ground to boiler.)

That could result in reaching the theoretical throughput maximum of 1/2, right?

[CherryKiss]

immibis, I am dazed and confused or at least I was...I had to read it twice, very slowly the second time, to get it

very neat though!