In the early game it's pretty good actually. The machine gun is fairly powerful with some bullet damage research. The car is very squishy, but against small and even some medium biters that's fineCars NOT for combat, yes for mobility, extra inventory and exploration.
For some things, but not everything. Dedicated lines are good for circuits for example. For 2 belts of green circuits you need 3 belts of copper and 2 belts of iron. That's a perfect ratio (and the whole line down to blue circuits is nicely ratioed) and a lot of materials. And you also need tons of green circuits. So it makes sense to run dedicated lines.Multiple Dedicated lines?
Otherwise, one of the first design paradigms is the so-called "bus":
You put common materials on the bus, draw from them with splitters and then shove what's left to one side with priorities. That way you always have a full belt at the bottom and the upper ones deplete as more material is removed.
What you put on it is sometimes obvious (like a stone/brick belt), but others are personal preference. For example some people belt iron gears because they compress nicely (2 plates -> 1 gear), but you can also produce them locally
You can also easily build taps that draw a half lane of each in a compact form. That's enough for a lot of things
Leave two tiles between each group of 4 so you can use undergrounds between them
Keep in mind that without dedicated copper/iron lines for things like circuits and belt production 2 belts of each is not enough. Many people go for 4 iron and 4 copper. But I've found that with dedicated belts for circuits and dedicated iron belts for my "make everything" factory two belts is enough for the rest. Just has to be upgraded to higher tiers earlier than when more belts are available. It's also possible to inject new materials after one belt has been used up. Likewise I don't run the green circuits for red and blue circuits over the bus.
This is what you need on the bus for 90 science per minute with only the rocket silo using productivity modules:
https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.htm ... +76RBZTz8=
Doesn't even need blue belts. And most of the copper goes to low density structures, which could have a dedicated copper belt too
And to distribute material from multiple production lines to multiple belts look up belt balancers:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics
There are many ready to use blueprint books out there
Direct insertion is very good for some things. The main examples are steel and green circuits. Steel needs 5 iron plates, but takes 5 times as long. And green circuits craft very fast, but need lots of copper cable. So it's best to directly insert the cables. It's usually a bad idea to belt cables as 1 copper plate becomes 2 cables. The exception is red circuits as they have a very long crafting time.Interconected assemblers, ignoring belts? in that case, how this can be replicated if it's needed?
Green circuits for example is often done like this:
Sometimes direct insertion is also just convenient like engines into electric engines
That's good for a very large base, but you don't start like that. You'd build a belt based starter base for science and basic production and then you use that to build distributed production blocksThematic regions? (Example: in this location, copper cable and iron comes in train, goes to a location with assemblers, there green circuits are mannufactured and another train transports this green circuits to the station of the assemblers wich crafts inserters or whatever.
Not an issue with a bus-like system. What you don't use moves on to be used by something else. If it's not used at all the belt backs uphow do you feed the assemblers that demand's 3 items ...1 line of assemblers means unbalanced imput/output belts