clockwork assembly line factory

Smart setups of railway stations, intelligent routing, solutions to complex train-routing problems.
Please provide - only if it makes sense of course - a blueprint of your creation.
blazespinnaker
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clockwork assembly line factory

Post by blazespinnaker »

Based on the idea that a train/rail is the equivalent of 20 belts (each slot is like the side of a belt)

Here's the idea. Really, you don't need a blueprint, anyone with any basic knowledge can do this from scratch and achieve very high SPM. DIY is always more fun than just pasting in someone's BP, which rarely I find satisfying unless it's a nice rube Goldberg circuit invention.
screen2.png
screen2.png (341.08 KiB) Viewed 3561 times
https://imgur.com/a/hchSCqC

https://imgur.com/a/I7fcZqS


No belts, bots, chests used.

Train rotates through patches and loads enough raw resources for all science in *each* wagon. Mostly waits at iron and then copper, with about 1/5 of the time at coal and stone (to get the ratios right). They then proceed through a series of steps where raw resources are removed from the wagons and replaced with intermediates necessary for the entire science build. There is no interaction between wagons in the train, each wagon is a self contained unit.

As you add production, you can copy/paste the assembly line and expand downwards.

I have just gs/rs in the image above, but you'd have stops on each line for: plates, gc, gears, belts, inserters, red science, green science, steel, pipes, rc, engines, sulfur, blue science, sticks, rails, modules, bricks, furnaces, violet science, bc, red engines, batteries, frames, lds, yellow science. rcu. jetfuel is all fluid so mabye not train fed. white science you'll want to pull and deliver to the labs like any other science.
Last edited by blazespinnaker on Thu Oct 07, 2021 8:26 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Amarula
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Re: clockwork assembly line factory

Post by Amarula »

blazespinnaker wrote: Thu Oct 07, 2021 8:17 am each wagon is a self contained unit.
I have seen some similar train line ideas, but doing it all in one cargo wagon, ooh that is a nice challenge! I would love to see a couple of close ups, and more specifics on the train schedule to load just the right amount of each raw resource.

Thanks for sharing!
My own personal Factorio super-power - running out of power.
blazespinnaker
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Re: clockwork assembly line factory

Post by blazespinnaker »

I use 20s between every stop. There are two train stops at every stop, one is TrainMain and TrainContinue

The route for every train is
TRainMain (wait 20s and rail signal must be green)
TrainContinue (no wait)

Circuit logic is required for controlling loading / unloading.

I did a poc in creative. It outputs about 30 spm per line. I am currently using trains of length 1. Longer would be better for more density, but more cumbersome also because of the length per line would increase. Also, you’ll get greater gap / idle times as the entire train needs to clear before the next in line can join in.

The approach Is basically a 40 sided belt with 1 space reach access to the entire belt with heavy circuit logic.
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mrvn
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Re: clockwork assembly line factory

Post by mrvn »

First please inline the images. There is no need for all the tracking crap imgurl adds. And over time the image links die as images get removed from imgur.com. The forum is perfectly capable of hosting it's own images. And worse firefox, at least mine, just shows a blank grey page for imgurl.com main links. They have some bad javascript in there that doesn't work.

Now to the real topic:

Can a single wagon hold enough material? Probably yes for science packs. How about rocket parts? How much ore do you need to make one of each rocket part? Still I imagine the cargo wagons get less and less full as you progress. At some point it's really wasteful.

What about oil or other fluids? Do you add oil every 50 wagons or something? That would be some interaction between wagons but unavoidable. Using pipes for oil and water wouldn't be expandable.

For white science maybe a train as a whole could have enough rocket parts to start a rocket and the white science is then split over all the wagons in the train again. Would mean each train carries 1000 of each science pack so it's balanced. And one wagon would have to build the satelite.
blazespinnaker
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Re: clockwork assembly line factory

Post by blazespinnaker »

Will do! Speedrun forum only allows imgur, which is why I was using it. I wish there was a way to paste in images rather than having to save them on this forum, like on imgur. Hassle.

Here's the calculator for 10 spm, including white science. You can think of 10 SPM as all color science + 10 rocket parts per minute, before adjusting for productivity modules. So the answer is yes, one cargo wagon can hold all the raw ore. Thinking about it, you'd probably have to belt or bot (shudder) the white science from shared rocket silos. In which case, it probably makes sense to do the same for all the science to labs. All depends on how purist you want to be.

I don't think it matters except that you do probably want to max surround your labs with beacons if possible, which is not possible without intermediate belts / chests from rail. AFAIK. I'm sure someone will prove me wrong now. Note that using intermediate wagons / cars / etc as chests is the same as using chests.

https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.htm ... 6Y9Df1BQ==

It's wasteful, yes, but really wasteful? I dunno, maybe. I cloned in about 7K assemblers and idled them and didn't see a UPS hit. Yes, this factory type will not get awards for density per sqm, without a doubt. Train pathing is dead simple, but perhaps with all those trains it will start to hamper UPS.

Personally, I think its sweet spot is for the 100% speedrun where you get all 100% of the achievements using saved blueprints and megapatches and little to near zero biters.

Also, if you just want to try something more about clearing out biters with a vengeance, putting down outpost mining patches and is simple and easily expandable to get high SPM, this is a way to go. You don't even need a blueprint to paste from, you can figure it out from scratch quite easily. I think this is very admirable goal for a design, helping everyone fully enjoy the game regardless of their time commitment and expertise.

And I say it's very simple for high SPM because expanding production here is simply a matter of putting down more track across ore patches and then expanding the factory is just one blueprint paste to add more lines with trains. No confusion, very easy to see what's exactly going on.

There are ways to increase density though if that's important to you. Honestly though, if that's your goal, I wouldn't start out with this approach. UPS, maybe, speedrunning, definitely, but density.. I don't see how it would help, but I could be missing something.

It is a somewhat risky early game vanilla strategy because of the expansive space it takes up, likely you'll constantly be running into biters.

Oil and fluids would be piped in. Tank wagons are fun, but awkward compared to pipes. I also find oil is fairly limitless in factorio due to the ability to draw upon exhausted wells. My late game map I'm using, I have exhausted about 10 ore patches, but I'm still using the first 3 oil wells I set up in the game (huge infinite prod bonus, beacons, etc helps)

It's also important that is just a kernel of an idea. I'm sure as it is explored, optimizations (likely through clever circuit logic and critical compromises on the various design assumptions) will be found. Hopefully I won't be the only one finding them. I think it's cool to try simple ideas.

And remember - this is Factorio! (said with the voice from that sparta movie) Around here, we thrive on over thinking totally irrelevant and useless things. But if must find something practical about it, use it as a baseline production solution that raises the bar on more complicated approaches.

Here's the blueprint of the POC you can use in editor mode / creative mod. Might have to replace the power source. It has all the ideas, but obv some work needs to be done in optimizing the circuit logic.



edit to add: I did a clone test with the TrainSwitchMode to set trains to automatic mode. Time usage started to climb around 500 1 length trains following a path similar to above (stops, signals, route, etc). My guess for better UPS efficiency you'll want to go with longer trains. Instead of having N trains stopping on a line, you could just have one train going through a series of stops. You could even make the train extra long and have it go over multiple lines. Ideas! This model is rich with them, I'm sure you can squeeze out a lot of efficiencies.

Yeah, simply putting down 4 furnace/assembler per wagon and stringing them together is waaay more optimal. By having stops that the train proceeds through you don't have to worry about the train leaving station problem (In fact, it's way better). This is 130 versus 56 total crafting speed for just two trains + two stops which is the equivalent of 6 wagons on the long train.

Simply put, train update and UPS will be a zero issue here. time usage will likely come from circuit network and entity update. Entity update is very hard to reduce beyond necessary consumption (not using belts and chests should help), but careful usage of the circuit stuff can reduce the damage there.

AFAIK however, powered idle entities consume no update time, so any 'wastage' is just memory at most, and we have plenty of that.
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