It is well known that taking items from belts has speed limitation in comparison with taking items from chests/assemblers, because of the stack size bonuses. This is the reason for the ubiquitous green circuit build, with wire assemblers leading directly into circuit assemblers - putting the wires on belts would simply not give enough throughput, because inserters wouldn't be able to pick them up as fast.
With the rocket silo we have similar problems - It takes thousands of ingredients, while taking a very short time (30 seconds) to construct. Combine this with the fact that the largest assembler is still 3x3, you can never get enough items with belts and inserters to make it at full speed.
The same happens for satellite - it needs hundreds of various components, and only takes 3 seconds to craft.
This leaves the player with two options -
1. Use belts and inserters, and face that they will never make full use (or even close to that!) of their assemblers' time.
2. Use logistic robots, taking from various chests filled by many inserters.
For me, I think it is a bit problematic - I have nothing against logistic robots, but I tend to think of them as quality-of-life mechanism, allowing you perhaps to make simpler builds in tight spaces, but should they be necessary? Are we really to be forced to use them to achieve full efficiency?
I would love it if there was a way to make 100% efficient factories without having to resort to logistic robots - sure, if you want to you can, but you should also be able to void them.
This can be done in various ways - the easier would be either re-balancing recipes, so things taking a lot of ingredients would also take longer to construct (3 seconds for a satellite? Why not 30? And a rocket silo in under a minute? Very impressive). A different approach would be to make bigger assembling machines - make a 4x4 or even 5x5 assembling machines, and have the very resource-intensive recipes use only this.
So, what do you guys think? Anyone even agrees with me that this is a problem?
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