RoddyVR wrote:this is from wiki (hope nothign changed in .12):
Longest recipie in chain is battery at 5 seconds, so lets balance the production for 5 seconds:
The fastest recipie is the acid plant, so
in 5 seconds, 1 acid chemplant will make 25 acid and use up 25 sulfur
in 5 seconds, 12.5 battery chepmplants will use up 25 acid
in 5 seconds, 12.5 sulfur plants will make 25 sulfur (and use up 37.5 petrolium which means you need something like 7 refineries just to feed this)
So its either 12:1:12 for sulfur:acid:battery
or if you want to be perfect, its 25:2:25 (but you'll probably never use that many batteries).
There's something wrong with those sulfur / sulfuric acid figures, but they haven't changed in 0.12 as far as I know, so the math on the wiki [
was fine, he just read it wrong]. Even a single sulfur plant will make more than 10 sulfur in 5 seconds (it's 10 every 4 real-time seconds, without modules). Chemical plants all run at 1.25x speed by default, so a one second recipe actually takes only 0.8 seconds to complete without any modules -- but conveniently, we can ignore this fact since it doesn't change the ratios between chemical plant recipes.
One chemical plant converts 3 petroleum into 2 sulfur per "second" (as listed in the recipe, rather than real-time seconds). One chemical plant converts 5 sulfur into 5 sulfuric acid per "second". The most optimal ratio between sulfur and acid plants is therefore 5:2, as seen here:
That said, after filling up the one tank I built for acid, these 7 plants have never had to run at anywhere near full capacity. The ten battery plants and fifteen processing unit assemblers I was using in this base have never required it to run at more than 50%.
Batteries are 2 acid per 5 "seconds" per battery plant. With ten plants, that's 4 acid per "second", which can be handled by a single sulfuric acid plant fed by two sulfur plants. If you have more than ten battery plants or a LOT of processing unit production, either a larger acid tank buffer to handle burst production, or a third sulfur plant to get acid production up to the full 5 per second, could typically do the job - you only need more acid output if sustained production actually outstrips a single acid plant's capacity for a significant period of time, giving it no opportunity to refill the buffer tank. But if you really want massive battery output (processing units are a minimal drain on acid, really) then a 2:5 build like I showed should work.
This build can support up to 25 battery plants -- a bit less if you want sustained processing unit production as well, although PUs take only token amounts of sulfuric acid, at 0.5 every 15 "seconds". That means if you make them in level 3 assemblers (which match the 1.25x crafting speed of chemical plants) you can run (15 / 0.5) * 10 = 300 level 3 assemblers instead of 25 battery plants - that is to say, the amount of acid consumed by each battery plant could instead run 12 level 3 assemblers crafting processing units.
(Converting to real-time seconds just requires multiplying the amount per second by 1.25, so the 5:2 build generates 12.5 sulfuric acid per second.)
For advanced circuits, you can actually run eight circuit assemblers per copper wire assembler, and a single plastic plant will also support eight circuit assemblers, whether level 2 or 3. You can find a couple of advanced circuit builds I've used in the same album I linked from the image above.
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