Factorio Forums

for some mods, it's necessary that poles can be connected over a long distance.
you could hack this by connecting them and teleporting one of the poles, but if you don't want them to get disconnected by players shift-clicking on them, you have to do the teleporting thing again when the script notices that they have been disconnected.
or you could use a combinator, which has no limit on the wire distance, but it doesn't have the property draw_circuit_wires, which get rendered on both surfaces even though the neighbour is on another surface.

example:
i'm working on a microprocessor mod, which has 10-20 connectors that connect to another surface.
hacking the wire connections is the only solution because transmitting the signals via script wouldn't be performance friendly.
each microprocessor has it's own dedicated area on the other surface, so the distance between them can get really big.

In my opinion, it would be more meaningful to allow for wireless connections. This has been suggested in the following threads:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=49317 Radio Links for signals transmission
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=47429 global circuit network
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=51628 Radio Signal Tower
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=51811 "Pipboy" for wireless network/circuit manipulation
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=62384 Logistic circuit signals through radars

Try using a basewide network by connecting all the major power poles via red and/or green wires. Buffer outputs to the network with arithmetic combinators that simply output the desired signal, e.g. green * 1 output green or green + 0 output green. This isolates the network from stray local variables. This essentially gives you 90 channels of communication. 45 each on red and green lines. More if you use signals other than alphanumeric and colors.