Factorio: Logistics Bridging, Logistics Relay, and Cellular Factory (prototype)
Here's an idea I've been playing around with for a while in Factorio. What you see in this video is a pair of tileable logistics storage cells, with their logistics supply areas separated by a gap of one tile. Requester and provider chests are placed on either side of the supply area gap such that resources can be moved from one logistics network to the other. This is the logistics bridge. These storage cells have a fairly large supply area around them, which can be used to build small, cellular factories with their own storage. The high density of roboports allows 1000+ bots to work continuously in each cell on average, giving very high throughput. The logistics bridge here is 54 inserters wide, giving a theoretical throughput of about 550 items/second. Observed throughput for this over a five minute test was about 460 items/second. A few things to notice about this: - The density of roboports along the sides with logistics bridges will increase throughput, since these roboports are preferentially used for charging. In this case, long wait times for charging deteriorated the throughput. The extra roboports are simply tacked on to the side of a cell here. - The storage cells can be tiled together if the storage area of a single cell is insufficient. I would not recommend tiling more than 3x3 or 4x4 from previous experience with large logistics networks. - You can create chains of cells linked together with logistics bridges to form a logistic relay to build up factories on a macro scale. However, the slowest logistic bridge in the relay will be the limiting factor, so plan accordingly. See http://pastebin.com/pyKAJLzx for the blueprint string.
Here's an idea I've been playing around with for a while in Factorio. What you see in this video is a pair of tileable logistics storage cells, with their logistics supply areas separated by a gap of one tile. Requester and provider chests are placed on either side of the supply area gap such that resources can be moved from one logistics network to the other. This is the logistics bridge. These storage cells have a fairly large supply area around them, which can be used to build small, cellular factories with their own storage. The high density of roboports allows 1000+ bots to work continuously in each cell on average, giving very high throughput. The logistics bridge here is 54 inserters wide, giving a theoretical throughput of about 550 items/second. Observed throughput for this over a five minute test was about 460 items/second. A few things to notice about this: - The density of roboports along the sides with logistics bridges will increase throughput, since these roboports are preferentially used for charging. In this case, long wait times for charging deteriorated the throughput. The extra roboports are simply tacked on to the side of a cell here. - The storage cells can be tiled together if the storage area of a single cell is insufficient. I would not recommend tiling more than 3x3 or 4x4 from previous experience with large logistics networks. - You can create chains of cells linked together with logistics bridges to form a logistic relay to build up factories on a macro scale. However, the slowest logistic bridge in the relay will be the limiting factor, so plan accordingly. See http://pastebin.com/pyKAJLzx for the blueprint string.