Motorised conveyor

[psusi]

What is it's purpose? It looks like the output speed of a standard hopper is slightly less than what a standard conveyor can carry, but only barely. I guess a motorized conveyor can keep it full but without one it seems like it's maybe 90% full already so... not much difference. Also a mk 1 forced induction seems to be enough to make a smelter eat more than a standard conveyor can supply ( or at least more than a standard hopper can ), so what is the point of the higher ones?

[CyberBlaster]

Originally posted by psusi:

It looks like the output speed of a standard hopper is slightly less than what a standard conveyor can carry, but only barely.

Hoppers output at 50 items a min (per side) and a conveyor can handle 100 items a min.
(On standard settings).

So that's double, I wouldn't call that "barely".

The Motorised Conveyor can also output faster then 100 items a min as well. I think its around 150 items a min (someone feel free to give exact number if I am wrong) so it can work for pipes.

[zzmmorgan]

The motorised conveyor speed should be about 3x that of the standard conveyor although that may depend on the resource settings and such on your world. The higher resource settings tend to have faster conveyor speeds so it might not be as noticeable. Depending you how you set stuff up you should see better throughput with the Mk2 and Mk3 forced induction. Although you also get higher threat levels with that so you'll want to be prepared with defence when you do that.
Obviously you'll get better movement with matter movers but that takes a LOT more power to get that kind of speed than the motorised conveyor uses.

Also the hopper speed is per side so you can run multiple conveyors into and out of hoppers to play with the throughput. And the hopper itself doesn't necessarily limit the speed as the belt, matter mover, etc. can dicatate the speed of stuff going into or out of a hopper..

Feel free to experiment - I learned a whole lot more just playing with stuff than anything else :)
One thing I found was that the motor speed and such on the ore extractors had a LOT to do with how fast stuff was moving to the smelters - until you get the hopper on the extractor staying full then your logistics is NOT slowing you down but the motor speed on the extractor is. Evemtually at the higher tier motors THEN your belt speed will start coming into play.

[psusi]

Ahh, I think I chose the slower conveyor setting this time because last time I played I thought conveyors were fast enough not to need to bother with minecarts. With a mk 1 forced induction, the hopper can't keep up with the smelter so I'm trying to figure out how to boost the feed speed but it looks like a motorized conveyor isn't going to help much.

With just two extractors one of which has only the basic motor upgrade in it, and a joint conveyor line feeding one hopper that then feeds another that the smelter with a mk 1 forced induction pulls from, the first hopper stays full and the second slowly empties. I got a second smelter now and am trying to figure out how to keep them fed.

[zzmmorgan]

Originally posted by psusi:

Ahh, I think I chose the slower conveyor setting this time because last time I played I thought conveyors were fast enough not to need to bother with minecarts. With a mk 1 forced induction, the hopper can't keep up with the smelter so I'm trying to figure out how to boost the feed speed but it looks like a motorized conveyor isn't going to help much.

With just two extractors one of which has only the basic motor upgrade in it, and a joint conveyor line feeding one hopper that then feeds another that the smelter with a mk 1 forced induction pulls from, the first hopper stays full and the second slowly empties. I got a second smelter now and am trying to figure out how to keep them fed.

Yeah depending on the settings things vary quite a bit. On the more scarce settings it takes so much ore to get an ingot I have to really push the input to the smelters and haven't ever run into a problem emptying them :)
On the other hand rush mode everything is fast.......I guess that's why it's called that..............It can be fun at times though as another benefit is really large veins of ore that are easy to find..