absolute fastest train loading?

[Lothos]

does anyone have a max speed loading train setup that is also 100% even for a 4 wagon train? My biggest bottleneck is the belt to wagon handoff. Hoping with 8 blue belts I can do this without rethinking my outputs. Easy to do more than 8 with my smelter stations as I can break them apart but my circuits are all based around 8 subsets that fill one whole blue belt.

[Jupiter3927]

The trick is to have stack insterters load to and from boxes.
More inserters means faster load times and you can have up to 12 on each wagon.

[Lothos]

yeah, got that...still slow getting to the first inserter handoff. and yes, i load both sides of the wagon at the same time. a better question perhaps is how to get the most items from a single blue belt into the hands of 6 inserters evenly and as quickly as possible?

[Jan]

Loading:

At my outposts I just feed 2 blue belts into 1 splitter followed by 2 and 3 splitters.Than you can pick up with 6 inserters (both sides of the train) into a box, than in the train. This apporach is really fast (and easy).

Unloading:

With robots,always. It is simply the easiest way to do it. 12 inserters into activ provider.Done.

[impetus_maximus]

wire all 6 chests to each other with a red wire. wire all the belt to chest inserters together with a red wire. set the inserters to enable if [item being loaded] < [stack size of inserter]

wire the the chests with a red wire to the input of a arithmetic combinator. set the combinator to / -6
wire the output with a red wire to the inserters.

then wire each inserter to IT'S OWN CHEST ONLY with a GREEN wire.

this will ensure that all chests are loaded evenly.

for balanced unloading, use > [negative stack size] for the inserters.

[GMC]

This is an evenly-balanced 6-way split.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=930109461

Although it's probably overkill; with the maximum bonus, a single blue belt can't saturate 6 stack inserters.

[impetus_maximus]

6 fast inserters can strip a blue belt.

[Lothos]

the problem with most even balancing options is it slows the loading tremendously. The best option maybe to simply have a single split to go to 3 and 3 inserters on each set of 6. And then of course wire them up to a combinator like Impetus suggests.

[Emmote]

Split the belt into two and use two stations?

[GMC]

Origineel geplaatst door impetus maximus:

6 fast inserters can strip a blue belt.

That's incorrect. If you replace the stack inserters in my screenshot with fast inserters (max. bonus, stack size 3), the circuits will start to back up.

[GMC]

Origineel geplaatst door lothos:

the problem with most even balancing options is it slows the loading tremendously.

The one I posted will load a single blue belt at full speed.

Another option is to split by 2 first then by 3, which allows it to take two belts:

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[Lothos]

ok, something else I see that bothers me is on offloading. The use of splitters is needed of course, but so many designs leave that remainder in one side of splitters. Is there no clean offload from 6 down to one without leaving any trace behind and still be fast?

[Lothos]

tinkered a bit on the offload end and found the splitters actually detrimental to speed. So, GMC's onload idea for the top and my offload the bottom:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=930176069

[Warlord]

I find this an issue for me as well. Especially with my circuit loading bay. Red circuits are in such a demand that I have to use a 4-wagon train to supply it (unloading from both sides for 8 full belts), and it takes ages for 8K circuits to pull off a belt and put into a train. Usually by the time it finally fills the train, another one demanding circuits pulls up next, so there never ends up being a backlog of circuits in chests for optimal loading. And since EVERY train that came by was asking for circuits from at least the front wagon, it's load was always empty while the 3rd and 4th wagon loading areas were usually full. It annoyed me that I was suboptimally running a belt in front of 6 stack inserters for an even look. Half of my circuit factories would actually be idle since the belts they fill are empty.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=930193731

So I am trying something new. If one belt can be stripped by 6 stack inserters and leave 1 or 2 of them idle by the end, then I need to have more. My previous format was the above the rail setup. One belt splits (for a slightly even loading) and each half is handled by 3 inserters. Below, I decided that since the first 1 or 2 wagons are top priority and the last 2 are less (due to having more 2 wagon requests than 4) I decided to try to optimize loading the first two. I took the 4 lanes I use normally for loading the entire side and plugged them into the other side of the splitters. Now all 6 stack inserters are running pretty much constant.

This helped my throughput problems a bit, but I'd like to optimize the top row to be the same. Which means I need to run more than 8 belts of furnaces/circuit production, which means moving my furnace/circuit line, which means.... Etc. Maybe I'll experiment next game, but this time I kinda built myself into a corner.


On a side note:
I don't really care for even loading or unloading. I figure that if one chest fills faster than the rest, there are two things that can happen.
1: A train comes by, eats up all storage anyway and is then waiting for belt to bring more in, or.
2: One fills up faster and is not consumed, resulting in 1 or 2 full chests, which means the other 4 or 5 chests then get the remainder.

[Lothos]

only reason i concern myself with even loading/unloading is to avoid the "front wagon empty" issue you have constantly. All my unload locations have 8 belts off directly into an 8way balancer for this reason. It's helped a ton in keeping the wagons unloading evenly.

[Warlord]

Origineel geplaatst door lothos:

only reason i concern myself with even loading/unloading is to avoid the "front wagon empty" issue you have constantly. All my unload locations have 8 belts off directly into an 8way balancer for this reason. It's helped a ton in keeping the wagons unloading evenly.

Yeah. You can see I use a belt balancer down below to make sure that if one destination is backed up (or the source is dry) that everything will still load evenly. But once a belt gets to the wagon, I don't care if 1 chest/inserter pair gets more of the belt items than the rest. If the belt is consumed by the time it reaches the last inserter, then uneven inserters is not the bottleneck.

The problem is finding a way to maximize having all 6 inserters on a side pulling from a belt as fast as possible with no downtime. At that point, there is no way to better optimize loading a train short of logistics (requester chests being filled by thousands of bots) to make it so stack inserters don't even pause the milliseconds it takes to get 12 items under their claws before turning.

Edit: Now that I say that, I am going to try that out.