Does a main bus work?

[Lord Enclave]

Instead of figuring out the right amount of ingots to send to each consturctor and fiddle with over/underclocking, i was thinking of making a main bus and use a splitter to feed it towards a manifold for the constuctors then further down the line another splitter to feed other manifolds with constuctors (etc etc) and using a smart splitter for the overflow.

(sorry for the edit, forgot to explain it a bit more)

[Maehlice]

A manifold is basically the defacto way. Any other way is the hard way and just for funsies.

[Suzaku]

That's just a manifold. Just need to provide the right amount of total supply, make sure your belts are fast enough to handle it, and the rest will sort itself out.

[Helen Carnate]

It is not as efficient and it can take up a lot of space but can be easier to deal with.

[Suzaku]

Originally posted by Helen Carnate:

It is not as efficient and it can take up a lot of space but can be easier to deal with.

Eh? What they described is a manifold, which is 100% efficient and takes up the least amount of space...

[Lord Enclave]

Thanks for the replies, i wasn't sure if manifold branching to manifold would work.
Well, that saves me a lot of work.
Cheers!

[Helen Carnate]

Originally posted by Suzaku:

Originally posted by Helen Carnate:

It is not as efficient and it can take up a lot of space but can be easier to deal with.

Eh? What they described is a manifold, which is 100% efficient and takes up the least amount of space...

Wasn't totally clear with the way they described it. A main bus is generally one long line of multiple belts on top of one another with different production lines tapping into whatever items they need.

[Verios44]

I use a main bus that spans nearly the entire length of the map. I chose this path because I dont like the intermittent nature of dealing with trucks or trains. It took forever, but its not long to add new to it now as needed. It spans from the west islands all the way to the titan forest bauxite nodes'

edit the primary use of my main bus is to deliver raw materials to factories. Raw ores or T1 goods like silicon or rubber/pl,astic, etc

[The Big Brzezinski]

People seem to prefer main buses to assembly lines because assembly lines need to be planned out ahead of time to work right. A main bus will never be as efficient, productive, compact, or reliable as an assembly line, but it will work well enough without having to do math.

[Verios44]

Originally posted by The Big Brzezinski:

People seem to prefer main buses to assembly lines because assembly lines need to be planned out ahead of time to work right. A main bus will never be as efficient, productive, compact, or reliable as an assembly line, but it will work well enough without having to do math.

Unless the machine ratio is good, an assembly line isnt always feasible. I use one though for my nuclear fuel rod factory in a way, but its more like assembly sections tied together.

[The Big Brzezinski]

I've done nuclear assembly lines, all the way through to sinking the plutonium fuel rods. I could never imagine doing so with a main bus. The tolerances are just too tight. If you get something wrong and it goes out of balance, there goes your whole power grid.

[>< V ><]

Originally posted by The Big Brzezinski:

People seem to prefer main buses to assembly lines because assembly lines need to be planned out ahead of time to work right. A main bus will never be as efficient, productive, compact, or reliable as an assembly line, but it will work well enough without having to do math.

Being someone that does condensed matter physics, a lot of math, a main bus is just as efficient with resources. It does take longer to saturate, especially if the main bus line has low item count, but it is vastly more compact, just as reliable and productive and less time consuming to build.

When I'm putting down 100 refineries, hundreds of assemblers and constructors, I see nothing that is gained by load balancing everything. The amount of time to build all the load balancing for hundreds of buildings, is less efficient with time when a main bus would be saturated and at full production already.

[LazerRay]

I have a few variations of manifolds based on what works in the set up:

All basic Splitters for things that need even distribution (no overflow)
A Smart Splitter at the end point of basic ones in-case of overflow (works like above with a slight exception)
All Smart Splitters for a cascading manifold for when I want machines to fill up in sequence and still handle overflow

[nfgman]

A main bus commonly refers to a tall stack of belts, sometimes in a loop. Physically and visually obstructive. Associated with 2 dimensional factories although I've seen exceptions.

The concept is Factorio-like in that you pick from and supply the belts and it provides some sort of spaghetti straightening.

[Rai]

A main bus is great if you don't plan on sinking the end products. This means the production line will eventually backup once the buildings and storages are full and make way for other production lines. This is great for item hubs for example where you really just want to start production but not really care about throughput.

Main buses for continuous production, don't work as well in this game compared to factorio imo simply because the belt speed of the game is too slow even at mk5. Once you start building on a global scale of say, 14000 steel per minute thats 18 mk5 belts. Everytime you split off from the belt you'd need to rebalance all 18 of those belts because thats just how main busses work or if the manifold requires more than 780items you'd need to inject more items into the manifold midway. In most cases this is just as if not more difficult than properly planning out each production line with the maximum throughput in mind.

[Verios44]

Originally posted by Rai:

A main bus is great if you don't plan on sinking the end products. This means the production line will eventually backup once the buildings and storages are full and make way for other production lines. This is great for item hubs for example where you really just want to start production but not really care about throughput.

Main buses for continuous production, don't work as well in this game compared to factorio imo simply because the belt speed of the game is too slow even at mk5. Once you start building on a global scale of say, 14000 steel per minute thats 18 mk5 belts. Everytime you split off from the belt you'd need to rebalance all 18 of those belts because thats just how main busses work or if the manifold requires more than 780items you'd need to inject more items into the manifold midway. In most cases this is just as if not more difficult than properly planning out each production line with the maximum throughput in mind.

My main bus, if you can even call it that feeds many continous lines including some critical like power production. My key is there isnt one or two lines. Take your 14k steel a min scenario. I would divide that into belts that max at 600 parts a minute. So that would be 23 full belts and one left over. Each of those belts would be destined for its own next in chain product. No mixing and matching. That way nothing can backup as the math is not messed with. Only thing that hurts efficiency is transportation time. Hence my love of drones.