Advise for setting up fuel distribution for trucks and drones

[PieceOfPeace]

I have no problem with setting up my factories without the need of calculation tools, but I struggle a lot with transportation after finishing phase 4, when the distance is too long for belts but too short for trains (or too few items to be worth a train).
How do you distribute your fuel to the location where you need it? For a coal node it would be an easy task to get fuel but most of the time you will want to have 100% of it for production purposes.
For drones I have a fuel production but I don't know how to distribute the fuel to the drone port without overflowing it. The idea was to setup three drones for three different drone ports (I know that only one destination need the fuel for a roundtrip) with different destinations, but that doesn't work well because one port got too much and other ports too less fuel.
I would really appreciate some advise to not belt everything around or have trains that are shipping the same items back and fourth, because the demand is so low.

I play in a way to just beat the game. No Megafactories or hugh production lines. I only produce what I need. (only went crazy with my coal power plant with 96 coal generators, because it was easier to do compared to fuel and nuclear power)

[GobboKirk]

I just let the ports fill up and sink what ever packaged fuel I get extra.
So far I've gone with the "They don't stop so I got enough" approach :)
Basically made Turbofuel from the rocketfuel setup I made.
Just named them Fuel output 1-5 and let them do their thing.

[Doggeh]

No distance is too great for a truck as long as it has enough fuel to complete a recording loop. Build advanced fuels and make a truck station that delivers your advanced fuels across your biomes to other truck stops through belts. What's a train?

[Illuminia]

Specifically for Drones; last game I came up with an idea that worked well. Basically created a bunch of elevated drone ports lined up together near our HUB & main storage depot
Drone port # 1 was receiving Batteries from a factory.
The received batteries would then go around in a loop underneath the ports, to "feed" to ALL the other drone stations. Overflow would go into storage at the end of the loop, which would feed back into the loop. So even if every drone ate a full meal at once, there was overflow storage of more batteries waiting to be served.
Other drone ports started undefined and had a drone built, fueled and waiting for orders.

Anywhere else we wanted a drone to come pick up items to deliver to HUB, we just had to throw down and power a drone port, and set it as the destination for one of the drones waiting at home.

We built a 5x5 blueprint for the whole setup, with sub-basement level solely for the battery loop, and another level for other incoming items to get directed to a main corridor bus for delivery towards our depot.

Eventually we expanded the line further, and making a set of drone stations opposite side and looping the batteries around to feed them too.
Turned out helpful in one or two cases where we wanted a material (Electromagnetic Control Rods) split between going to storage depot and going to a 2nd drone to deliver elsewhere. Just split part of the incoming across the bus to an empty drone on the other side, and sent it off to the nuclear power plant under construction.

Think we had 20 drones in total by the end? (10x2); that was in addition to two medium sized trains, few trucks for really short routes near coal, and a few point-to-point trains that just shuttled one or two items between some factories. (Loads of nitrogen gas over to oil/fuel processing, for example.)


In theory you could do similar for Coal/etc and a bunch of Truck stations, but good luck getting them to not crash into each other..... (I gave up after a few attempts.)

[PieceOfPeace]

I guess this would be the easiest setup for drones. But it means also I will always need a line to feed the line which I want to run. This is where trains shine. I wish I could have drones that can do an A>B>C run, but this would make the late game too easy.
Currently I run human Hypertube lines for the affected steps in some of my production lines (all with very low throughput) until I found a better solution.

[Ryzilynt]

I use bottled rocket fuel for my drones. I have a tower in the grassland with 1008 rocket fuel power gens. I bottle 300 rocket fuel/min in the basement (refinery) . I store about 40k bottled in industrial storage then I send it up to the roof where I have recessed drone ports. These drones are dedicated power delivery. The bottled rocket fuel feeds into their fuel reserves as well as their outgoing storage.

If I have a remote base somewhere I just build a port and call one of the drones in. I build and industrial container on the receiving end and split that via manifold to however many drones i'll need there. The rocket fuel is extremely efficient. Currently using 7 pads to feed a few hundred drones. I gather all of the uranium on the map via drone and I gather about 2400 SAM via drone. Among many many other things.

Fun fact, for the Uranium, I am able to achieve a consistent 2100/min on the receiving end.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3353284904