Suggestion: Show time on conveyor belt

[xenxander]

I know we can upgrade the speed of the conveyor as it moves our cars along.
How about if we click on a segment, It will display the time it takes to move one car along the segment (provided there is nothing in front halting its progress).
This would be a major boon in letting us plan a more efficient route, knowing the time it will be on the conveyor between assembly stations (as we can already look at the time at each station already).

[robbie]

I had calculated this out to be about 2.5 cars per ingame minute (fastest belt speed). What that means is that it takes about .4 minutes for a car to travel the length of one conveyor. Cars diverging/combining and going around turns tend to have a slightly slower speed so throughput is reduced to about 2.2 cars/minute in a complex factory with no bottlenecks. Knowing that factor you can just multiply by the number of belts between your station to get travel time (ex: 10 conveyor belts x .4 = 4 ingame minutes).

[xenxander]

This is great information. I'll probably assume .5 minutes just to be safe, but the .4, save around corners, is a nice bit of info.
I am still wishing it were there in-game somehow/somewhere.

[Molybdane]

I fail to see the benefit of having this information. Cars spend so little time moving on a conveyor belt that it is hardly relevant that they do. They spend much more time being assembled.

Another way to look at efficiency is to look at the rate at which each part of the factory allows cars to pass. Since we're talking minutes when assembling parts, the seconds per unit of length on the conveyor belt are so low that they have no meaningful effect on effieiency.

[xenxander]

Sorry you fail to see the benefit of this information. But it would be useful for those who really like to plan routes and efficency.

[robbie]

I had to calculate it to determine how many lanes of conveyors I needed. Considering one lane can support up to ~130 vehicles/hr I built my factory around having enough of each station to support that. I started ramping up a second lane to get to 260 vehicles/hr but in current state of the game there isn't enough demand for cars even if you have all 20 "types/tiers" covered.

[Molybdane]

I had quite a sizeable post ready but decided to stick with the following:

Based from what robbie said, I concluded that the only reason why you'd want to know the rate of cars / minute on a conveyor belt was if you have a very high rate of production of a vehicle taking place in two or more separate parts of a factory. In this case, a simple statement of 0.4 minute per car per segment (or 24 seconds per car per segment) would suffice. Additional information would be required if the part of the convyor belt made a turn or a crossing.


But in any other case, this information isn't relevant, (my original point) because of the conveyor belt's very high rate of cars per minute, certainly compared to any other part of the pproduction line.

I think it depends on whether or not this information is worth the time/resources, but thats not my decision.

[xenxander]

Well it is worth it, if you're trying for a single production line only, that if always supplied with parts, will never have cars waiting (or minimal wait). I'm trying to find the absolute most optimal spacing for a full assembly line, just because that's what I do.