Transportation costs

[Aberro]

I've been building a new iron production and had to choose between conveyors and cable cars. Quick comparison has shown that conveyors have great throughput, maybe greatest in game. They are on par with cable cars in MW/t/km (I haven't actually compared values, just guesstimated - cable cars required 18.5MW/d, conveyors require 6MW/d per tower at full throughput, 7 towers, but throughput utilization would be relatively low, so an actual consumption should be about same). And they're very costly to build. Cable cars, respectively, have lower throughput, medium energy consumption and much lower build cost.

So, my question is - is there any in-depth comparison of different ways of transportation: road vehicles, trains, ships, airplanes, cableways and conveyors/pipes? What I'm interested is: relative throughput, cost of construction, energy requirement (either kW/t/km for electricity, or t/t/km for fuels)?

[moron_with_a_gun]

In my experience, nothing keeps up with the demand of the steel mill like conveyors. If you need to go long distances, use trains to fill storages next to the factory. Otherwise you'll need to lower the number of workers in the steel mill or it will be frequently idle.

[Aberro]

I'm not asking about steel mill, I've more interested in relative pros and cons of all forms of transportation in game.
Intuitively, I think that:
* road vehicles pros is relatively low construction cost, high flexibility and extensibility, relatively low vehicle cost; cons is relatively high fuel cost, low throughput.
* trains pros is very high throughput, low (maybe even lowest) fuel/energy cost high flexibility; cons is high construction cost, high vehicle cost.
* ships pros is very high throughput, low fuel cost, very high flexibility (no need to build ways at all); cons is very high vehicle cost, very limited applicability (water is required), construction cost is moderate.
* airplanes pros is speed over long ranges only, cons is high construction cost, high vehicle cost, high fuel cost, low throughput, low applicability (requires a lot of space), overall maybe worst transportation method.
* cableways pros is low construction cost, low vehicle cost, relatively low energy cost, cons is relatively low to medium throughput and no flexibility (can't switch ways and expand network).
* conveyors/pipes pros is very high (maybe highest) throughput, relatively low energy cost, cons is very high construction cost, low flexibility (can build small networks, but can't connect multiple sources and destinations with different cargo).

But I'd like to know exact values of kW/t/km or t/t/km of energy/fuel cost for different transportations. But that'd require a lot of testing.

[Nokia 3310]

Conveyer tower limit is 10t/sec (this is exact number, measured many times).
Direct conveyer connection (building to building, without conveyer tower) has unlimited speed.

It means if you want to utilize 100% of vanilla iron mine with >80% ore saturation, you have to directly connect it to storage, and only then you can use 2 exits with conveyer towers.

However, buildings have their internal limitations and operation speed.
If I remember correctly, balker loading speed is about 5t/sec. Balker unloading speed much higher, more than 10t/sec. Balker EXPORT unloading is very slow - 2t/sec or smth like that. Balker numbers are not exact, but relation should be fine.
Hopper loading is fast, one station with 2 trains with 8 wagons loads more than 16t/sec (I’m sure here).
Hopper unloading is faster, than loading, but I didn’t measured it.
Automobile loading/unloading is limited not by input/output, but by vehicle entrance/exit. It is idle more than 50% of time (do not know exact number, but it looks like idle time is about 80% or even 90%). Due to this reason, it looks not very realistic to use it instead of trains or conveyers. You need 20? 30? automobile stations to reach 10t/sec.
Airplanes/helicopters/cableways even more slow, than automobiles.

Open storage/warehouse cargo is another story. Direct connection transportation is also infinite, but loading/unloading is very slow. Automobile and other logistic systems are competitive here. Containers also affect efficiency a lot.

Do not know much about other types of cargo.

[Bufnitza]

Aberro, you are asking for universal metrics on these means of transport, but that's not a feasible assessment. Things such as distance and consumption rate need to be factored in as well. Sure, you could come up with a huge spreadsheet detailing every detail, but that's really not very valuable without proper context.

The steel mill is a very good example because it is a high-consumption factory. You cannot compare the Steel Mill with a Heating Plant or a Coal Power Plant when it comes to Coal consumption. Even if a network of conveyor belts would prove to be the best option, I am sure that a single dump truck doing rounds between the plant and a coal aggregate storage somewhere in the wild would be a lot cheaper and effective for the heating plant. than a long CB connection.

In general, for most cases you'll end up using a mixed transport network anyway (i.e. Conveyors, trains, etc). Case in point, for a high-consumption building such a Steel Mill, it's worth throwing down local aggregate storages which are supplied by huge trains able to carry close to 1000 tons per trip. Sure, you could make a 1.5km conveyor belt network from your Coal mine all the way to the Steel Mill because on paper it is more efficient, but is it truly what you want to do?...

[Bufnitza]

Another thing I want to point out is the fact that vehicle transport (be it road or rail, I personally have not used ships and planes yet at all) is highly dependent on the engine factor as well as the cargo capacity. On longer routes with less intersections, it's worth using a heavy puller, mid-power engine with larger cargo capacity, whereas if you have a busier line/road which might cause slowdowns, a more torque-oriented / smaller cargo capacity engine would be preferable. A universal kWh/t/km metric is irrelevant because not every km travelled is done the same way.

[Aberro]

@Nokia 3310, thanks, that's some valuable information

@Bufnitza, no, this doesn't actually require huge spreadsheets. Things like distance and consumption rate is application dependent, and they can be factored if there's info about different ways of transportation. Direct connections (i.e. distances below 50-100 meters) are negligible, their application is usually obvious. So, the only interesting comparisons is 1km and 10km transportation, first is short and medium distance, second is long distance. For short and medium distance the most important factors is throughput, loading/unloading speed, flexibility and applicability, for long distances the most important factors is construction and vehicles cost and energy/fuel consumption (not that throughput isn't important, but if you'd try to stretch a conveyor for 10km, it's cost and energy requirement would lead your republic to default and blackout). By knowing such parameters and some notes (like, ships requires water connections, cables can't be in network, etc), one can estimate which transportation would be the best one for a given task.
Like, for example, a steel factory in case, when you have both iron and coal sources nearby is better with conveyors, because cables are limited by throughput and also can't be mixed, but uranium processing, if source is in a mountainous area, is best with cables, because they're cheap, very applicable (they don't have limitations on slope) and has enough throughput. Heating plants can be supplied with trucks from local aggregate storage, but such aggregate storage is best supplied by trains if source isn't nearby, because they're much more fuel efficient. Etc, etc. All of these can be deduced from just few parameters and some notes.

[MrKrabs]

I had a medium steelmill running near a coal processing plant. The coal came via conveyer but the iron I brought by train. I was able to manage it running without stops.
Conveyers for Iron might had been possible ether but it would look odd Imo. At my current map is a spot where both resources are close together. There it may be another story.

[Aberro]

Originally posted by Bufnitza:

Another thing I want to point out is the fact that vehicle transport (be it road or rail, I personally have not used ships and planes yet at all) is highly dependent on the engine factor as well as the cargo capacity. On longer routes with less intersections, it's worth using a heavy puller, mid-power engine with larger cargo capacity, whereas if you have a busier line/road which might cause slowdowns, a more torque-oriented / smaller cargo capacity engine would be preferable. A universal kWh/t/km metric is irrelevant because not every km travelled is done the same way.

Yes, but they don't variate too much either. So, you can expect that on average your trucks would consume anywhere from n to m tons of fuel. At least, if you won't try to use slow low-capacity trucks, just for sake of perverted logic.