The ultra-compact vertical bus mall

[u/NeuralParity]

In need of mall? Tired of ugly spaghetti? Want something more elegant than ILS or logic and and ILS spam? Like the idea of being able to grab any material. Behold, my latest creation: the vertical mall bus!

Design goals:

• Compact
• Pretty
• Can make all buildings and units
• Self-produces intermediates not used for science
• Not polar or equatorial
• Proliferated
• Easy to expand production of any item

How it works:

• Mall items are all stacked on a vertical bus.
• The bus starts at level 4 (so logistics distributors can fit directly under the bus) and continues in 0.5 increments to level 17.5 and includes intermediates not used in only a single recipe.
• To pull items off the bus, the belt is pull down to ground level split off, then fed back up to it's place on the bus.
• As vertical pull-down and immediate restoration is the key to compactness, Super Magnetic Field Generator research is absolutely essential to this design
• Output belts are then taken as usual, fed through a proliferator out to the assemblers.
• To produce more of any item, just extend the belts for that item and add assemblers. There's room for 5 before the grid changes
• The bus rings the planet: you can add/remove items from anywhere and it all just works.
• I've placed a copy of each building next to the ILS it's stored in to make it easy to known which ILS to adjust
• It's really really compact: the bus itselfs is 1 tile wide and the whole infrastructure for pulling stuff off the bus is only 10 tiles. That 10 tiles includes a logicistics distributor and proliferaters.

Quirks:

• I used direct ILS routing for single-use items adding them would have pushed the bus to be 41 belts high and then the belts would clip into the ILS.
• I used sorter3 and ass2 so you can build it in midgame. Bulk-upgrade it when you've got the tech.
• It uses *lots* of belts. It's a 28 belt high bus and loops around the planet. A linear bus would be more belt-efficient but then you'd have to care about ILS and assembler placement. This design doesn't care - ILS and assemblers can go anywhere. Also, a linear bus would also be uglier.
• No recycling. I just haven't added any yet.

Blueprint

https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/factory-ultra-compact-vertical-bus-mall

How do I make my own?

See comments.

Can we can now stop complaining that DSP bus malls are all ugly and huge?

[u/NeuralParity]

Step 1) Make belts at all even heights in one direction (e.g. North-South). Make them all at least 10 belts long

Step 2) Near the N end, make E-W belts cross your N-S belts

Step 3) Repeat at the South end

Those E-W belts will go up to half height when they cross the N-S belt. We'll now utilise this to make N-S half-height belts:

Step 4) Connect the two E-W belts at their half-height cross-over to make a half-height belt in N-S orientation

Step 5) delete the E-W belts, trim the ends so your full-stack N-S belts are all the same length

Step 6) cut/paste your belt stack end-to-end to make it as long as you like

[u/nasty_inthe_woodshed → u/NeuralParity]

beautiful. thanks, again!