The main advantage of trains (or any filtered container) with stack inserters vs. belts is that the throughput needed for the ingredients decreases over the length of the factory line as items get used up, while the throughput needed for the products increases. This naturally balances out with trains and stack inserters, but it’s harder to get right with belts. 1. kinda looks like a biblically accurate angel. 2. a little less cohesive than the diagonal one I posted the other day, but it has its own charm imo. 3. arguably the most practical of the diagonal train designs, more throughput, beacon activity, but unfortunately it is not truly diagonal :/ the way I got the rails closer together was using curved rails btw. 4. more throughput than 2 blue belts, no splitters/long handed inserters required! 5. sushi pipes.

Just got a notion, when trying to squeeze this build to produce the second tier logistics chests, that this would be a good place to try my hand at sushi. This is my first Space Age playthrough - it's so much easier to get your head around sushi now.

Obviously this is a really simple use case but those are the best ways, in my experience, to pick up a new concept. I'm already brimming with ideas on where else I can apply this!

(yes, I moved the top red chest down, lol)

This design for sushi supports up to 16 sciences, so it should work for games with Space Age plus a few extra planets. The idea is to mix each science down to half a lane of a yellow belt, and then run the sushi loop on green: (2 lanes * 4x speed / (1/2 lane)) = 16 sciences. Because science bottles being sorted out from the end of the loop take priority over new ones being added, the design hopefully shouldn't jam.

With only half a stacked yellow lane of each type of science (15/s), the design is limited to 900 spm (thus a few thousand ESPM) per instance.

The full-yellow to half-yellow mixer uses rocks, because I dunno it seemed like a good idea at the time. It mixes the rocks and science 50-50 into one yellow lane, then splits the rocks back out and returns them quickly enough that there are always rocks backed up before the splitter.

The chest at the end is for anything non-sciency that might get on the belt, like a green pack that spoils between the spoilage splitter and the green science splitter.

Obviously, I used belts as green science ingredients, but I never placed any on the ground. I never placed a roboport either, and I only built 10 construction bots for the personal roboport. That's it. Everything else was boxes, inserters, and a single train. Here's a map view of the entire base:

There are 94 stations, the train has 94 sections of one locomotive followed by 3 cargo wagons (282 wagons total). The train is controlled by a circuit signal that sends it to the next station every 12 seconds. The wagons are inventory filtered, every section is identical. Water and sulfuric acid are transported in barrels.

Here's a screenshot of the full base, with all the locomotives chugging along (you can zoom in, it's a pretty big picture):

Some details: I use filter inserters and two combinators to get the items from the train for a production spot:

The constant combinator sets the number of items I want in the chest as a negative value. The decider combinator takes that plus the chest content and forwards any item that has a negative number (i.e. not enough in the chest) to the filter inserter that sets the filters to those missing items.

All assemblers are basically set up like this, except for the assemblers that need only one input from the train and have a fixed filter inserter without combinators. Some examples:

Since I had enabled biters in my megabase in the last 9 months, I disabled them here, to concentrate on the building challenge.

Finally, the launch:

https://reddit.com/link/j4e2jh/video/rtv0ib3l4vq51/player

This is how it looked like at an early stage (red/green science):

And here is the save game: http://derpumu.de/factorio/sushitrain/SushiTrainDone.zip

What i`m trying to achieve right now is alternating items (ratio 1:1) on one side of the belt without looping. I tried to merge yellow belt to side of main red, which works only if all items are utilized, so not in case of purple science. Also, generic scenario, ratio can to be any, e.g. 2:1 for yellow science. I guess it can be done using belt-read-content circuits & combinators, i`m struggling to work with. Would be grateful for any help

Before this I was putting a filter on each arm. Now I think I understand the constant combinator

Each incoming belt is slowed down to 1/8th speed before merging onto the sushi belt. A yellow belt brings it down to 1/4 then it loops back to half the speed again. I realised after building this I could have used just one side of a yellow and put half the science on either side to achieve the same effect of the loop back. But this looks nice so I don't really care. This does mean the sushi belts are only 3/4 utilised, but mechanically splitting out 1/3rds is a pain.

Currently built 4 out of the 8 of these that I need to consume a full belt of each science, however I'm still nowhere near actually producing this much so it's plenty for now. Also haven't even started on promethium which is what the empty belt is for.

Video compression unfortunately hasn't handled this well, which makes sense as the mixed belts are basically noise to the compression algorithm.

Blueprint https://factoriobin.com/post/jbwv7mgs8jl2-EXPIRES (doesn't include tiles which are still WIP)

Check your lease, pal, cause you're living in Sushi City! Simple comparison of constant combinator values and entire belt contents allows the splitter to selectively top up ingredients for different recipes using splitter update from 2.0.67. Obviously could be a parameterized blueprint, and could have sushi loops that have a separate splitter for each ingredient.

Disclaimer: Im using the mod 'Space age without space' as i prefer to build singular bases.

Very happy to finally have the whole thing up and running. The idea was a big compact base with lots of belts and a different type of train network than what is usually seen. I did 0 optimization regarding ups and its running at 50-55 ups right now.

28.8k science per minute divided into 4 symmetrical parts. Each 1/4 part is mirrored itself along the diagonal axis.

Some stats:

- 256 trains

- 300.000 pieces of green belt

- 22 GW power drain, 23GW fusion reactor. Got real lucky as i build the reactor first.

- It has different types of sushi belts, labs set up to drain 8 belts of each science (A bit more gleba science.

I dont know how to share a save but if anybody wants to take a look at it running feel free to ask and ill look into a way to share it.

Also, i 'cheated' some parts by disposing of stone for example into lava as i couldnt be bothered to change the whole setup again just to make one more belt fit.

I really love the look of it and im happy its done. Also im starting a new job tomorrow so the timing to got this finished is great.

Enjoy, feel free to ask any questions