Tutorial:Transport use cases
< Tutorial:Transport use cases
Good question. Because it depends. For example on the amount of resources you have, or how far away they are.
However, keep always in mind, that a basic belt cannot transport much more than 700 item/minute and an express belt (the fastest) not more than 1750 (see above). Now compare that with a locomotive: a wagon can deliver 960 items per wagon! So when speaking from throughput, you need to swap to train. This picture changes when you developed logistic bots. They can't be beaten for relatively small areas, and they have some kind of intelligence, currently they try to deliver all requests as equally as possible.
Or in other words: the afford, to squeeze out the last 10% of belt-performance rises depending on distance and amount and at some point the train will win. But in your central factory area the bots will never be beaten.
| Transport medium | Belts | Trains | Logistic Bots |
|---|---|---|---|
| thruput | constant, slow, very exactly calculateable, limited, high afford in optimizing | extreme high, fast, not good calculateable but constant, nearly unlimited if enough space, optimizing not so needed better rebuild | extreme high in small areas, not calculateable/chaotic, unlimited if enough bots, not optimizeable |
| to be continued... |
The advantages of belts are:
- coming to transport-performance, belts deliver very constantly
- easy calculations possible (e. g. Is belt able to transport output of all mines)
- basic belts are cheap compared to tracks and it is built faster
- you see how much items are on the belt
- the belt works like a small storage
Disadvantages:
- already said: limited transport capacity, cause limited throughput.
- slow. This is a problem with verily long belts because it takes a while to fill the belt. The items on the belt cannot be used. A belt with length of 100 holds 1200 items for 56 seconds. With trains this is much lower (10 seconds).
- Belts work normally fine up to 50% of maximum capacity. Belts are not thought for using with full capacity. As described in belt physics above, the tighter you compress the items, the more inefficient it can become.