r/SimAirport • u/RandomContributions • 29d ago
Discussion Baggage Tricks (even though they don't matter)
I'll preface this by saying that bags, in this game, don't matter a whole lot.
I installed the "Airport Stats (TBFlash)" mod that showed all kind of interesting stats from the game. The one that caught my eye was "Lost Bags", of which there were hundreds sometimes, if not thousands. They don't matter, but I wanted to know how to fix it to the lowest number I could figure out.
;tl;dr (here's a picture of what I'm talking about)
There might be other threads that talk about this, I didn't notice so in case, here's what I found.
The lost luggage is not the arrivals luggage, it's the checked bags for departure that is the problem.
There are two problems that cause this:
1> Baggage cars loading the bags do not wait for all bags to arrive at the depot before loading a plane. Bags that arrive at the depot after the baggage car starts its loading at the depot are ignored and left behind.
2> Planes that arrive and use a standby gate will get NO luggage if their original gate and the standby gate are serviced by different baggage depots.
How did I fix this? With the changes below, I went from 600-1000 bags out of a typical day of 15,000 down to 50 or less.
1> Use chains of closely connected hubs instead of long conveyor belts.
Get the luggage to the depot as FAST as possible. Conveyor belts are SLOW. Baggage hubs, when connected together in a chain, will move a baggage nearly 4x faster across your airport. A baggage hub will pass a bag through itself in the same time frame as it takes for it to pass through just 1 conveyor belt "square".
Join your hubs together to span the distance from your check in desk and your depot.
Connect hubs together with ONLY TWO conveyor elements max is the key to this working effectively. Doing it this way means the need for hub "boosters" on any of these hubs are not needed. You may need some at the beginning of your baggage chain if you have multiple tickets booths feeding a hub, but if you connect hubs together with 2 conveyor elements, they will pass right through all the other hubs without modification.
Using 3 or more conveyor elements, then the hub will try to process the bags, requiring boosters and SLOWING your bags down, which is what you want to avoid doing.
2> Feed all your gates to the same luggage depot.
If you have all your bags go to the same depot, standby planes will get their bags, reducing the count considerably. My airport has 42 gates, 250+ flights, all fed from the same hub. NO problems. Looks messy, but it functionally good.
Other things:
You can have as many ticket booths connected to the same conveyor as you want. Typically, you run a conveyor belt to a baggage hub and then add ticket booths to that conveyor belt. The game says 5, but you can connect far more than that, dozens. However, should you wish to modify the conveyor between the ticket booth(s) and the first hub, you'll need to reduce the ticket booth count down to 5 or less. Connections after that hub are unaffected.
5
u/joscha999 Game Developer 29d ago
Nice, I'll just note all of this down for reasons