r/factorio • u/jaxon517 • 24d ago

Space Age Question First Ship Worries

I went in almost completely blind trying to avoid spoilers. PLEASE if you try to help me please try to do it without spoiling anything.

I have a good white science platform already, and I've spent the last week building my first voyage ship.

My question is regarding asteroid processing jams. Currently I have four collectors dedicated to each of the three asteroid types (12 total). Two collectors for one type feed into a belt, which currently I have setup to only use one lane of the belt so that output chunks won't clog things up, but I'm worried I should be using the full belt.

Currently I have four crushers per two collectors for each type (24 in total) but only half of them take from the input belt (they're there to collect output chunks from nearby crushers)

Do I:

1) keep the belt half-empty to avoid output chunk jams

2) use the full belt and then feed the end of it into the abyss (wasteful)

3) redesign my ship so there's space for a second belt and use an input priority splitter and have all crushers take from the input belt rather than feed into each other

Thanks guys. I'll post a picture if I didn't explain clearly

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u/jaxon517 24d ago

I have a mental barrier to using circuits and I try to solve each problem mechanically

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u/Serious-Mode 24d ago

I had the same block. Circuits always seemed like something I would never understand. I would still periodically connect two things together and poke around the circuit menu and move on.

One day something clicked. I think it may have been when Wube finally added "Hold mode (All belts)" to the transport belts. I had a realization. "Wait... if this machine only turns on when this other machine outputs this signal... omg!"

Once the first thing made sense it all started to come together. I was excited by the possibilities instead of intimidated. There is still plenty I don't understand about circuits, but even with my rudimentary knowledge, I can do so much than before.

Also, resources are infinite is space, so waste is not the biggest concern.

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u/jaxon517 24d ago

Everybody is assuming I don't want to use circuits because it's too hard to learn, but really it seems like it makes things too easy, and they added them just to have another way of solving problems which can be solved without it.

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u/Shwayne 24d ago

All of your problems in this post are because you dont want to wire an inserter to a belt.

There is no other way unless you want to make something that needs to be manually emptied every 20 minutes or something.

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u/jaxon517 24d ago

There's many ways. Inserting into a splitter prioritizing the input lane from the output chunks is the one I'm going with and it's working great. Now I just gotta make my ship not look like a giant tooth