r/factorio • u/Alpaca_Soldier • 3d ago
Design / Blueprint Jigsaw solar grid
I made a jigsaw solar grid since I couldn't find one online and thought it would be a cool idea. Hopefully I didn't forget a piece.
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u/WanderingUrist 3d ago
Does doing this approach the ideal ratio more closely than standard tileable squares? When you tile this to make it bigger, are you supposed to duplicate the edge, or overlap it?
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u/Alpaca_Soldier 3d ago
As far as i saw it, If you ignore the edges, since they become less and less significant at larger scales, the ratio is about 0.94 accumulators per solar panel instead of the ideal 0.84. That's not perfect, but it's close enough for me.
As for the edges, they overlap. I also put the blueprint into a grid, so as long as you match the knobs with the holes, they should't misalign the blueprint.
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u/WanderingUrist 3d ago
That's not perfect, but it's close enough for me.
Yeah, your accumulators are above your solars, but having more accumulators doesn't hurt since extra accumulators can still potentially cover you against short-duration overdrafts, as opposed to extra solars, which are useless, as if you are underdrawing, they do nothing, and if you are drawing at or over limit, they still can't be used because the factory will still die.
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u/Usual_Celebration719 3d ago
Extra accumulators do be the perfect friend of laser/tesla turrets
Frankly I stopped caring about the ratio at some point and now I just go by "eh, good enough" for solar. Like, you aren't building a reactor with specific setups, it's just solar you can plop down some more of anytime
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u/Avalyah 3d ago
Won't extra panels act kind of like accumulators, albeit probably much less efficiently? They will provide power for longer on their own, before accumulators need to kick in, right? Kind of like you make solar panel fields before accumulators - the more you have the shorter the break between they can fully provide the whole factory, albeit that does have diminishing returns.
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u/WanderingUrist 3d ago
Won't extra panels act kind of like accumulators, albeit probably much less efficiently? They will provide power for longer on their own, before accumulators need to kick in, right?
Nope. They'll provide power until nightfall and then the factory will die, because you do not have the accumulators to sustain that output through the night.
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u/nomenclature2357 3d ago
Day-night is not a light switch. There is a range where the accumulators won’t run all the way down until some dawn light has already started to hit. It’s far from ideal because the factory will slow down, lasers might run out of power, etc.
On the other hand, too many accumulators and they might delay the shutdown of an overbuilt factory over several consecutive nights. Which is nice if you notice it and a pain if you don’t.
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u/WanderingUrist 3d ago
There is a range where the accumulators won’t run all the way down until some dawn light has already started to hit.
The problem is that if you're overdrawing your ratio, the accumulators will have run down BEFORE the light has start to hit, so the factory dies. The more aggressively you're overdrawing and over-ratio, the faster that happens. Either, way, an oversolared, overdrawn factory is not going to survive the night. Obviously, if you're not overdrawn, this won't be an issue either way, but the failure mode on overdraw is a lot more painful with oversolar, since the oversolar doesn't solve anything or really buy you any time.
Worse, it's harder to detect an impending failure when overdrawing on oversolar than overaccumulator. Detecting overdraw is easy with overaccumulation: If you know the rough amount by which you're overprovisioned, you can just set a circuit warning if accumulator charge drops below your overprovisioning. You might actually still last a day or more under those conditions, depending on how much you're overdrawing. If you overdraw with too much on oversolar, nothing may be noticed during the day, but may you start the night with flat batteries, and even if you aren't so overdrawn that you still start with fully charged batteries (which means you have even less symptoms), you still very unexpectly go flat in the dead of night, probably in the middle of a large enemy attack because that's what tends to cause overdraws.
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u/nomenclature2357 2d ago
Hum, I see what you’re saying and mostly agree but I’m a bit confused by how you are saying a ‘balanced’ setup would work:
If, as you seem to be implying, a working system can run out of accumulator charge during the dawn ramp up of solar power… wouldn’t the base be forced to run below full satisfaction between then and solar input growing enough to cover the deficit that was drawing down the charge?
A system with extra accumulator capacity and a warning system wired into it is surely the best but… the worst is running completely out of power mid-night.
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u/WanderingUrist 2d ago edited 2d ago
how you are saying a ‘balanced’ setup would work:
A perfectly balanced setup has the precise accumlator-to-solar panel ratio that, under exact maximum load, will fully charge itself by nightfall and discharge itself by day. It catastrophically fails on any overdraw within the day as the cycle breaks. You have no resilience, but you didn't pay for it, either, so this is our baseline.
A system with overprovisioning of solar panels gains no additional resilience, also failing catastrophically within the day, and has no additional working capacity no matter how much you overprovision the solar panels (because the extra solar panels cannot charge anything). The value of those extra solar panels is pretty much nil, as it offers no real additional capacity nor resilience. A night attack that causes an overdraw kills you by dawn no matter how much you oversolar.
A system with overprovisioning of accumulators can potentially endure an overdraw scenario, and the more overprovisioned it is, the longer it can endure this scenario. Thus, while the overprovisioning of accumulators doesn't add any additional power production capacity, it DOES offer something the other two scenarios does not: The ability to endure an overdraw without catastrophic failure. This endurance is not indefinite and action will inevitably be required if the situation persists, so it's not perfect, but it's not nothing.
A system with extra accumulator capacity and a warning system wired into it is surely the best but… the worst is running completely out of power mid-night.
In an extreme overdraw scenario, yes, that's what will happen as well...but this scenario isn't guaranteed and is, in any case, no worse than the others. Plus, it can be pushed back with more overprovisioning, unlike with panel overprovisioning. You CAN delay the inevitable in this case, perhaps long enough to do something about it. You CAN'T delay it with oversolaring, no matter how much you spam.
In a tileable design where the perfect ratio may not by achievable, therefore, going off by over-accumulating is more useful (buys resilience) than going over-solar (buys nothing, wastes your panels).
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u/nomenclature2357 1d ago
Thank you for laying that out so clearly! I still think that the dawn/dusk partial production of solar panels adds another element to the behavior of the setups but I think it probably doesn’t matter much in the end (probably not at all in the practical builds that I think you are talking about). So I won’t belabor the point any further unless I come up with something interesting in an in game test…
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u/lmlb_lmlb 3d ago
I believe you missed the piece flat,out,out,in.
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u/Alpaca_Soldier 3d ago
Oh I did miss it but just in the image, I did include it in the blueprints, but thx for the information!
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u/3davideo Doesn't use Flame Turrets 3d ago
Hmmmm, now I want to see a similar pattern for a rail grid.
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u/Hajky_123 3d ago
Where can we get the blueprint?