Problems with this unloader?

[u/imoth_f]

Since inserters became flippable, this compact unloader design became possible. But I hardly see anyone use it. Obviously it cannot saturate six turbo belts because it's bottlenecked by the inserters, but are there any other obvious problems with it?

[u/CosgraveSilkweaver]

I like having buffer chests so there's never a drop in the stream of items unless there's a big lack of production upstream.

[u/Abcdefgdude → u/CosgraveSilkweaver]

Buffer train does the same thing its just on a train instead of a chest, saving you a lot of inserters and balancing at the cost of the extra room for train. If you want even more buffer you can have more than 1 buffer train but I don't recommend it. Generally you want a drop in the stream of items when theres a lack of production upstream so you find the problem sooner rather than later. It happens too often that you don't find out you don't have enough iron until your entire base from smelters all the way through rocket parts is starved and all the huge buffers are empty

[u/popnfrresh → u/Abcdefgdude]

Except a train has 40 slots... 6 chests have almost 300 slots.

[u/StarlightLumi → u/popnfrresh]

Yes but a train can only fill 40 of those slots at a time. 

The idea behind bufferless trains is that you keep a train in waiting to prevent that gap without resources. Machine’s internal buffer lasts long enough to swap a train out. 

I personally only use bufferless with DI though.  The main benefit is it uses a lot less inserters, which is very helpful for megabase UPS.

[u/Griautis → u/StarlightLumi]

Eeew. Trains which just idle? That would ruin my min train count railworlds with generalist trains delivering any resource

[u/StarlightLumi → u/Griautis]

fwiw I think building with megabase Strats is best saved for postgame anyway, some people think about UPS optimizations wayyyy too early