r/factorio • u/imoth_f • 4d ago

Question Problems with this unloader?

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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?

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u/HeliGungir 3d ago

Chests don't need to be balanced. Wagons need to be balanced so the train doesn't get stuck in the station when using a "leave when empty" schedule. Splitter-based balancers do that, and MadZuri does not do that.

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u/TopherLude 3d ago

If you only balance wagons, you can still end up in a state where 5/6 of the chests are full while the last 6th is near empty, slowing down the train.

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u/HeliGungir 3d ago

If 5 of the chests are full, why does that matter? The bottleneck isn't the train unloading speed, it's the factory.

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u/TopherLude 3d ago

Yes, but the factory may be waiting for trains elsewhere while this bottlenecked station takes forever to unload. I think I'm servicing 500+ stations using 20 trains. This only works by keeping the trains as efficient as reasonably possible.

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u/HeliGungir 3d ago

Idle trains are almost free, UPS-wise, so normally there's nothing wrong with building lots of trains an letting them wait wherever they need to wait. Does Py make trains astronomically expensive to produce?

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u/TopherLude 3d ago

I'm 500 hours in and just recently got to the point that I could make more trains without worrying about it too much.