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Comment by kentonv | Hacker News Reader

If belt networks were only about capacity, sure. But you can't put two different kinds of things on the same belt lane without creating some serious trouble. So, the more different kinds of things you want to transport by belts, the more parallel belts you need. Plus, you need those parallel belts early on, even before any of them are running at capacity.

I find it much easier to lay down just iron/copper belts and upgrade them as needed -- upgrading speed in cases where adding parallel lanes is inconvenient.

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It’s not just about capacity. It’s also about:

- using machines efficiently (in the sense that a central production facility means idle-capacity can be used elsewhere)

- replacing production efficiently, I.e. yolo build a potato-quality factory now so that it’s actually producing, then expand it to hyper efficient maxed productivity modules in all the machines between maxed speed beacons later (so your resources go further and you don’t need to spend as much time building remote bases), but do not interrupt production forever to rebuild everything during the transition.

Yolo-building with a high quality strategy to replace components is also a great strategy for startups. In either case the real limiting resource is manpower.

And I typically target about 8 belts of green circuits, to feed a nonstop-rocket shop (avoiding the major transition off belts altogether.) Get a balancer design off the Internet. It’s fine. :)

Sure, but this is only an issue if you need less than a full belts worth of green circuits... if you remove that belt of green circuits, you are going to have to replace is with MORE than one belt of raw materials.

On full scale it is about trains worth of green circuits.

> But you can't put two different kinds of things on the same belt lane without creating some serious trouble.

Sure you can, it's called a "sushi belt" and with some simple combinators, it can work reasonably well.

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