i’m kind of at a loss, splitter calculators crash when i try to use them /:
I’m a fan of flow by priority, and use smart splitters to overflow to the next priority. Let the belts balance themselves once production becomes saturated.
how does that work exactly?
Say you have a production that takes 100 ingots /min. If you choose your largest lines you could split each off, 4 productions with the remainder 76.7 left out. You could merge those together. Then the 450s you do the same, and merge all those 50s in. Then you have one (or two lost count) belts of just those remainders left that you could then maximize production with.
Whatever line needs to be up and running first, send full belts. Install smart splitters on those lines and designate an overflow direction. Merge those overflow belts into other belts, rinse and repeat for following belts. It will auto balance once the intakes of the machines fill up, and your material production can keep contributing to active production. Example I found online
Another option is to use the double size storage containers to act as both buffers and automatic mergers/splitters.
As suggested already using manifolds with overflow smart splitters is the way I did it when I built a 10 heavy frame factory. The only place that hurt my brain was when I needed to split reinforced plate to 25 end points and there wasn’t enough volume for a manifold to work so I needed balancers and a 5 way balancer broke my brain. Doc in YouTube had the answer which is split into two, then split those two into three and feed one of the six end points into a merger before the split into two. Then the five remaining end points get the same treatment and you end up with 25 end points for heavy plate.
Good luck!
I’m a little confused on the exact request here. Do you have those pictured lane rates now, and need to combine/ split them into the ratios above (2000, 300, e.t.c)?
yes, sorry i wasnt clear
If you’d like exact rates, you can use belts of various speeds & smart splitters, eg.:
Need 300, so take a higher belt (eg one of the 455) and smart split off into a mk3 belt (270), and overflow the rest. You should now have a full mk3 270 belt and 185 remaining (overflowed). From that you can smart split into a mk1 (60), and split it in two (30, 30). Take one of those and merge it with the 270 from before and you’ve now got 300, with 125+30 remaining for more siphoning off. Basically, 300=270+60/2.
Similarly, you could do 2000=1200+780+60/3. The rest is left as an exercise to the reader.
TL;DR, I would do the following:
- Build a a 3->2 balancer across those 3 belts on the left. These 2 outputs, together, will be your feed of 2000.
- Split a belt off of each of the other 4, and merge them together.
- Split that into 2, and merge each of those into one of the 2 belts of the 2000 line.
The long version:
In my experience (and this may well be a product of my build style, and may bot quite be applicable to you) belt balancing is not an issue that needs to be addressed. Belt capacity and throttling leads naturally to self-balancing.
Example: in the Steelworks build I did recently, I had two different sets of machines needing to consume Steel Ingot: Constructors for Steel Pipe and Constructors for Steel Beam. Currently, the factory is clocked for a max belt of Mk1, since I can’t really afford the power for more, right now. My foundries produce 90 Steel Ingot/min, so that means I need 2 belts worth of Steel Ingot transport. I ended up building 12 Foundries, in 2 groups of 6, each outputting to a separate Mk1 manifold, so I’ve got 2 belts of 45/min each.
On the consumption side, I need 21.068/min to make Steel Pipe and 68.932/min to make Steel Beam. So, I still need 2 belts of bandwidth for Steel Beam, but only 1 for Steel Pipe. To make this happen, I split each of the Steel Ingot lines into 2, let 1 from each split go onward to Steel Beam, and took the other from each split and merged them, for Steel Pipe. All dumb splitters.
Now, you might say "well, that just gives you 45/min going to both Steel Pipe and Steel Beam, you just made it that the two separate Foundry lines can now mix. But this doesn’t account for (what I call) “back-pressure”.
The magic of back-pressure is that it makes dumb splitting (splitting evenly, instead of with ratios) irrelevant. With my setup, the Steel Pipe constructors only need 21.068/min but are getting 45/min. However, as long as the clock rates are set correctly on those machines, they will only consume 21.068/min, and the extra 23.932/min will eventually back up, and flow over to Steel Beam anyway.
Essentially, it’s the balancer vs manifold debate. Upside is, you don’t have to deal with crazy balancing calculations, when you’ve got odd ratios like you have. Downside is, the system doesn’t reach full efficiency until it “primes” up all the back-pressure.
The one caveat to back-pressure is if you have “re-combination” farther down the line. In my example, if I were going to take those Steel Beams and Steel Pipes and combine them together in some other recipe, then it might be impossible to build up enough back-pressure to balance everything out. Sort of like having an air-bubble in the system. You can solve this by either manually priming the back-pressure, or just swapping to a Smart Splitter with an Overflow output, in the right spot, to allow the “bubble” to bleed out.
