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I first noticed this when trying to feed five mk2 smelters with a fully saturated line of ore on a mk2 belt. Five smelters, at 88 items/minute, should need 440 ore per minute; should be able to be fed by a mk2 belt (480 items/min). In my first test, one of the smelters was occasionally starved; it didn't have enough ore to continuously work, and was paused for a brief amount of time. Which shouldn't happen.
So I set up a test of the mk2 belts; loaded up a chest with 4 stack inserters (5 per swing), merged together to get a fully saturated mk2 belt. Lead it to another chest with 4 stack inserters picking everything off the belt; leaving one spot between the two unconnected. I dropped a belt connecting the two, disconnecting said belt exactly 60 seconds later. Here are the results:
mk2 test 1: 426 items
mk2 test 2: 428 items
mk2 test 3: 429 items
Even accounting for random loss/gain in placing/deleting a belt segment, ~428 items/minute is far from 480 items/minute; a full 60 items less is a drastic loss. About 89-90% of expected efficiency cannot be explained by just one belt segment with inaccurate timing (plus/minus one second). Belt is 10% slower than in- game metric. I tested the mk1 belt (240 items/minute); I got 128 items/min each time.. Not as bad as mk2 (95% accurate) but still not the given in-game metric..
As far as I can tell, there's a couple possibilities here:
- Could in-game metrics be incorrect?
- Are the belts not performing up to the expected metric?
- My computer is, well, old, and not as performant as newer systems.. Could lower framerates/engine ticks (as in factorio parlance) be affecting my timing?
- although if this were the case, I would have expected the smelter speed to be affected as well, and not seen the starvation I was seeing..
I have some "complicated" setups (my atlantium processing is overengineered, but thats why I play these games), which means I'm going to go over my setup numbers again to make sure I'm getting the throughput I need.
Thoughts on this? Is anyone else seeing this issue?
Attaching my belt speed setup.. the gap in the belt is placed at the start, then removed 60 seconds later. I then count the iron in the chest on the right, the iron in my inventory (from the deleted belt) and anything still being held by stack inserters..
@cyrix I have created my own testing using a single line of 240 segment conveyors. My results:
* Each conveyor segment holds up to two items.
* Conveyor Belt Mk1's item speed is actually 3.33 items/s not 4 items/s.
Here is a link to recording of my test https://youtu.be/-iiC0U2Dm_8