PI: Chaining processing facilities - good or bad?

Industry Gameplay Center Science & Industry
1

In a nutshell:

You have a P2->P3 processing facility which needs to be supplied. Theoretically it could be done with two P1->P2 facilities for each of the three required materials (given the P3 product requires three in this case) so that they would constantly run and supply the P2->P3 facility.

Theoretically, one can simply chain the P1->P2 facilities to the P2->P3 facility so they would directly feed it without going through a storage, since their output volumes per cycle would match its input volume and the cycle times are identical, right?

But let’s say, the P2->P3 facility doesn’t finish in time, so it got delayed, and the P1->P2 facilities have some output to deliver, but couldn’t do so because the P2->P3 input storage is already full.

What would happen?

  1. The P1->P2 facilities would stop in a “Waiting for delivery” stage until the P2->P3’s input storage empties?
  2. The output of the P1->P2 facilities would be discarded?

First case would mean chaining processing facilities is safe to do - production would just be backlogged up to the head of the chain.
Second case would mean that every facility should have its input and output buffered through some kind of storage – be it command center, storage or launchpad.

2

Chaining will result in waste. You should always use a buffer. Extractors will harvest a lot more material at the beginning of the program than at the end - the excess needs to be stored until the basic processor can use it. Basic processors will send P1 to the advanced processors asynchronously - it’s discarded if the advanced processor can’t use it.

Because each stage of processing reduces the volume, everything can be buffered through the launchpad.

1 Like
3

As above, always buffer through storage. Interestingly I think the P4 products actually increase in volume slightly over the constituent P3 products, but they are still smaller than the total P2’s.

4

it depends on the p4 product and what sort of inputs it has. if the input is all P3’s then the volume reduction is only 108m3 - 100m3.
if it has a p1 input then the volume actually increases from 87.2m3 - 100m3