> log trains can only carry logs, passenger trains can only carry passengers
Not technically true since you can mix carriages, but like in Factorio having mixed trains is probably a bad idea.
Not technically true since you can mix carriages, but like in Factorio having mixed trains is probably a bad idea.
Mixed trains in Factorio offer some awesome benefits if you're a bit creative.
Especially because filter-inserters are cheap and plentiful. So its very easy to reconstruct "main belts" from a mixed Factorio train.
I've lost the blueprint for this 'Trainmall' I made a few playthroughs ago, but the idea is to:
1. Have a generic train loadout that can build any base.
2. Have a small set of "standard" assembly machines that can feed red-requester chests, so that construction-bots can build any (reasonable mid-game) design you can imagine. Remotely and automatically.
Carrying Electric Miners / AM1 machines is inefficient. One base may require miners, while a 2nd base may require assembly machines. By "assembling in the field", the singular iron + gears + circuits (+other stuff) train can feed many different bases without any reconfiguration at all.
Only made possible with mixed-trains.
Yellow belt is limited to 15-items/sec, Red 30/sec, Blue 45/sec. Trains are more complicated, but intersections are usually limited to 20 to 40 trains/minute, depending on intersection design.
This means that even a train track is going to be limited to ~30ish trains/minute (not because of the track itself, but because it will be bottlenecked by some intersection down the track somewhere).
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Mixed just allowed you to utilize those belts more efficiently. For any base smaller than 45-science per second (among the 6 endgame sciencies: red, green, blue, purple, yellow, and white. Military isn't really needed once your defenses are thick enough), aka: a 0.45 rocket-per-minute base or smaller, a __single__ blue belt can theoretically support all of your labs.
Of course, sushi belts require combinators, counting of items, and more. Its a bit complicated. But if you sushi-belt, you get some simplicity benefits (at the cost of combinator complexity).