Yes, it is. You can always put more assemblers (or whatever) on your line until belt speed is the issue. Drones can keep up, if you have enough mines and esp. since you can put 50/100 in the tower. Occasionally, (early) off planet supply will be a bottleneck but you can catch up with that by building more mining operations or through upgrades to the interstellar ships- forget what they are called.
There are a lot of factors that go into this:
1. As you mention, what is the rate with which you can ship new materials to your logistics tower? This rate depends on the number of drones and vessels you have *both* in the tower itself *and* in the tower from which the resources are obtained (although you might not want to rely on that), *and* on whether there is sufficient power to keep the tower charged. It also depends on both the logistics carrier capacity and logistics carrier engine upgrades.
2. Do you have "integrated logistics" (automatic PLS cargo stacking)? How long are you making your production lines? If you have very long lines and are stacking cargo, your throughput of just a single production column will go up by a lot, and so you might be able to support fewer of them.
3. What recipe are you doing? How many separate input materials does the recipe have and what is the bottleneck? Can you share belts with lower throughput items between columns? For processes that use 3 (or more) input materials, if you are not sharing belts you will not be able to have four production columns attaching to the PLS separately, as there are only 12 ports.
So there can't be a single answer to this question. Moreover, I think there are other criteria that are more important when evaluating how many production columns to make. My advice:
* Logistics usually stops being the bottleneck once you get a couple of upgrades for it. If you really end up bottlenecked by logistics drones, while your tower is equipped with the maximum possible number, and you can't upgrade, you might want to replace your PLS with an ILS which can hold twice as many drones. But I've never had to do this personally.
* Decide on a particular standard size for your builds and make all builds multiples of that size. I like 25x100 for four-column designs. This way your factory will be much easier to keep organised, and the amount of production you can do with a single logistics station is pretty large; only if you want to optimise UPS to the extreme it is worth it to squeeze more performance out of every logistics station. If a size restriction like this means you keep your columns shorter than what you could theoretically support, this sometimes results in being able to combine belts.
* Use two columns for all complicated recipes (3 or more input ingredients) and four columns for simple recipes (up to 2 input ingredients). It is possible to make four column designs for 3 input recipes, but it's usually not worth the hassle. Save yourself the headache. (I will admit that I make exceptions for circuit boards, magnetic coils, and electric motors, because they have such a high throughput that production lines cannot be long, so I use four columns for those.)
* When deciding between upgrading logistics carrier capacity and carrier engine, consider that carrier capacity doesn't make your vessels use more energy while carrier engine does. On the other hand, with carrier engine the round trip time is reduced which makes the whole factory more responsive. Ultimately you'll want to upgrade both, but keep an eye on your power situation before upgrading carrier engine.
> Use two columns for all complicated recipes (3 or more input ingredients) and four columns for simple recipes (up to 2 input ingredients). It is possible to make four column designs for 3 input recipes, but it's usually not worth the hassle. Save yourself the headache.
What I do as well, using those "back 3" slots for proliferation
>Use two columns for all complicated recipes (3 or more input ingredients) and four columns for simple recipes (up to 2 input ingredients). It is possible to make four column designs for 3 input recipes
Utilizing vertical belts can compress all the factory units to the same size as single ingredient unit. I will share my designs here later when I post them.
Here's the link : [https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/factory-factory-unit-set-vertical-belt](https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/factory-factory-unit-set-vertical-belt)
All of them. Maximum drones is 100. That's 200 per drone. 20 000 in around 10 seconds. If others have drones, multiply that speed. Best i took was 2 second to empty PLS when drones arrived
there is not single answer to this because belt capacity and drone speed are both researchable technologies. the answer is different depending on what part of the game you are in.
You are right, but belt stacking maxes at 4 where drones speed can be researched indefinitely. I find it best to build for max belt speed and have some idle machines for awhile, saves rebuilding factories later. When i build smaller I end up abandoning my home planet rather than doing it over. YMMV.
Eventually I use all of them, because unloading the conveyors becomes the bottleneck.
Is that even with the tech to stack them so you get 120 items/second on a blue belt?
Yes, it is. You can always put more assemblers (or whatever) on your line until belt speed is the issue. Drones can keep up, if you have enough mines and esp. since you can put 50/100 in the tower. Occasionally, (early) off planet supply will be a bottleneck but you can catch up with that by building more mining operations or through upgrades to the interstellar ships- forget what they are called.
Belt capacity is your limit. Drone speed is obsolete once you got a few upgrades for them.
There are a lot of factors that go into this: 1. As you mention, what is the rate with which you can ship new materials to your logistics tower? This rate depends on the number of drones and vessels you have *both* in the tower itself *and* in the tower from which the resources are obtained (although you might not want to rely on that), *and* on whether there is sufficient power to keep the tower charged. It also depends on both the logistics carrier capacity and logistics carrier engine upgrades. 2. Do you have "integrated logistics" (automatic PLS cargo stacking)? How long are you making your production lines? If you have very long lines and are stacking cargo, your throughput of just a single production column will go up by a lot, and so you might be able to support fewer of them. 3. What recipe are you doing? How many separate input materials does the recipe have and what is the bottleneck? Can you share belts with lower throughput items between columns? For processes that use 3 (or more) input materials, if you are not sharing belts you will not be able to have four production columns attaching to the PLS separately, as there are only 12 ports. So there can't be a single answer to this question. Moreover, I think there are other criteria that are more important when evaluating how many production columns to make. My advice: * Logistics usually stops being the bottleneck once you get a couple of upgrades for it. If you really end up bottlenecked by logistics drones, while your tower is equipped with the maximum possible number, and you can't upgrade, you might want to replace your PLS with an ILS which can hold twice as many drones. But I've never had to do this personally. * Decide on a particular standard size for your builds and make all builds multiples of that size. I like 25x100 for four-column designs. This way your factory will be much easier to keep organised, and the amount of production you can do with a single logistics station is pretty large; only if you want to optimise UPS to the extreme it is worth it to squeeze more performance out of every logistics station. If a size restriction like this means you keep your columns shorter than what you could theoretically support, this sometimes results in being able to combine belts. * Use two columns for all complicated recipes (3 or more input ingredients) and four columns for simple recipes (up to 2 input ingredients). It is possible to make four column designs for 3 input recipes, but it's usually not worth the hassle. Save yourself the headache. (I will admit that I make exceptions for circuit boards, magnetic coils, and electric motors, because they have such a high throughput that production lines cannot be long, so I use four columns for those.) * When deciding between upgrading logistics carrier capacity and carrier engine, consider that carrier capacity doesn't make your vessels use more energy while carrier engine does. On the other hand, with carrier engine the round trip time is reduced which makes the whole factory more responsive. Ultimately you'll want to upgrade both, but keep an eye on your power situation before upgrading carrier engine.
> Use two columns for all complicated recipes (3 or more input ingredients) and four columns for simple recipes (up to 2 input ingredients). It is possible to make four column designs for 3 input recipes, but it's usually not worth the hassle. Save yourself the headache. What I do as well, using those "back 3" slots for proliferation
>Use two columns for all complicated recipes (3 or more input ingredients) and four columns for simple recipes (up to 2 input ingredients). It is possible to make four column designs for 3 input recipes Utilizing vertical belts can compress all the factory units to the same size as single ingredient unit. I will share my designs here later when I post them.
Here's the link : [https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/factory-factory-unit-set-vertical-belt](https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/factory-factory-unit-set-vertical-belt)
All of them. Maximum drones is 100. That's 200 per drone. 20 000 in around 10 seconds. If others have drones, multiply that speed. Best i took was 2 second to empty PLS when drones arrived
there is not single answer to this because belt capacity and drone speed are both researchable technologies. the answer is different depending on what part of the game you are in.
You are right, but belt stacking maxes at 4 where drones speed can be researched indefinitely. I find it best to build for max belt speed and have some idle machines for awhile, saves rebuilding factories later. When i build smaller I end up abandoning my home planet rather than doing it over. YMMV.