#assembly lines

With all the base materials on the bus, you should build assembly lines for all of the most commonly used items. You can start by making one line of assemblies with a belt of iron, gears, green circuits and copper running along the line. Now place the assemblies in a way that allows normal and long-handed inserters to grab items from all the available belts to produce all the basic building items like inserters themselves. Leave space in between the assemblies for chests to collect the items in.

The crafted items should each get a chest of their own. Use the red “X” in a chest to limit the amount of items that will be crafted.

Now to be clear: the point of an assembly line like this is not to have enough throughput of materials to craft everything at once. The first couple of assemblies will probably use up all the material on the belt. But once the allocated amount of stacks in each chest is reached, those assemblies will turn off and material will get to the next ones on the line. The idea is that while you’re gone building or fighting biters or whatever it is you do, your assembly lines will keep producing items to fill the chests. By the time you’re back in the base, you will be able to grab all the items from the chests that you desire. No more handcrafting or waiting for assemblies to produce the items you want!

This is why some people in the community like to call assembly lines like this “shopping mall”. Because if you run out of things it’s the number one place to re-stock on everything you need! *flashy neon signs*

If you still don’t want one belt of iron to provide materials for a really long assembly line, you can make several lines next to each other. I usually do a line for inserters, power poles and then miscellaneous items. You can share some of the belts with items that are less in demand.

Another note on getting gears on half of a belt. Most items need iron gears and you could produce them localy for each and every item like so:

But you can also put them on a beltline or even half a belt! You can start your assembly line with one or two machines turning iron plates into gears. If the incoming iron line is on the “near” side of the belt (i.e. the side of the belt closer to the assembly) you can grab this iron, turn it into gears and the output inserters will place the gears on the “far” end of the belt:

The miscellaneous line should include items like miners, assemblies, maybe lamps, repair packs, etc. Later on, as you advance through the tech tree you will be able to craft new items. You can just add these to the end of your assembly line. You might also need to introduce more belts of need items (like steel, red circuits, etc.), therefore you should leave enough room between the assembly lines.

These lines can get really long though, if you don't watch it. So you might want to split it off into two parallel lines. This one for example is a little on the long side:

It also really helps to know what tech you will get later on. It would be annoying to have assembly machines level one and two at the beginning of the line, only to research level three ones later and not having enough room to fit them into the line next to the other ones. Experienced players have an advantage, because they can plan ahead for these kind of things.

Now for some tricks you can use to grab from far away belts, by using some undergrounds and long-handed inserters! This will grab from all three lines of belt:

Long-handed inserters are slower and there are other inserters with better stack size. So you could also use some belt spaghetti to get a far away line closer to avoid using long-handed inserters:

The only items I don’t put on a simple assembly line are belts. Because belts (especially the higher level ones) need ridiculous amounts of gears you will need a large array of gear assemblies. There is a really neat layout that I’ve got from the wonderful YouTube channel of “Katherine of Sky” (She posts a lot of great videos about Factorio (and other games), both playthroughs as well as tutorials, and I can invariably recommend ALL of them).

The Belt array uses a lot of gear assemblies at the beginning and feeds a line of gears running through the middle of the assemblies. The layout works really well and I will include the blueprint for it after the cut.

With your Mall area set up, you will never have to handcraft anything ever again! So the next step is to get a proper science production running!

October 7, 1913 Moving assembly line debuts at Ford factory

"For the first time, Henry Ford’s entire Highland Park, Michigan automobile factory is run on a continuously moving assembly line when the chassis–the automobile’s frame–is assembled using the revolutionary industrial technique. A motor and rope pulled the chassis past workers and parts on the factory floor, cutting the man-hours required to complete one “Model T” from 12-1/2 hours to six. Within a year, further assembly line improvements reduced the time required to 93 man-minutes. The staggering increase in productivity effected by Ford’s use of the moving assembly line allowed him to drastically reduce the cost of the Model T, thereby accomplishing his dream of making the car affordable to ordinary consumers.

In introducing the Model T in October 1908, Henry Ford proclaimed, “I will build a motor car for the great multitude.” Before then, the decade-old automobile industry generally marketed its vehicles to only the richest Americans, because of the high cost of producing the machines. Ford’s Model T was the first automobile designed to serve the needs of middle-class citizens: It was durable, economical, and easy to operate and maintain. Still, with a debut price of $850, the Model T was out of the reach of most Americans. The Ford Motor Company understood that to lower unit cost it had to increase productivity. The method by which this was accomplished transformed industry forever.

Prototypes of the assembly line can be traced back to ancient times, but the immediate precursor of Ford’s industrial technique was 19th-century meat-packing plants in Chicago and Cincinnati, where cows and hogs were slaughtered, dressed, and packed using overhead trolleys that took the meat from worker to worker. Inspired by the meat packers, the Ford Motor Company innovated new assembly line techniques and in early 1913 installed its first moving assembly line at Highland Park for the manufacture of flywheel magnetos. Instead of each worker assembling his own magneto, the assembly was divided into 29 operations performed by 29 men spaced along a moving belt. Average assembly time dropped from 20 minutes to 13 minutes and soon was down to five minutes.

With the success of the magneto experiment, Ford engineers put the Model T motor and then the transmission on moving assembly lines. On October 7, 1913, the chassis also went on the moving assembly line, so that all the major components of the Model T were being assembled using this technique. Ford rapidly improved its assembly lines, and by 1916 the price of the Model T had fallen to $360 and sales were more than triple their 1912 level. Eventually, the company produced one Model T every 24 seconds, and the price fell below $300. More than 15 million Model T’s were built before it was discontinued in 1927, accounting for nearly half of all automobiles sold in the world to that date. The affordable Model T changed the landscape of America, hastening the move from rural to city life, and the moving assembly line spurred a new industrial revolution in factories around the world."

-History.com

This week in History:

October 4, 1957  - Sputnik launched October 5, 1947  - Truman delivers first presidential speech on TV October 6, 1926  - Babe Ruth sets World Series record October 7, 1780  - Battle of King's Mountain October 8, 1871  - Great Chicago Fire begins October 9, 1936 - Hoover Dam begins transmitting electricity to Los Angeles October 10, 1845 - US Naval Academy opens

Apple to invest $1 billion in India, plans to begin export of ‘Made in India’ iPhones across the world

As Apple plans to begin exporting ‘Made in India’ iPhones across the world, the California-based company is set invest some $1 billion in India.

Pankaj Doval for The Times of India:

The move by the US electronics giant comes at a time when the US and China are engaged in a trade war, prompting companies which are heavily dependent on manufacturing in China to look elsewhere for making their…