Transport System

Total Island Transport
v1.0.2
Author: Calen

Introduction

Welcome to the first iteration of the Transport System! The transport blueprints of the various production centers can now be combined into a total island Transport System. As this is a first iteration, further improvements and integrations will be made. The main problem with developing this has been the multiple orientations and locations that these blueprints can be placed in relative to each other. It presents somewhat of a 3-body problem.

This may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but most of the blueprints for the Transport System are not present here but are included with their respective production centers. The two transport blueprints included here are the Multi-Mine Transport and Waste Disposal System. See the bottom of this page for an explanation about these two blueprints.

The Manufacturing Hub’s transport blueprint serves as the main thoroughfare from which the other transport blueprints flow. The Unified Foundry and Oil Refinery each have two (mainly) egress transports depending on their orientation and approach to the Manufacturing Hub. One is labeled normally while the other is appended with “(Flipped)”. I’ll explain this later. Other production center blueprints are in various stages of integration. The work continues.

For the most part, I tried to keep the transport blueprints under 14 belts & pipes so that each of them could fit under a large ramp. The Manufacturing Hub transport is the notable exception, but I envision ramps being used on the connecting transports, rather than the main thoroughfare.

While I tried to make the various transport blueprints plug & play, every game is different, so you’ll still have to do a lot of cut and pasting (particularly with the “straight” blueprints).

To Flip or Not to Flip

A few of the transport blueprints come in “normal” and “flipped” versions. This is to accommodate variations in placement and orientation of those production centers vis-à-vis the Manufacturing Hub. So when do you use one over the other? First let’s talk about your orientation.

Throughout any of my blueprint explanations, I will use directional terms like up, down, left, or right. These terms are always relative to the production center in question. I orient myself to each blueprint so that the general flow of products and resources is from the bottom of the screen to the top. Now that we’re facing the same direction for each production center, I can hopefully explain this succinctly. Here we go.

If the transport blueprint in question will connect to the opposite side of the Manufacturing Hub transport, use the normal blueprint. If it will connect on the same side, use the flipped version.

For example…

If you want products to leave the Unified Foundry on the left side of its egress transport and enter the Manufacturing Hub on the right side of its transport, then use the normal blueprint.

If you want products to leave the Unified Foundry on the left side of its egress transport and enter the Manufacturing Hub on the left side of its transport, then use the flipped blueprint.

The same holds true for right->left and right->right pairs respectively.

Elevated versus Ground Transport

For the purposes of this discussion, consider ground transport to be both ground and one level raised, while elevated transport is raised by two and three levels.

Elevated transport has several advantages over ground transport. Pickups and trucks are able to pass beneath them, so they don’t form large obstacles for smaller vehicles. Additionally, organizing the belts and pipes into groups of four allows you to connect merging and diverging transport paths without altering the path of the main transport, and provides easy viewing of what each transport is carrying. Here are the elevated transports:

• Manufacturing Hub
• Unified Foundry
• Oil Refinery
• Food & Drug Center (Inorganic Ingress)
• Waste Treatment Center
• Nuclear Power Station
• FBR Station (Not yet released)
• Ethanol Refinery (Not yet released)
• Multi-Mine Transport

Ground transport has its uses as well! Ground transport is easier to build but more of a hassle when dealing with connections. Therefore, I use ground transport when there is no diverging or merging paths from source to destination. Ground and elevated transports can pass through each other without impact (See Image 5) and can even run one on top of the other, though I wouldn’t recommend that for long distances. Here are the ground transports:

• Farm
• Food & Drug Center (Farm Ingress and Supermarket Egress)
• Waste Disposal

DIY Transport

Some production centers don’t have pre-built transport blueprints. This is because their placement varies depending on the terrain and available space, and they have limited ingress and egress. This makes it more practical to build ad hoc transport for these.

• Coal Power
• Concrete & Paper Factory
• Data Center
• Individual Mines
• Shipyard & Cargo Depots
• Ad-hoc buildings

Large Volume Resources

Some resources have two transports because they require more than 450 units/min of throughput. These doubled transports run side-by-side so that balancers can be used at connection points to maintain an even distribution of resources between the two transports. Those resources are:

• Dirt
• Rock
• Coal
• Iron Ore Powder
• Sand - Unified Foundry Ingress Only: This is because it’s numerically possible for the UF to consume more than 450/min, however I’ve never actually seen that happen; at least for long enough that the sand supply couldn’t recover on one transport.
• Slag
• Carbon Dioxide
• Sulfur (see below)

The Sulfur Exchange

Sulfur is transported around on a circuit that I call The Sulfur Exchange. The circuit is designed by having the parallel transports travel in opposite directions with balancers at either end to keep the flow of sulfur going. The main reason this is necessary is because I currently produce fertilizer at the Food & Drug Center rather than the Oil Refinery. This means that sulfur egress and ingress locations vary game to game in relative location and sequence to each other, so a circuit is needed to ensure sulfur doesn’t get bottled up somewhere.

Multi-Mine Transport

The multi-mine transport is designed for long-distance hauling of natural resources that are vaguely coming from the same trajectory. This would probably still work for smaller maps like New Haven, but it was conceived on large-scale maps like Armageddon.

To understand how to use the Ascent and Descent transport blueprints, please see https://imgur.com/a/IcHPKAx.

Trains will most likely make this obsolete, but until then it makes for a good substitute.

Waste Disposal System

The Waste Disposal System was designed to facilitate the removal of mining and industrial byproducts by bringing them as close as you want to the area where they're to be dumped. A fuel station, and its requisite pipeline, is included so that dedicated dumping trucks don't have to travel to refuel. While storage is included at both the start and end, feel free to forego the starting storage if you are connecting it to existing transport.