I created this:

The blueprint pasted down looks like this:

Copying it also does not work:

Ahh! I've seen this. The problem is that the conveyors are "unsupported" and there's no valid place to put the supports, since support doesn't travel through connectors. It's quite infuriating for compact desalinator builds like this, since I have to rebuild that pipe reaching over the seawater pumps every time I want to build another one:

Yes, it's sized to just barely fit between two cargo depots that're placed at closest approach. Now, I could probably adjust the connector positions to get it to blueprint drop correctly, but I can't be bothered. Anyways, every time I build another... notice the missing pipe segment between the highlighted connectors?

Construction then requires me to delete the pipes for the connector on the left, then build to the far one first, like so:

Then connect the middle one, like so:

Which eliminates the support at that location, but doesn't trigger any collapses.

Personally, given the supports you can see on the connecting pipes, this should be allowed, and the intervening pipe segments should be considered supported through the connectors.

Reviewing the support positions on your blueprint, and the maximum support distance relative to station width...

it looks like you're having the same problem, though unlike my build, you didn't delete any supports in the process. It does seem like it really ought to be properly supported through the connector. It's not like connectors are connected to the belts or pipes via hinges, after all, they're probably bolted securely to the truss structure of the running belt. In the meantime, you can probably get it to paste properly by centering the connectors over the station, like so (it pasted correctly):

It looks like there's a two-tile window of connectivity there without disrupting "supported" status, I've selected the one closer to the tracks.

Yes the problem seem to lie with the connectors but there are no warnings or errors during building so I don't see why copying/BP should fail. Someone gave me a workaround:

but I can only output with one conveyor per station which just is not good enough.

This one should work and has enough pillars but you can also not paste or bp it.

Hmm... 3 tiles between each station, and lifts... Alright. Here's a pasteable workaround that does both lanes.

Note the station module itself has a 600-per limit, so a single T3 belt can nearly keep up with an unloading train (with realignment time).

... I haven't even researched blueprints on this save, but it took me about 30 seconds to make that. It's all about placing the connector over the center of the station module, so it's no more than 4 conveyor tiles away from the nearest support- which you can easily coax the game into helping you do, by extending it over the station until the tile before it does this:

Sorry, am problem solver by inclination. My pattern is not just pasteable but tileable, for whatever station dimensions you want.

... Now researched blueprints.

B572: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

All that said... Devs? This issue definitely needs to be fixed:

To reproduce:

1. Construct normal elevated belt normally.
2. Remove the supports by connecting other belts to it at their positions, causing them to be replaced by connectors. I removed the end supports by simply trimming the belt.
3. Remove those other belts, so the connectors return to being belts. The supports do not come back.
4. Build whatever you like underneath your antigravity belt.

I think the ideal solution would be to allow connectors to have supports, and to receive support from belts, so that they don't get removed in the first place. Incidentally, that would also solve the connectors-over-train-station issue Beton is having. And allow some very interesting (artistic) belt designs.

Thanks a lot! I need 4 because I have many stations that I want to unload in parallel so the more the better! Do you happen to be in the discord? I have some other problems that you seem to be good at solving ;)

I created the first blueprint with this:

https://hub.coigame.com/Blueprint/Detail/2434

Take a look and let me know if you like it

Hmm... I feel like Calen might have been right to not include a "train only ingress" option, since a fully-rail-fed foundry would benefit from being split into smaller but more extensible facilities. Also, a station like this one will tend to be better-suited to high-volume foundry insertion, thanks to the quick unloading of trains:

Mixed, single-module-for-product stations, wherein the train has to reposition for each car, tend to be ridiculously time-consuming (read low-throughput) to use, especially with the long trains necessary to reach good throughputs, and back up easily- even when they're not sharing storages, which would tend to make the problem exponentially worse, since you'd have trains dispatch to all four stations at once, then you'd only probably get the first one to arrive far enough ahead of the others that it could fully unload, but could easily end up with a station deadlock situation- especially when the next product tried to do that, and trains started waiting on the mainline. Unlike Line trains, Network trains won't switch to an open parallel station, they'll wait for their assigned delivery station!

That said, the station pictured above is one of the busiest on my entire network (the one just south of it, visible on the bottom of the image, is the busiest), and neither one has ever backed up except for bug-induced train shutdowns, since they load/unload promptly. However, in order to achieve that with just iron, copper, concrete, and diesel, it looks a bit like this:

Yes, that's one very long station.

The blueprints discussed above, I would see using with like products, with matched train length, to allow extremely-high-volume smelteries (like Calen's) to receive maximum input from very short one- or two-car trains, which the COI crew seem to favor in all their previews, via parallel unloading of entire trains of like products, to get past the throughput limit of such a short train.

My network has mostly gotten away with only 2-rail tracks, despite the high volume everything and the nasty pinch points remaining on the temporary portions of the network, probably because I'm using large trains, which are naturally high-throughput.

I do agree. But high volume classical train Stations I have tried in my last saves.
Here I wanted to try and test the limits of mixed network stations. The limit is unfortunately quite low.
I did another attempt here that has much better output but is a mess to create:

https://hub.coigame.com/Blueprint/Detail/1442

I still like this approach a lot for all mixed low throughput stations to just copy and paste stations to it. Calens Foundry was my edge testing and without Mods it is not really feasible.

computerneek wrote:

Ahh! I've seen this. The problem is that the conveyors are "unsupported" and there's no valid place to put the supports, since support doesn't travel through connectors. It's quite infuriating for compact desalinator builds like this, since I have to rebuild that pipe reaching over the seawater pumps every time I want to build another one:

Yes, it's sized to just barely fit between two cargo depots that're placed at closest approach. Now, I could probably adjust the connector positions to get it to blueprint drop correctly, but I can't be bothered. Anyways, every time I build another... notice the missing pipe segment between the highlighted connectors?

Construction then requires me to delete the pipes for the connector on the left, then build to the far one first, like so:

Then connect the middle one, like so:

Which eliminates the support at that location, but doesn't trigger any collapses.

Personally, given the supports you can see on the connecting pipes, this should be allowed, and the intervening pipe segments should be considered supported through the connectors.

Reviewing the support positions on your blueprint, and the maximum support distance relative to station width...

it looks like you're having the same problem, though unlike my build, you didn't delete any supports in the process. It does seem like it really ought to be properly supported through the connector. It's not like connectors are connected to the belts or pipes via hinges, after all, they're probably bolted securely to the truss structure of the running belt. In the meantime, you can probably get it to paste properly by centering the connectors over the station, like so (it pasted correctly):

It looks like there's a two-tile window of connectivity there without disrupting "supported" status, I've selected the one closer to the tracks.

If you put the connectors over the liquid dumps instead of over the only spot a support pillar would fit, pillars should form and you should be able to keep a fully working blueprint. See the output belts on my furnace blueprints, for example.

Fair.

I feel like something like this, with each station tied to one of the storages in the chain (but none actually sharing storages) would work for short trains on a high-volume product, though the trackwork to get enough short trains in to keep such a station busy would be a challenge I wouldn't want to deal with:

While there'd still be a theoretical risk of over-ordering trains, particularly if there was a sudden loss of massive demand and a massive supply to feed it and an excess of trains available to do the feeding, that's enough overkill that I doubt it'd actually happen in practice. With T3 storages, I'd suggest using train limits to limit the number of trains to each station, then segregate products by station rather than with empty modules, so as to ensure the limits applied on a per-product basis, like so:

On the other hand, if T2 storages were used instead (they have enough throughput), they'll limit the stations to ~2 T2 trains per facing of storages, plus 1 for the station itself, versus the ~6 per facing of the T3 storages, which would tend to carry its own limiting effect and allow the disparate products to be linked via empty station modules instead of station segregation.

This is all, of course, only with the stations set to match- or exceed, I suppose- the train size, so as to unload the entire thing in just one station alignment, and keep the trains moving- that's about the most important thing for a multiproduct station, keeping the trains moving. And that would work basically automatically with your original design, just with a few extra storages- and storage links, like so:

You could, of course, add more storages after those T2 ones, and I'd actually recommend it, since 4 rows of T2 storages isn't actually all that much of a working buffer for a high-throughput station- especially since they're all being used to control train orders. If you wanted to play it risky but probably-actually-safe thanks the sheer number of trains necessary to overfill it and the likely inability of the source to produce quite that much material, you could have the further storages be shared by all stations.

And yes, that print is still pasteable with the extra belts for the first two stations removed, resulting in the S curve over the station- you can see the extra supports the game automatically inserted during the paste, next to the second row of lifts, to make that possible.

Kayser wrote:

computerneek wrote:

If you put the connectors over the liquid dumps instead of over the only spot a support pillar would fit, pillars should form and you should be able to keep a fully working blueprint. See the output belts on my furnace blueprints, for example.

Yup, I absolutely could! But as I mentioned in that original post, I just can't be bothered to do that.

computerneek wrote:

Kayser wrote:

computerneek wrote:

If you put the connectors over the liquid dumps instead of over the only spot a support pillar would fit, pillars should form and you should be able to keep a fully working blueprint. See the output belts on my furnace blueprints, for example.

Yup, I absolutely could! But as I mentioned in that original post, I just can't be bothered to do that.

Lol, I should probably read more carefully.