I started a challenge:

Setup place one factory and use spawn belts and spawn pumps to pipe in all raw items I'll need (ore, wood, coal, stone, alien artifacts, oil and water) no power. Once I got that set up I enter the factory with nothing and I don't leave for the rest of the game. I'm also using marathon mod just to make sure it's not too easy.

I was worried that I would be limit on space till I researched and made more factorys to place inside but I got plenty of room. Now my biggest worry is I chose to only pipe in one pipe of water and one of Oil and I'm worried that I'm going to be missing the water I need to make power. Any one know how much power you can make with only one pipe of water? I know/think its a lot more then just one off Offshore Pump.

nice idea. Nested headache of fun ;)

Right now the maximum throughput per tick through one port is half the capacity of the pipe (so 5 units per tick), since every tick balances the inside and outside pipe. This throughput gets divided through the number of ports you route the pipe through, unless you use enough small pumps. In any case, 5 units of water per tick is barely enough to feed fifty steam engines, totalling 25 MW. That is definitely not enough, and remember that you need lots of water in other places too. I suggest that you produce some power outside instead, and increase the power throughput multiplier in the configs to get effectively unlimited power.

I working out that I would have to sacrifice too many belts of ore to pump the water I needed in to make power. This would be fine for a normal game but with marathon mod I think there would to too much time just waiting around.

I thought about giving up, editing the Factorissimo mod to give me more input so or having power out side having each Factorissimo have solar panels (I know power does not flow out but I think they can be used to power things inside them.

In the end I decided to use the Water Well Mod but only for power.

http://imgur.com/N4DSxMz

Just finished reserching architecture So I'll be able to get more space. As you can tell not much planing went into this layout didnt think it would be this cramped as this stage al my thinking when is what I would do once I start puting factorys inside factorys. Keep in mind this is with the marathon mod.