Any future possibility to make chest connections if a train pulls up alongside a factory building? The issues I see are A) cargo wagon filtering B) since you could have multiple interior chests connect to a cargo wagon as it covers multiple squares on the outside, how would you handle balancing or input from train to multiple chests.

Even if it only worked in the most simple in & out to a single chest, you could make some really nice train-to-train smelting setups with it. (At least with the level 1 & 2, as 3 is too big to tile alongside more than 2 wagons).

This doesn't really seem worth the effort to implement, since you can achieve the same thing by putting your factory building 2 tiles away from the tracks and using regular chest connections with stack inserters.

Mainly just because of how slow stack inserters are. Using 3 (for a level 2 factory shared by two cargo wagons) or 4 (for a single level 1 factory per cargo wagon) stack inserters takes 28 or 21 seconds to unload a wagon full of ore. Big difference vs instantly teleporting the entire contents into the interior chest every 60 or 20 ticks... Seems like it might be more UPS friendly not having all the inserters since you're going to pay to transfer the items inside anyway.

Admittedly I'm playing around with some ridiculous setups like 100k to 200k plate per minute smelters in a single factory (works amazingly well, actually).

Hm, in that case how about you add some modded stack inserters with much higher speed and capacity?

Also I assume you're using ridiculous amounts of robots inside your factory building to move that ridiculous amount of ore and plates around, right?

Yeah it takes quite a few robots to move 210,000 plates per minute at the top level of the factory, but with the new robot research it's actually not nearly as many as you might think (just a few thousand), and the UPS doesn't even budge doing it at 60 tick intervals. So massive kudos to you on how well it's optimized.

I'm experimenting with using bots on the outside to move from the 9 other chests into the 3 that are the factory input, and since the distance is so short it lets me empty the wagon at the full 12 stack inserter speed, so I can size each factory to work at that rate with trains continually backed up.

Cheers!

I'd love to see a few screenshots of your world, if you don't mind.

I would recommend a stack inserter that can hold stacks as big as 1/3 of a cargo waggon but it has about 20 secons cooldown until it can work again? Dont know if this is possible but otherwise this things are to op