I'm about 120 hours in on the map I am currently playing on. I ended up launching about 20 satellites and about half of the spaceship components for the spacex mod in my starter base when I realized the final FTL tech requires hundreds of thousands of space science and to complete, and there was absolutely no way this base was going to make it that far. My resources were already close to depleted, especially oil.

So I set off to the west of my base and started clearing out biters and set up an artillery supply line to keep the rail line clear. Finally managed to get far enough out that I was finding 50-100 million ore patches, so I set up my second base.

Previous to this point, my knowledge of rail systems was rudimentary. I set up a bunch of loops that just go out to an outpost and back around my initial bases, but never anything more complicated than that. I resolved for this base to figure out how to build a more complex network.

Anyhow that's the background. I feel pretty good about how far I have come, but mostly I wanted to get some feedback to see if the conclusions I have come to so far are sound.

The way I laid it out is essentially a loose city block kind of design. There are squares with 2-lane rails around the peremeters. In each square I set up a relatively self-contained factory. At the moment I have a mall, a circuit/module factory, iron smelting, copper smelting, an oil refinery, and a stone products factory, and a power plant. Obviously some of those are more input/output heavy than others. The circuit factory has enormously high throughput on both sides if it is going full tilt, and I gave it the least space of all of them...

Anyhow, my biggest question is about the depots. I have probably designed 15 different way of doing it now, and I'm still not sure I have a solution I am happy with.

I have a system that I like pretty well for the loading (output) side, especially for the smelting facilities. I have 1 loading dock that is belt fed, and I have created a stacker in between the loading dock and the exit so that any empty trains will first be loaded very quickly, and then go and wait at one of the staging stops until their presence is requested by one of the factories.

My question with the output docks is about multiple products. The smelting facilities are simple because they only send 1 thing, but I can't think of a good way of creating a relatively compact loading dock that can handle several different kinds of products. At my oil refinery, for instance, I have 4 separate loading areas; plastic, sulfuric acid, artillery shells, and a mixed fluid train for the mall. It works ok but it takes up an enormous amount of space, and if I wanted to export something else I would have to tear up the entire line and start over. Is there a better way of doing this? I know that LTN would make this problem go away, but I am interested to know if there is a good solution outside of mods.

And with the incoming docks, I am wondering what the most UPS friendly unloading method is. Right now I am dumping all of the product into purple chests and having bots move them from the unloading area to the input area of the factory. It works pretty well and it is item-independent because the bots will sort everything, I am just not sure how scale-able it is. My circuit factory can easily keep 1000 logistics bots busy if it is going balls to the walls, and my factory isn't really that big.