Since I didn’t get to play today, and since @[email protected] asked for it, I’m gonna elaborate on the walkway/tubeway I’m always talking about, but have never really shown off in detail.

There’s very little to it, really. A few window walls, frame walls, frame foundation, and a glass roof, with a connection point for power lines and hypertubes running through. Plus some lighting, cause why not (fun fact, the light colors are actually the default machine colors).

This is actually about the third iteration I’ve done on a walkway/tubeway like this. Prior versions from prior playthroughs had the conveyor tubes just running down the middle of the walkway, with only railings instead of the whole upper enclosure, and power running underneath. It made walking along the walkway without getting sucked into tubes at junction points impossible, so I decided to elevate the tubes up above the walkway, and leave it clear for walking this time, which was a big success. That also meant I could just run power up above as well, which is much less of a pain in the ass than running it underneath.

Since the frame foundation set only comes in 4m ramps, that’s the only type of incline I can support directly, which does kinda suck.

Entrance/Exit also gets its own blueprint. I had to try a few different things to get this to a height where you can walk underneath it without getting sucked in, but can still jump to get in, and still have it shoot me from one segment to the next, without stopping. This version’s been working perfectly.

I’ve got just a few variations on the basic 8m-length straight and incline versions, and all the other edge cases have been easier to just build by hand, as needed.

A small junction heading off to miners, from the most-recent build.

I’ve also taken to putting in ladders, as such, pretty much anywhere there’s tube entrances, since another problem I had in prior playthroughs was having to walk reeeeeeeally long distances to get back up on the walkway, after falling off or jumping off.

Now, here we have the main part of the “design” that I carried over: how I can use this walkway to also lay out belt and pipework. Basic idea, as you can hopefully see here, is that I use one of the 40cm thin flat frame pieces, positioned 40cm above the height where the belt support sits, and it lines up to look like the belt is simply sitting attached to the frame. No suspension of disbelief for floating belts!

I also am running some power underneath the walkway, like I used to do, but it’s still so much simpler than before. This space is reserved for “non-main” power lines, I.E. power grids that sit behind a switch. I.E. When I have factories that have miners far away, I can still have them be powered off, when the main power switch for the whole factory is shut off.

A slightly closer look at a densely-packed section of beltway. There’s 7 belts meeting up here, so that means extending the lower portion of the whole tubeway down by an extra 4m.

The design also supports having belts change elevation, and even criss-cross around each other, if needed, as long as they either use the 4 gap areas in the thin supporting frame pieces, or I just leave one of those pieces out for a foundation. You can juuuuuuuuuuuust barely see in this screenshot that the upper belt that’s rising up by 2m is supported by another thin frame at the top of its rise, which is shifted over by 4m. Again, giving a nice illusion of everything being supported.