4 ms·

> Just in time doesn't mean "buffer free". It means eliminating unnecessary buffers. this is sort of tautological, or at least hinges on how you interpret "nec

> Just in time doesn't mean "buffer free". It means eliminating unnecessary buffers. this is sort of tautological, or at least hinges on how you interpret "necessary". certainly no one would implement a buffer knowing at the time that it was unnecessary! but even in factorio, it can be worth maintaining a buffer deeper than what's needed to keep the factory running at 100% under optimal conditions. you don't want to find out that you're out of stone when your bots stop autoreplacing your walls and the biters flood in, or discover that you've exhausted all your uranium patches when your base goes dark. it's a real pain to reseed your kovarex enrichment in a power crisis. I usually maintain fairly deep buffers of critical defense items and monitor them periodically (or set up alarms). especially with fuel cells, I like to have at least a two hour supply, in case setting up the next mine is nontrivial. disclaimer: I have played several hundred hours of factorio, but I have never built a base so large that my PC itself became the bottleneck.

dragontamer 5y ago
> you don't want to find out that you're out of stone when your bots stop autoreplacing your walls and the biters flood in But stone is used in more than just walls. You also use stone to make concrete. So what do you buffer? Do you buffer stone? Cause buffering stone didn't actually solve anything (your "stone reserves" are the mine itself. If you really wanted to see "how good" your reserves are, you check how many stone mines you have left). Do you buffer concrete? No. That wastes stone unnecessarily. Maybe you need the stone for the biter attack. Do you buffer walls? No. That wastes stone. Maybe you need the stone to make concrete. -------- So here's our 4 potential buffers: * Buffer Stone -- Inferior to just running by your stone mines every few minutes and checking to see how many stone is left in the mine. The __MINES__ itself are your buffer. * Buffer Concrete -- Wastes walls. * Buffer Walls -- Wastes concrete. * Buffer Concrete AND Walls -- Wastes furnaces, pumpjacks, and oil refineries. All of which require stone to make (and can't be made out of Concrete or Walls).
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  This type of buffering actually leads to the sort of supply chain bottlenecks we are experiencing. If the demand for stone suddenly rises to a point where much more walls and concrete is demanded, you get a massive delay in the production line because the stone needs to get mined and transported and crushed and transported &c before it even reaches the wall factory. It's not entirely dissimilar to the chip shortage we are seeing. Our processes require a long lead time, which depends on accurate forecasting to work well. When the forecasts fail, you additionally get huge knock-on effects because downstream products also get delayed, which delays additional products. It's incredibly efficient, nobody is denying that, but what can also not be denied is that incredibly fragile.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    No. I argue that your style of buffering causes the delays we see. If Ford hoarded 1 year of chips, not only would Ford not be making cars, nor would anyone else be making cars. Every single chip made last year went into a car: and pretty much every car was sold. We are limited at the chip manufacturing level. The only solution is to make more chips. This process of spinning up chip production takes months to years. Blaming JIT for showing us the answer is backwards. ------------ That being said: we do have substantial buffers where it counts: dealership lots. We don't actually have a car shortage yet, just a dramatic increase in car prices. We're all looking ahead to the future to see a lack of production because we're actually more forward looking than we give ourselves credit for.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > If the demand for stone suddenly rises to a point where much more walls and concrete is demanded, you get a massive delay in the production line because the stone needs to get mined and transported and crushed and transported &c before it even reaches the wall factory. That doesn't take long. And you'd have enough walls as a finished product to wait out that small delay. (A tiny percent of what you'd have if you tried to buffer the full supply.) > It's not entirely dissimilar to the chip shortage we are seeing. Our processes require a long lead time, which depends on accurate forecasting to work well. The thing making the chip shortages so bad and hard to catch up is that we don't have enough manufacturing capacity. For both chips and the supplies they need. Buffers would not help much, because all the spare capacity we had wouldn't have filled them very far, and then they would have quickly drained back to leave us exactly where we are. If you want to handle longer term disruptions then you need to have more factories, not more warehouses.

dragontamer 5y ago

> you don't want to find out that you're out of stone when your bots stop autoreplacing your walls and the biters flood in But stone is used in more than just walls. You also use stone to make concrete. So what do you buffer? Do you buffer stone? Cause buffering stone didn't actually solve anything (your "stone reserves" are the mine itself. If you really wanted to see "how good" your reserves are, you check how many stone mines you have left). Do you buffer concrete? No. That wastes stone unnecessarily. Maybe you need the stone for the biter attack. Do you buffer walls? No. That wastes stone. Maybe you need the stone to make concrete. -------- So here's our 4 potential buffers: * Buffer Stone -- Inferior to just running by your stone mines every few minutes and checking to see how many stone is left in the mine. The __MINES__ itself are your buffer. * Buffer Concrete -- Wastes walls. * Buffer Walls -- Wastes concrete. * Buffer Concrete AND Walls -- Wastes furnaces, pumpjacks, and oil refineries. All of which require stone to make (and can't be made out of Concrete or Walls).

marginalia_nu 5y ago
This type of buffering actually leads to the sort of supply chain bottlenecks we are experiencing. If the demand for stone suddenly rises to a point where much more walls and concrete is demanded, you get a massive delay in the production line because the stone needs to get mined and transported and crushed and transported &c before it even reaches the wall factory. It's not entirely dissimilar to the chip shortage we are seeing. Our processes require a long lead time, which depends on accurate forecasting to work well. When the forecasts fail, you additionally get huge knock-on effects because downstream products also get delayed, which delays additional products. It's incredibly efficient, nobody is denying that, but what can also not be denied is that incredibly fragile.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  No. I argue that your style of buffering causes the delays we see. If Ford hoarded 1 year of chips, not only would Ford not be making cars, nor would anyone else be making cars. Every single chip made last year went into a car: and pretty much every car was sold. We are limited at the chip manufacturing level. The only solution is to make more chips. This process of spinning up chip production takes months to years. Blaming JIT for showing us the answer is backwards. ------------ That being said: we do have substantial buffers where it counts: dealership lots. We don't actually have a car shortage yet, just a dramatic increase in car prices. We're all looking ahead to the future to see a lack of production because we're actually more forward looking than we give ourselves credit for.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > If the demand for stone suddenly rises to a point where much more walls and concrete is demanded, you get a massive delay in the production line because the stone needs to get mined and transported and crushed and transported &c before it even reaches the wall factory. That doesn't take long. And you'd have enough walls as a finished product to wait out that small delay. (A tiny percent of what you'd have if you tried to buffer the full supply.) > It's not entirely dissimilar to the chip shortage we are seeing. Our processes require a long lead time, which depends on accurate forecasting to work well. The thing making the chip shortages so bad and hard to catch up is that we don't have enough manufacturing capacity. For both chips and the supplies they need. Buffers would not help much, because all the spare capacity we had wouldn't have filled them very far, and then they would have quickly drained back to leave us exactly where we are. If you want to handle longer term disruptions then you need to have more factories, not more warehouses.