How do I put less than 20kg on a rail?

[Occam Blazer]

This comes up once in a while so I made a machine. It looks pretty stable, but I haven't tested it over a long time.

Like so many things in this game it's kinda mesmerizing to watch.

[ghkbrew]

I've been using a similar contraption I cribbed from algae loader in this build:

The idea is to only activiate the loading sweeper when the element sensor on the rail is off. I think your version will overload the rail if it backs up. But the lag from the automation signaling means you only get 1 packet per 2 seconds. That's not been an issue for me, but you should be able to double it like here for a full 1 packet/s

[Saturnus]

There's virtually no circumstance where it would be needed to actually decrease the amount on rails instead of just slowing the rail down which is trivial to do. For example, if you have a system where you need a solids flow rate of 1kg/s then you just use a timer on a shut off valve or vent at the end of the rail to be on 1s out of every 20s.

[Occam Blazer]

8 hours ago, Saturnus said:

There's virtually no circumstance where it would be needed to actually decrease the amount on rails instead of just slowing the rail down which is trivial to do. For example, if you have a system where you need a solids flow rate of 1kg/s then you just use a timer on a shut off valve or vent at the end of the rail to be on 1s out of every 20s.

Someone on reddit asked about it. They were trying to convert clay into ceramic on the rail, but the 20kg packets form tiles instead of debris. I didn't check if it's actually useful. (-:

[ghkbrew]

23 hours ago, Saturnus said:

There's virtually no circumstance where it would be needed

To be fair. I did link a build that required it above.  But yeah it's rare. The purpose is not so much to decrease flow rate as to be able accurately deliver less than 20kg of debris at a time.

14 hours ago, occamrazor said:

They were trying to convert clay into ceramic on the rail, but the 20kg packets form tiles instead of debris. I didn't check if it's actually useful. (-:

For the record: it's not. Any amount of clay will form a tile of ceramic when heated to "melting".  I think dirt -> sand is the same way.