Those miners will deplete their little areas. Once they do, you will have to rebuild your smelting line to shift the miners over.
I could, or I could just move the miners back and run conveyer lines from each miner to its same corresponding smelter from before.
Good for very early tech rushing - I’ve seen dosh or Hendricks to something similar on deathworld challenges. Once you’re past the very early game you quickly need to be able to utilise the entire patch, and if you have furnaces/ belts on the patch, you’re not doing that.
Admittedly the smelter placement was just me being lazy lol. The train station was already set up, and with this positioning the output line feeds straight into the first car.
It's a bad ratio and poor use of the iron patch. 30 miners will fill a yellow belt which needs 48 stone furnaces. So in this your miners are only working at around 2/3rds capacity. In the actual game you'll need belts and belts of iron so you want to be able to place as many miners on the patch as you can.
That reminds me, gotta upgrade the furnaces. But, on that, how's the ratio change with steel furnaces?
Miners produce ore significantly faster than the furnaces consume it. Which means you need more miners for the same throughput, higher peak energy demand. You also have to manually move the line around whenever they run out. And you gave to bring coal to your mining outposts which isn't a big deal at the very beginning or the end but is awkward in the middle game.
Since your ore patches are only partially covered by miners, you'll need many more ore patches to produce the same number of plates. Also, these miners will have a lot of downtime as the furnaces are much slower.