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.
Modded the design a bit so I don't have to run conveyers to the smelters whenever the miners need to move back, particularly as now they just won't move until the whole patch is drained (scuffed example here but, again, I'm just fiddling around in the tutorial atm). https://reddit.com/link/p14alrh/video/l3ax9rqe6tgh1/player On your first point: What you're talking about is a choice you have to make on where you want your bottleneck to be. Either the furnaces aren't producing as much as they could be, or the miners are producing ore that isn't being smelted. If I plan to mine the whole patch anyway, I might as well have as many miners as I can get so I can get as much iron as I can as fast as I can. With that in mind, if I have 50,000 electric furnaces waiting on the ore from 5 miners, I'm not sad that the furnaces sometimes won't burn, because all the ore is still getting smelted as fast as it can be. On the other hand, if I have 50,000 miners producing ore for 5 furnaces, I'm VERY frustrated at producing so much ore that I can't do anything with until the furnaces finally get around to it,. With both the setup in this comment and the one in the OP, the ore is smelted as fast as it's produced, so the fact the furnaces aren't running doesn't bother me. The main problem with the setup from the OP is just that I hadn't packed everything as tight as they could have been == Your second point is fair enough, can't really argue with it. I can avoid moving the smelters by just running belts from the miners to them that'll get longer as the miners move back, but ultimately it's still a limitation to work around. == On your final point though, that's not much different from the problem I already face brining ammo to ballistic turrets whenever I set up a new mine. In fact, in the video you can actually see one of my turrets is being fed by a burner inserter, which keeps me from needing electric poles all around the perimeter for electric inserters to feed the guns. Coal and ammo can be brought along in the same train car and fed down that belt beside each other, and the coal can be siphoned off to feed the smelters.
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.