Sorting Structure Advice Requested

[HighestElite]

Hello fellow Tekkit friends. I was wondering if any of you have invested your resources in creating a structure that sorts as well as returns useful resources and commonly used items. I am asking because I have been pondering the idea for some time now and I am at a virtual 'cross roads'. The means of sorting with the machine is fairly simple; you put items into a chest and/or throw them near the machine and the items are then moved via pipes to their respectable chests. I anticipate a maximum logistical load of 3 Alchemical Chests to suffice.

Anyways, back to my problem; I cannot devise a quick and simple means to retrieve the stored items once they have been stored. I want the items to be dispersed to the player within 3 seconds of activation of a lever, button, pressure plate, etc..

So far I have attempted prototypes and the best I could produce so far was a button and a lever wired to a timer set for .200 seconds (Basically a pulser) wired then to a vanilla repeater set to delay mode 3 (this is so that the dispenser mention next can disperse items evenly without a break in between) which is placed adjacent to a vanilla dispenser. When the lever is in the on position, items in the chest are dispensed one at a time into an obsidian pipe then a golden pipe to speed it to players 'pick up' destination. This entire process takes too long for my liking.

Any advice for an aspiring tekkit technician?

[milcondoin]

How far are your storage area and your retrieval area apart from each other? (a.k.a. is some kind of teleport needed to reduce traveltime, e.g. enderchests?)

Do you want to retrieve your items one-by-one or stackwise?

Do you need your retrieved items to be spit out via dispenser/transposer/filter or can they be put in a target chest where you get them out yourself?

[HighestElite]

How far are your storage area and your retrieval area apart from each other? (a.k.a. is some kind of teleport needed to reduce traveltime, e.g. enderchests?)

Do you want to retrieve your items one-by-one or stackwise?

Do you need your retrieved items to be spit out via dispenser/transposer/filter or can they be put in a target chest where you get them out yourself?

Well I wanted it to all be in one big ‘skyscraper-esk’ building with a 1st floor with a simple layout for imputing materials and retrieving them as well. I wanted to make one lever for steady flow of the item selected and a button to extract one stack at a time as well. I wanted the player to retrieve the item via a drop shaft (the item will fall down on them from above in a specified location). The input section will most likely be an alchemical chest on the first floor that sends that automatically pumps the items out and sorts them into their respective chests.

As for the Ender Chest, I honestly don't know what that does.

[milcondoin]

Ender Chests with the same color code share their inventory. When placed down, they have 3 small blocks on top of them, white/white/white by standard. You can then color them via the normal dyes. Bad thing about the ender chests: If you have EE disabled, it will take a bunch of time to gather all the ender pearls and blaze rods, if you need many of these chests.

With this you could put an ender chest somewhere in your storage area which receives the items to be dispensed to your player. This could reduce the length of pipe-/tubework needed -> speedup.

Directly above the drop shaft you put another ender chest with the same color code, below that a redpower filter, powered via a redpower timer. The filter will pull out the contents of the chest stack by stack on each pulse and drop them out its backside (the side with the small dot).

[Yuriy]

I've set up everything from large pipe networks, to logistics pipe warehouse systems (wish it was smp), and many things in between. Once I'm teched to the hilt, I also prefer to get the items I want quickly and easily without having to really do much after the system is set up.

Lately, I've been debating switching to red power as a means of delivering the items back to the player but I may continue using buildcraft using wireless transport pipes at the end of each main item hub. By that I mean that each section of the warehouse or each floor will feed into an item teleportation pipe that will feed the retrieval area.

A method of collection could be achieved with the use of wireless red stone a skitters hooked up to buttons or levels that would power the means of pulling items from a chest and sending them into the retrieval system.

At present, I am experimenting with a rail raft sorting system which am be a bit slower but requires less piping and just seems like an intereresting notion to me. Rather than splitting resources into a webbing of pips, I intend to have a transposer (I think that's it, red power suck items into tubes thing) or a chest feed a storage cart that moves around on a powered track feeding every chest in my warehouse. The sorting system would lose a bit of sorting speed as the car dies its thing but makes up for it with an increase of space and simplicity (IMO).

For retrieval, I would probably use red power to pull items with a red stone pulse and find a way to get it into a powered buildcraft pipe to send down the teleport tube and to the player. As someone mentioned, you can instead use a coded ended chest for retrieval and by diminishing the capacity of each floor, add an index chest for each storage chest to have the items instantly pulled into an enter chest for retrieval. The latter would be really freaking expensive but would make the process of retrieval almost instant. You could also do an enter chest per floor or section and that would cut down the cost considerably while maintaining a decent speed.

Ah, how I love logistics ;p

I also look forward to reading any other people's ideas about their logistical networks.