Truck Station

A Truck Station is a structure used to transfer items between tractors or trucks and a Conveyor Belt. It has two belt inputs (one for cargo and one for fuel) and one belt output.

The truck station has two belt inputs. The one on the left (facing the inputs), near two tanks on the station, is for fuel. Fuel items of any type can be belted in here and will be stored in the station's fuel slot. Items belted into the right input will be stored in the station's inventory. Note that the station must be powered to accept any input.

When a tractor moves into the 2 x 2 foundation sized area in front of the truck station (visible as a white outline when constructing the station) it will be loaded from the station. Items in the station's fuel slot will be added to the tractor's fuel slot, and items from the station's inventory space will be transferred to the tractor's inventory space. The station will completely load/unload a tractor if the tractor stays a sufficient time in the loading-space. If the tractor doesn't stay long enough, it will not be completely loaded. Note that the station can load only one tractor at a time. The station will only attempt to load/unload a tractor once. If there's room left in the tractor, and the station has received new resources, the tractor will have to leave and re-enter the station to continue loading.

The station consumes 20 MW when there's a vehicle in the loading-bay regardless if the loading/unloading is taking place, but it will not consume energy when there is no vehicle in the bay.

Tips
For greater throughput, consider building clusters of Truck Stations and add more vehicles.

Round trip times
To optimize throughput the time that tractors or trucks should use for one trip depends on the speed with which the origin station is filled or the destination is cleared. It can be calculated as:

max_roundtrip_time = ( numslots * stacksize ) / min( input_items_per_minute, output_items_per_minute )