I wonder if anyone is going to clock that reference. Hmm.
At any rate, I said a few days ago that I intended to come back once I had the process worked out for right-turn bypasses at railway roundabouts in Satisfactory. The idea being that there’s no point in sending the train through 270 degrees of cornering and eating up all pathway vectors if all it needs to do is “hang a right at the junction.” Minimizing the time spent in the roundabout block is good for any train which needs to utilize it.
So here’s how I make that happen, more or less. (Circumstances sometimes require some creative fudging. That’s the game in a nutshell though, isn’t it?)
This is a short follow-up to the big roundabouts post, so you may want to reference that first if needed.
There isn’t a whole lot to it. The basic trick is to place a couple of short lengths of track a bit before/after the entrances/exits and use those to snap into place both a curved bit and the two straight bits. This means starting with an even bigger chunk of foundation tile real estate since you’ll need enough room on the exit and approach lanes to have the “near” end of the short track pieces at the 2.5 foundations point away from the “corner” of the 9×9 square on which we build the main roundabout loop.
(I tried using the “3×3 rule” and for whatever reason the game rejects it when you’re trying to run a curve between existing straight rails. 3.5×3.5 it is, then!)
Once those are down, place the curved bit to make the “right hand turn” you want.
Run your straight line pieces across and you’re all set.
All we need now is the Path and Block signals at the entry and exit points respectively. The basic idea is identical to what I described in the original roundabout post, it’s just that our start and exit points are slightly further out to accommodate the new right-hand-turn feature.
Done and done. Enjoy your new, slightly more efficient, rail roundabout in Satisfactory!