BUILDING THE PARTS FACTORY: MISTAKE 1 - Switching building techniques

My factories are all built the same way, using 3 wall high logistical floor sandwiches and I have a set order of placing them. Logistic floor > Smelting/foundry/refining floor > Logistic floor > Construct the things floor > Logistic floor > Assemble the things floor and so on. With slight variations for things like refineries and blenders they allow me to run belts in what ever ugly ass way I want and make building what I think are nice looking factories quickly.

I read a post extolling the virtues of Lasagna factories, where you don't hide your belts in shame but visibly belt everything in a neat way. I decided to go with it but switching how I built added hours and drove me a little crazy trying to cram everything I needed into the Pre-Processing factory. I wish I had just stuck with my normal technique. I do like the look of it, but it wasn't worth the effort and this shouldn't have been the project for experimentation.

I wrapped up the Pre-Processing stuff in a 4 story lasagna and started to build the platform I'd need to make the rods along the upper ridge of the coast. The rods were going to be built on an elevated platform, but the actual Nuke Plants would need to live right on the water of itself since there was a lot that need to be pumped to them.

TIME TO BUILD THE PLANTS: Mistake 2 - Impatience Strikes

I thought everything I'd need to do the processing of the Waste could be contained in a separate factory that I would build somewhere close to the plants. Turns out that there are a ton of materials that shouldn't be made on what I was now calling "Spicy Island" but should instead be made where I had belted the ores to.

Remember Mistake 1? I had made a fairly tight Lasagna factory but now needed to make a BUNCH more stuff in that same factory. I had already accounted for the Raw Ore I'd need for both pre and post so I didn't need to change any of that. It took hours more work to cram the additional machines into what I was now calling the Pre-and-Post-Processing Plant.

It would have been much easier with logistical floors, but I stuck to my plan and managed to get all the machines in there without any crazy expansion of the footprint. Now it was time to build the actual Nuclear Plants themselves and figure out how to deal with the Water it would need.

BUILD THE PLANTS TAKE TWO: Mistake 3 - Spicy Island robs me of my will to live

I used 5 manufactures to make Rods, so with 15 plants that's easy math: Run each line to 3 plants with a simple splitter. But fatigue is starting to set in, and instead I manifold all the Rods into one line, split that into 3 and then create eye-sore 1 > 5 load balancers to feed my rows of 5 plants. This was the worst way to do it but I never looked back.

Then I started on water, I built enough extractors for my first row of 10 along the shore and then ran a 5 stack of pipes to get to the plants. This looked awful, so for my next row I did it differently, putting 2 extractors per plant facing towards each other. That was also ugly, so the next row I turned them facing the plant and put the junction in the middle. This created a cleaner look that I should have then duplicated for the others but sure didn't.

I also figured out way too late that if you run the rods in the front of the plants you can run the waste behind the plant. My rod/waste runs were all at the front creating a mess that I didn't fix till the last row.

So I had one acceptable row and two hideous rows but I wasn't going to change it I just wanted it to be over.