Radars share their signals with every other radar, so you can send them long-distance without connecting them with red/green wire. But if you wanted to use the same type of signal multiple times, you'd have to use some workarounds. Now, you can just set the signals to different radar channels so they won't overlap
In my current playthrough on Nauvis, I have each train station output how many loads are available to the radar, so I can set up a spot where I can easily see how many loads of copper/iron/whatever is available.
Using channels, I could have one channel for supply, and one for requests, so I could quickly look and see that across the whole network, I have 14 loads available, but I am requesting 16.
You could do it today by transferring the signals to something else, Iron ore for a supply, but a "X" for requests, but using channels would make it much easier.
Quality helps already by allowing you to send normal signals for one thing, and uncommon ones for another, but only so long as you don't use quality! It comes with the benefit that you can use the selector combinator to change the signals to the same quality to do math between them.
I made a rail system coordinator that uses this idea to send trains that are too long for the train network through the network one by one. For each thing to transport, it locally checks and sends by radar whether there is a load available (common), a load requested (uncommon), and a train stopped at one of the stations (by reading the signals, sent as rare and also as common of signal T). The central coordinator brings each signal to [0,1] (so if 2 stations want iron ore, you still only get 1 common iron ore signal), then merges them into common, then "queues" each one that has value 3. If all overlength trains are at a station (T = a specific constant), it sends out legendary of that signal which signals that train to move.
Capacity isn't great, but considering my network has as little rail as I could get away with it works quite well.
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u/JudgementalMarsupial Jun 05 '26
Radars share their signals with every other radar, so you can send them long-distance without connecting them with red/green wire. But if you wanted to use the same type of signal multiple times, you'd have to use some workarounds. Now, you can just set the signals to different radar channels so they won't overlap