GarryB Thu Aug 20, 2020 4:56 am
The problem is bottle necks.... no matter what you do there going to be bottle necks.
Having a huge ship able to carry enormous numbers of containers means problems on its own.
You will have a network of ports... the amount of traffic going from the big ports to other big ports internationally might need to transport enormous numbers of shipping crates at a time, but equally sometimes you will have ships going from big ports to smaller ports that don't or wont carry as many containers.
Think of it in terms of air travel... just using super big transport planes only makes sense if they are full all the time.
The other factor of course is that fully laden big heavy planes can only operate from big flat runways in major airports, but when the big planes land and all this stuff arrives you need to break up the loads for the different destinations they will be headed to... no one sends products to ports or airfields... they need to be sorted and processed and moved on as quickly as possible... some things need to be checked before they go anywhere, and other things need to be moved as fast as possible because they will rot or degrade, so you need to ensure everything is properly organised... having fruit and veg in the bottom where it takes 3 days to get to is not a great setup, but you are relying on the port that loaded the ship to make the sensible load choices... a 3,000 container ship might be dropping off 500 containers and picking up 350 containers and moving on to the next port... it would be a horrendously complex system... AI would probably help keeping it run efficiently, but I certainly would not be experimenting with my main port testing new ideas....
Flat top barges are great for rivers, but no good for open ocean... Cranes that can carry more than one container at a time and can collect up multiple containers that need to remain together... perhaps placing them together on the ground or on train flatbeds or whatever...
Having a row of channels for individual ships, so a ship can sail in and stop while cranes taking off containers to either side of the ship can quickly remove the necessary containers and then sail to the next position to add any that need to be added and then it can sail off while the containers removed are moved to storage areas or transferred to the second location for the ship they need to sail on to continue their trip... trains or trucks can come alongside and take the containers where they need to go...
The best solution would be to build up all your ports so you have five busy ports instead of one crazy port and four relatively idle ones... all the ports can have road and rail connections so it really wont matter too much which port the goods go through...