Teleportation Tunnels for vehicles/trains

[ExcessionOz]

Peter F. Hamilton used the idea of warpgates in his novels (see Pandora's Star, or the Void Trilogy). He especially likes the idea of having interstellar train systems using these wormholes.

Factorio would benefit immensely from this technology.

Have a pair of warp gates between any two points, and a 'tunnel' between them of zero length. A train could drive in at point A and emerge at point B having skipped the intervening space entirely.

Such technology would be expensive in terms of power (1.21GW springs to mind), and to initially lay down the portals. I've looked at the Personal Teleporter mod (which is waycool), but I have no idea how to convert this technology to be used as a train-transport system.

There would of course be problems -- if a train can drive through it, then what is stopping a car/tank from using it, or a biter ... Also, placement of entry and exit beacons could be problematical.

Recently we played a game where we went quite a long way to find decent patches of resources using RSO, we went about 10K tiles, some 3 minutes travel on a 2-2 train (single direction 2 locomotives two wagons) away from our base. It was becoming a problem waiting for the travel time when ALL of our mines were so very far away and we had mined out local (small depositcs). Remote deposits were in the 7-10Million range at our explored distance, which was about 1 diagonal screen away on a fully zoomed out Main map, basically a long corridor to a rich area with ore and petroleum to meet the needs of our mega-base.

Having Teleporter Trains would be very nice, but the problem would be train pathing, I have no idea how the underlying game 'knows' the station A and B are in the same train network, and with a physical break between the wormhole entry and exit, it's difficult to work out how train pathing would work over such a system.

Anyway, thats my idea for a mod, I'd love to see this attempted, and can be contacted for playtesting if someone takes up the challenge.