Newb question (Optimization)

[TehDwArF]

I'm working on building my first epic factory and I would like to adjust some things to reduce wasted space/assemblers. How do I tell how long a craft will take? I'm assuming the time under "Total Raw" is the total time all components take to make seeing as recipes that don't take anything but raw materials doesn't have a time listed. Also, it appears as though the wiki is outdated and neither the components or times match in game.

[ssilk]

Yes, the total time you see, is the time you need, when you craft it yourself.

The right answer would be, that the total time - when crafted in assemblies, what I assume, because of the first sentence - cannot be calculated and it makes no sense to calculate it, because you need to calculate in the time to transport the components from one assembly to the other. And the assembly time differs also, dependend on the modules you use in that. Any many other factors, too. It can differ between two items dramatically. So I mean it's a bit useless to ask this question, when you produce the items in an industrial manufacture. Much more important is here the total thruput, the number of items you produce per minute. You produce in parallel!

In other words: It's ready, when the former items have been produced anywhere and it is now assembled together. And you leave the area of looking at single items and look more for the run...

[Mctittles]

I don't think this is a useless question at all! For instance if I were to create a single gear assembler for every red science I wanted, I would get a huge backlog of gears waiting for the science jar to get done since gears are fast and red jars are slow. Instead if I have one gear assembler and split the final product 5 ways it works much better and I can use the extra metal gained for other things.
Having an idea of how long a component takes to be made would make estimating how many times you can "share" made resources much easier.

[Holy-Fire]

When you hover the mouse over an item in the crafting menu and see its recipe, at the top (right below the item name) you have a label "Time:". This is the time it takes to craft it.

E.g., for iron gear wheel time is 0.5, for Science pack 1 time is 5, so one assembling machine for gears can feed 10 machines for red science packs.

[Zourin]

The 'time to build' listed in the item's description will give you a general idea of how to proportion your factory as mentioned above, assuming you use the same grade of assemblers throughout the chain.

Assembler modifiers do become involved, such as basic assembler I's taking twice as long, assembler II's taking about 50% longer, and assembler III's being 25% faster than the player. It comes down to Item Build Time divided by Assembler Modifier.

This production rate, aside from how to proportion your assemblers, will also give you an idea of how many inserters (and of what kind) you will need to feed and unload your assemblers. Only for certain products will you need to use either multiple yellow/red inserters or fast/smart inserters because of throughput issues (gears and copper cables come to mind)