Testing Factorio assembler energy efficiency

When building small space ships in Factorio, energy efficiency becomes important. The question is, should you use an assembler 2 or 3 when making ammo on a small ship where power is a precious commodity?

I used one accumulator to power an assembler making ammo with an input and output inserter, then counted how many magazines were made by each setup.

Here are the results (w/researched stack size of 4 for yellow/blue inserters):

In	Assm	Mods	Out	Ammo made
				29
				81
				79
				77
				55
				57
				56

One final tweak: you can force the output inserter to only activate when there is more than one magazine of ammo to move, which saves some swings:

In	Assm	Mods	Out w/ condition	Ammo made
			w/ >= 2	84
			w/ >= 2	82
			w/ >= 3	84
			w/ >= 3	84
			w/ >= 4	JAM
			w/ >= 4	84

For whatever reason, using a yellow input inserter causes the system to jam when the output condition is "ammo >= 4", and that is repeatable.

And with the assembler 3:

In	Assm	Mods	Out w/ condition	Ammo made
			w/ >= 2	58
			w/ >= 2	58
			w/ >= 3	57
			w/ >= 3	60
			w/ >= 4	56
			w/ >= 4	60

cellularmitosis/README.md

Testing Factorio assembler energy efficiency