In this case, the long twisty tunnel is necessary for operator safety. Even if you're not in the beam itself, anything within direct line-of-sight is getting irradiated by various secondary effects. Having a few right-angle turns in the entry and exit tunnels mitigates this to acceptable levels.

You can tell that's absolutely what its for because right after the turn you start seeing the static from the electrons messing with the camera.

It also provides a natural place to hide loading screens between levels! ;-)

You just know that snow effect is an asset-swap. ;)

Secondary effect like electron ricochet?

Seems safer than having a PhD push the sample into the electron beam with a trolley.

The PhD's cheaper.

The first grad student is cheaper. The lawsuit ... ehhh

Lawsuits require survivors. The implications are clear.

But no PhD would do physical labor. That's what undergrads, PhD candidates, or even the interns are for.

Ah, yes, no postdoc has ever been ground down by endless repetitive labor.

I recently watched a short YouTube video detailing the process of making high-end rice cookers in a Japanese factory:

https://youtu.be/xLCwr8qG1p4

The process includes parts being moved around on some of the shortest conveyer belts I've ever seen, in some cases moving just a few feet before being picked up by another person.

The tightest bottleneck sets the pace for the whole line, so yeah high volume manufacturing can get into really detailed optimization.

Ah just like with the "PhD student" joke in another thread: the value is likely in the "workers compensation case" savings when you can show that you did everything humanly possible to mitigate risk of injury, should there be a claim

Yep. Even in the linked video around 3:20 the assembly makes a short 3foot trip on a conveyer. There's a cut there but you could imagine instead of walking the part that distance and back now they have half the next item already done. Looks like some are used as a small queue for the next station as well to give some slack to timing variations.

You can actually see that in many of those cases all of those short belts/rollers are actually funneling different major sub-assemblies together. Because you have lines coming together the conveyer/rollers provide a bunch of benefits:

a) It's a short term buffer. While the lines are going to balanced pretty well, it's still super useful to have a small buffer.

b) Lets you spread out the lines a bit, giving you more flexibility with the design and layout of your lines. This is probably one reason why they don't try to pack the lines closer so that you can just hand off.

c) Having people shuffling the parts around is just inefficient. You don't want to hire a person just to shuffle the parts over such a small distance. You don't want to interrupt the last guy on the line's job with such a task. You could try to minimize the cost of runners by batching up your work before moving them (and having your runner rotate through different things to haul), but now you introducing probably more buffer than you want, and also potential latency spikes into your process.

I'm not sure if you are talking about real factory or making a Factorio reference.