[Random thoughts] make water tanks any sense ?

[nobodx]

These are some thoughts I came up with, and I can't really judge if it's better or worse than the standard builds.

Generally you build your steam engine line with 1 water pump, 13/14 boiler and 10 engines.
A pipes maximum throughput is equal of a single water pump.
A tank is having 4 connection points, and having 2 in- and 2 out-going pipes should allow twice the throughput + balance it.
With more inputs that outputs you should be able to keep the pressure at max.
So I build a engine block (50 engines, 70 boilers, 10 pumps ) plus a extra line of boilers + water pump . Every boiler-line feeds into a big tank-system, that in turn feeds the engines. The idea behind this is, that if a boiler-line becomes unavailable (for whatever reason), the remaining boilers can still fuel the entire power plant.

[MeduSalem]

A pipes maximum throughput is equal of a single water pump.

A pipe can actually take the amount of roughly 2.5 water pumps, but it doesn't really make any sense beyond 2.

So a Steam Powerplant with 2 water pumps feeding 1 pipe then going through 28 boilers and hooking 20 steam engines behind that actually works quite well. If I have the space I actually do that quite often. But that's the problem... it takes a lot of space and maybe there is also some ineffeciency involved considering pipe length, so the pressure falls off or something somebody with more insight on the matter than me can clear up.

A tank is having 4 connection points, and having 2 in- and 2 out-going pipes should allow twice the throughput + balance it.
With more inputs that outputs you should be able to keep the pressure at max.
So I build a engine block (50 engines, 70 boilers, 10 pumps ) plus a extra line of boilers + water pump . Every boiler-line feeds into a big tank-system, that in turn feeds the engines. The idea behind this is, that if a boiler-line becomes unavailable (for whatever reason), the remaining boilers can still fuel the entire power plant.

Don't do that. Really. Giving liquids the ability to flow in multiple directions doesn't work very well. And even worse are circles... not even with small pumps they work out as intended.

But I say that except maybe for a backup contraption... one should leave tanks and small pumps out of the steam engine setups in general. Not really worth the trouble. Makes everything just unnecessarily more complex and error ridden.

[bobucles]

Steam power is already super intelligent. Boilers will only bring water up to 100 temperature, and steam engines will only use as much hot water as it needs.

You CAN store excess hot water in storage tanks, but it's not very useful for many reasons:
1) Pumping water is EASY. You can always have as much as you need, so there's little gain in storage.
2) Water gets used FAST. It takes a lot of storage tanks to handle a short duration of energy demand.
3) There is no energy waste from a boiler. Sure they will actually work at 50% efficiency from what the fuel says, but an idle system doesn't waste anything.
4) The only way to recover the water tank energy is to have extra steam engines. These auxiliary steam engines take up a huge amount of space.
5) It's easy enough to run dedicated pumps and boilers for any number of engines you have.

In the grand scheme of things, there's nothing a hot water tank auxiliary system can do that an extra boiler/engine line can't do better, without the headache.

[ssilk]

Moved from General to Gameplay Help.

The tanks can be used as "resistor". I use it generally for a priority handling of heavy oil to create lubricant.

Code: Select all

 === heavy oil ===> TANK1 => TANK2 ====>  Refining to light oil
                     ||
                     v
                   Lubricant

This setup guarantees, that you will always have enough lube.

[nobodx]

Lube ? I'm a healthy man I don't need any L... Oh, you mean the green stuff.

I usually use pumps with wires connected to a lube-tank to control the amount I have around (who need >1k anyway).

[vanatteveldt]

I actually do it the other way around: I connect my refineries to a storage system, and have a pump that pumps into the cracking plants if the pressure in the tank > 250 (depending on how many tanks are connected). It is a simple red wire from the tank to the pump, with a condition "light/heavy > 250"

This always leaves some light/heavy oil for manufacturing (lubricant, but also for science pack 3 in the adjusted science mod), and converts any excess into petroleum.

[ssilk]

O.K. but when you have no pump? Cause you don't have electric engine unit left for example?