offshore pumping speed 104/1200? what does it mean?

[JapaneseMom]

I've notices that my offshore pumping speed is so low, which is 104/1200. I honestly dont understand what does it mean and what effect it has on my base, since my electricity is running just fine, but the water is starting to turned green and the more i look at the pumping speed, its starting to bothering me, because the percentage is so low. does it really have any negative effect of this low pumping speed? or its fine as long as i have electricity running?

[5thHorseman]

Pipes kill throughput, so often pumps can't go at full capacity because the pipe they are directly connected to is full, because it hasn't emptied its contents into the next pipe down the line.

The best way to overcome this is to use fully-stretched out underground pipes whenever you can, and also use (regular) pumps to empty them as quickly as possible.

The worst thing you can do is run long lines of above-ground pipes next to each other making a huge grid of pipes.

[Serenity]

Green water is a cosmetic effect from pollution. It doesn't do anything.

1200 is the maximum throughput. If you need less you pump less water. One offshore pump is enough for 20 boilers

[JapaneseMom]

Pipes kill throughput, so often pumps can't go at full capacity because the pipe they are directly connected to is full, because it hasn't emptied its contents into the next pipe down the line.

The best way to overcome this is to use fully-stretched out underground pipes whenever you can, and also use (regular) pumps to empty them as quickly as possible.

The worst thing you can do is run long lines of above-ground pipes next to each other making a huge grid of pipes.

what does it mean to empty the pipe? connect the last boiler to the ground using pipe?

so does it mean less number the better?

attach image for reference

Screenshot (1041).png (3.74 MiB) Viewed 10056 times

[Serenity]

Why do you have three pumps for just four boilers? It doesn't hurt exactly, but as said one can supply 20 boilers. And each boiler produces enough steam for two steam engines. If you hover over the boiler it shows you how much water it consumes. So you can easily calculate the ratio. With three pumps each one obviously works even less than if you just had one

[JapaneseMom]

Why do you have three pumps for just four boilers?

i was worried with the low pumping numbers, so i thought it doesnt pump enough water to the boiler and decided to have 3 pumps

[5thHorseman]

1 pump can supply 20 boilers.
So 1 pump supplying 4 boilers will pump at 4/20th the maximum rate. Because the pipes are full of water.

Basically, you're trying to fix a problem you don't have.

[astroshak]

Offshore Pumps put as much water as they can into the pipe. If the demand for water is just not there, then they will have a reduced output. 104/1200 means that you are only using 104 water/sec out of the maximum capacity of 1200 water/sec. Increase the demand, and your offshore pump will put out more water, up to its maximum of 1200 water/sec.

One Boiler consumes 60 water/sec, and produces up to 60 steam/sec. That’s why they were saying that one offshore pump can supply water to 20 boilers. If there is insufficient electrical demand on the steam generators, they won’t use all the steam, which means the boilers won’t use all the water, which means the offshore pump won’t put out its full capacity.

[starlinvf]

Pipes kill throughput, so often pumps can't go at full capacity because the pipe they are directly connected to is full, because it hasn't emptied its contents into the next pipe down the line.

The best way to overcome this is to use fully-stretched out underground pipes whenever you can, and also use (regular) pumps to empty them as quickly as possible.

The worst thing you can do is run long lines of above-ground pipes next to each other making a huge grid of pipes.

what does it mean to empty the pipe? connect the last boiler to the ground using pipe?

so does it mean less number the better?

attach image for reference

Screenshot (1041).png

Fluids in factorio operate more like Belts then "realistic" fluid dynamics. The actual behavior is a bit hard to explain unless you understand things like circuit topology, signal flow, and the difference between Energy and a Quantity rather then Energy as a Force. I'll try to make this as layman's as possible.

If you consider Pipes as a Belt for fluids:

Pipes have a capacity of 100 fluid units each (same way a Belt segment can hold 8 items), which flows outward until its equalized % wise across a fluid network. All "connected pipes" carrying the same fluid are considered to be part of the same fluid network. HOWEVER.... each pipe's fluid amount is still an integer, and becomes important for the next part.

When a machine takes fluids out of the pipe, it sucks out however much it needs out of the pipe its connected to. Production nodes (like refineries) do the same thing, except its adding instead of removing units from the pipe. The pipe then tries to equalize with the next connected segment, and so on, and so on, until the network evens out. This is why long pipes and loops in a pipe network cause huge problems to the effective flow rate of the system; because it has do these checks one pipe segment at a time on the back end.

Fluid Flow gets a little confusing, because its affected by fluid level in the pipe system (high level = higher effective flow rate) which directly affects how fast Machines/ChemPlants can draw resources off of them. Hence pipes networks with low fill %'s has the same effect as belts that run out of items.


Storage Tanks complicate this further, because they hold 25k units of fluid, but act like a single pipe segment in the game logic. So they still have the same % based balance behavior as normal pipes, but add a HUGE amount of capacity to the network. Plus you also need to initially prime the whole system with 100x(n_pipes) worth of fluids (plus storage tanks)..... which is LOT for big networks. For reference, Basic oil cracking (which is your first finite fluid production) produces 9 Petroleum per second..... which on its own is not enough to feed a single Plastic Bar plant.


To deal with this, we have underground pipes and pumps.

Underground pipes cover more distance, but only have 100 units capacity; compared to 1000 units if using 10 normal pipes to cover the same distance. The advantage is that it keeps the Fluid networks at a higher fill % using less fluid units in total. And remember that higher Fill % is higher effective flow rate.

What pumps do is break pipe networks into 2 different ones, and force fluids to fill one side. With this, rather then having the fluids "spread thin" due to the size of your fluid network, you have the network on the "output side" of the pump at max % by virtue of the pump pushing it from one side to the other. If you run out of fluids on the input side,the pump prevents it from flowing backwards.

Now its worth noting that all of the Object tool tips and stats are designed to show "current performance". HOWEVER, with Factorio being a logistics game, you very frequently run into phenomena such as Stalls, Back pressure, starvation, Over provisioning, and a myriad of other issues that directly affect the throughput of a factory. Not all of these are bad. A factory only uses what it needs; its entirely possible to overproduce or have a huge surplus of something that directly affects the movement of thing as an individual measurement.


****************

With that set of explanations out of the way: What you're seeing is normal. The offshore pump can produce 1200 units of water/sec, "Maximum". If you aren't consuming 1200 of water/sec, the pipe system is already full, and thus the pump only produces as much as needed to refill whats being used. (There is another quirk of pipes that makes them run at 600/s, but thats only something you ever deal with in highly optimized designs, and perfect ratios)

When investigating these types of things, you have to look at the system broken up into Producers, Consumers and Transport. Producers add, Consumers Subtract, and Transport moves stuff from producers to consumers. If Consumers aren't consuming fast enough, Transport gets maxed out, and Production slows because it can't add more (since transport is full). However, almost everything consumed in factorio is used to produce a product which gets consumed in another production down the line. So nearly everything in the game is both a Consumer and Producer. So on top of the 3 stages of production listed above, you have multiple layers of production, each with its 3 stage process to do what it does.


So when we look at the math:

- Offshore pumps produce "up to" 1200/s worth of water
- Boilers consume "up to" 60 water/s to produce steam.
- Steam is consumed by Steam engines at "up to" 30/s to produce electricity
- Steam engines can produce "up to" 900kw of Electricity
- If electrical demand is lower then max capacity, Steam power has a cascade effect of slowing production to match consumption.

Ergo..... The reason the pump's flow rate is that low, is because your Electrical demand is low enough to not max out the Steam Engine, which slows its steam consumption, which slows boiler steam production, which lowers boiler water consumption, which lowers pipe drain rate, which lowers the Offshore pump's water production. Plus if you look at the ratio math, the offshore pump's max capacity can support 20 boilers (and 40 Steam engines in turn).... but you have no where near that many built; so it wouldn't run at max water flow even if the 4 steam engines you DO have, were running at 100% capacity.



Wiki links:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system
https://wiki.factorio.com/Power_production#Steam_power