Pumps..

[Zourin]

I'm trying to get a grasp on some of the nuances of pumps..

Place a pump on a pipeline, and it will generally push all the contents of the feed line in the direction of the arrow. That's fairly self explanatory and is good for making sure product is shoved into storage tanks and not 'balanced out' through the whole pipeline system.

What I haven't had luxury to check yet.. if I have a T intersection. One line is input from the refinery, one line is to a Pump into a storage tank to other processes, and the other is to, say, a solid fuel factory.. what is the expected behavior? will the pump take prioirity and move 100% of the incoming oil into the storage tanks until it's full, and then, when oil backs up, move to the factory in question? Will the factory's 'need' slot take priority over the pump? Will they each get some of the incoming oil? Is it first-come, first serve for all the incoming fluid?

I know that if you put a pump pushing fluid towards a steam engine, it purges the steam engines into a shutdown scenario. It doesn't matter if it's hot or not, pumps will shut down a steam plant if attached to the fluid line (a phenomenon I've come to call 'blowout'). I'm not sure what aspect of Steam Engines causes this. Normally you would think that putting a pump along the waterline would help pressurize the "steam" flow and ensure that they all get a good 10 units of fluid for optimal power flow..paradoxically, this is not the case and the water is 'blown out the ass' and shuts everything down.

[ssilk]

Steam engines are not really steam engines, a better name would be "hot water engine".