With a dash of electricity?
Offshore pumps, storage tanks and so forth are basically accumulators and have a 'service area' that makes fluids behave like electrical drain and 'addition', 'expansion' and charging of accumulator charge. No fluid flow per se, just number substraction and addition.
Any building that is part of a pipe network and uses pipes acts as a pump and projects 'service area' around it.
Pipes do not project this area, so you can't just lay a long pipeline across the world and have fluid basically travel instantaneously, that only happens in the 'service area'.
So the solution for a long pipeline is the addition of pumps, which , again, project this area like a roboport logistic system. Now the pipes are all part of that instantaneous substraction/addition system because it is assumed that the pumps have the power to deliver the fluid.
Does that sound sensible? I haven't found it if was pondered before, but I also didn't try THAT hard to search all the permutations of the concept.
Could fluids work faster as a 'roboport area system'?
Re: Could fluids work faster as a 'roboport area system'?
This looks very similar to pneumatic delivery system that has been suggested a long time ago, and was repopularized during the beltbotcalypse :
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7150
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=48648
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=59506
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7150
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=48648
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=59506
Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.
Re: Could fluids work faster as a 'roboport area system'?
Interesting, that does look similar, yes. I like the belts and other things though, the fluids just seem more complicated for what they actually end up doing.
Aka, they don't work in a complicated way from a conceptual standpoint, but they are programatically complicated to implement some 'fluidlike nuances' but I personally don't think these nuances are worth the roleplaying factor.
It seems the biggest part of the fluid system is not 'flow' per se, but dealing with the pipeghetti and throughput.
And while throughput is related to flow, I don't think the flow system is required to model it.
I am not confused by the fluid system as a concept, but I am often confused by the amount of fluid in a pipe, etc.
Dragging the mouse along the pipes to see tiny fractional amounts there, tiny ones there, bigger ones over there yet, etc, with little rhyme and reason.
Same with storage tanks, simply slapping them together like a beehive creates some strange behavior with some of them being quite full while the ones that are being pumped into a train, for example, are really low and the amount is somewhat gradual in that direction.
As in, the pumped tanks are pretty much drained, when the others in the change gradually have more and more residue in them (often in the thousands) the farther back they are, despite being all part of the 'tank hive'.
(They remain like this even when the pumping has stopped, they don't equalize, they remain in this gradual falloff state)
This makes no sense to me unless the fluid is EXTREMELY viscous I guess, but even then.
I know that not 'hiving' the tanks and putting them to the side of a pipe helps (Think a grape cluster with the stems being the pipe and the grapes the tanks) but that's still kinda weird.
So those fluidy nuances are, in my opinion, serving evil more than they are serving good, and I wonder how many players would actually miss them over a more 'flat' simulation like I proposed, etc.
Aka, they don't work in a complicated way from a conceptual standpoint, but they are programatically complicated to implement some 'fluidlike nuances' but I personally don't think these nuances are worth the roleplaying factor.
It seems the biggest part of the fluid system is not 'flow' per se, but dealing with the pipeghetti and throughput.
And while throughput is related to flow, I don't think the flow system is required to model it.
I am not confused by the fluid system as a concept, but I am often confused by the amount of fluid in a pipe, etc.
Dragging the mouse along the pipes to see tiny fractional amounts there, tiny ones there, bigger ones over there yet, etc, with little rhyme and reason.
Same with storage tanks, simply slapping them together like a beehive creates some strange behavior with some of them being quite full while the ones that are being pumped into a train, for example, are really low and the amount is somewhat gradual in that direction.
As in, the pumped tanks are pretty much drained, when the others in the change gradually have more and more residue in them (often in the thousands) the farther back they are, despite being all part of the 'tank hive'.
(They remain like this even when the pumping has stopped, they don't equalize, they remain in this gradual falloff state)
This makes no sense to me unless the fluid is EXTREMELY viscous I guess, but even then.
I know that not 'hiving' the tanks and putting them to the side of a pipe helps (Think a grape cluster with the stems being the pipe and the grapes the tanks) but that's still kinda weird.
So those fluidy nuances are, in my opinion, serving evil more than they are serving good, and I wonder how many players would actually miss them over a more 'flat' simulation like I proposed, etc.
Last edited by lovewyrm on Sun Aug 11, 2019 6:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Could fluids work faster as a 'roboport area system'?
It sounds like the mechanics of how it works might be a bit confusing. To clear that up, the way it works now is a sort of simplified pressure system, where each pipe or storage tank or anything with a fluid_box defined has a "level" and a "height", and if the "level + height" of one fluid box is higher than the "level" of any connected fluid_box, the fluid will flow from the first to the others until this is no longer true. In the case of connected storage tanks (Why are you connecting storage tanks, btw? One is plenty in virtually any case.), if you are seeing the case where one storage tank is pumping out and appears empty, but the storage tanks further up the line from that have fluid, it simply means that you are pumping fluid out faster than the system can handle, and the fluid in the preceding tanks are attempting to catch up with the flow, but cannot move fast enough. In this case, you should really just remove the other storage tanks, as they are serving no purpose.
Re: Could fluids work faster as a 'roboport area system'?
Ah, yes, my bad, I should have added that the fluid remains 'cattywompus' like that even when no active pumping is happening, I'm gonna edit that in.
The pumped ones simply have the lowest level and the further back you go the more residue is in those.
This is the case when the pumping stops.
The fluid does not equalize, or if it does then it must be way way way slower than patience to observe the system.
Maybe it's some sort of vacuum effect, like how water stays inside a straw, defying gravity if you put your finger on one end, but again, I don't think that this is worth any "roleplay" points, lol.
The pumped ones simply have the lowest level and the further back you go the more residue is in those.
This is the case when the pumping stops.
The fluid does not equalize, or if it does then it must be way way way slower than patience to observe the system.
Maybe it's some sort of vacuum effect, like how water stays inside a straw, defying gravity if you put your finger on one end, but again, I don't think that this is worth any "roleplay" points, lol.