reverted pipe size vs flow behaviour.

[lxl]

Hey bob,

The pipes work different(the opposite) as expected.

I was wondering if i could increase the water ammount transported by using better pipes.
First i put one pump,1 pipe, 1 tank in a row... nothing did happen. --> offshore pump is too slow to fill one pipe.
Then i put 3 pumps at a straight line of coast in parallel, connected by 5 pipes. I did connect the middle pipe to 14 pipes in a line and a tank. All of the same type.
The result is (at roughly the same time)
2.4k water in the tank using copper pipes size(5)
2k water using iron(size 10)
1k water using plastic(size 20).


I also did replace the 5 "input collection pipes by copper and only the remaining pipes were iron. The result was the same.

[bobingabout]

That sounds about right. Water flows faster in smaller pipes, it's the way the game was designed.

It basically works like this: the more water percentage there is in a pipe, the quicker it will flow into the next one.
Since smaller pipes hold less water, they fill faster, and therefore spill into the next pipe faster
Since larger pipes hold more water, they fill slower, and therefore spill into the next pipe slower.

Think of it this way, if bigger pipes meant faster flow, then water would travel through all storage tanks instantly (because to the game they're just a really big pipe), and take a long time to travel through those tiny size 10 pipes.

[Chibiabos]

Is there an advantage to using bigger pipes to, say, flow water to boilers to steam engines? I thought bigger pipes would let more water flow in and thus let more water flow into the steam engines, but it doesn't seem like it though I haven't tested.

Also, is there any difference besides the size and health? Do pipes of different materials having the same size have any real difference (aside from some being particular to certain recipes for other things -- I'm just talking about the pipes themselves used generically for flowing water/oil/etc.) like stone vs. plastic?

[bobingabout]

The higher tier version underground pipes have a longer difference, there's not really any difference for the pipes themselves other than health and size. As for the flow... there are reasons to use the larger pipes, but not that many, for the most part, you're best off just using size 10 pipes. the main reason why pipes of other types exist at all was mostly just for use as ingredients, but why have some you can place and some that you can't? and that's pretty much why you can place all of them.

[Chibiabos]

I like the stone pipes because they're big, and stone is a resources I never seem to be short on.

[bobingabout]

...and stone is a resources I never seem to be short on.

Wait until you start using a lot of the advanced smelting recipes, a lot of them use stone, and I personally seem to run out of the stuff.

Also, has anyone noticed that I use coal instead of carbon for these advanced smelting recipes? Maybe I should change that...

[Ojelle]

I tought the smaller pipes where faster but with a lower capacity, and vice versa
Yes, if you take a pipe with a cut area of 1dm² with a flow of 1m/s the capacity equals that of .5dm² with a flow of 2m/s, but in reality you got more friction, and therefor need more energy to sustain that flow rate. And as far as I know, the power supplied by eg offshore pumps is independent for the pipe connected to it.
So, do they have a bigger capacity (troughput) or not? If not, might be worth considering. If you want I can give you formulas to calculate some things about flow rates, would need to look em up in my syllabus of hydrodynamics. Wasnt that difficult for straight circular pipes if I remember correctly ^^

And as somebody said something about the viscosity or density and flow rate in small/big pipes, I don't remember whether or not that has an influence on flow rate. Simply forgot. I think thicker was better in bigger pipes (more distance to center of pipe, thus less friction losses) and density should not have an influence.