Once upon a time the devs thought about dirty mining, but then they added infinite productivity research and the problem was solved. Unfortunately this created a secondary issue where belts could no longer keep up with the high output of mines. Miners can be casually boosted to double or triple output even with simple speed modules, and at that point belts can no longer keep up with the massive flood of ore that pours out. The problem can't be solved with more belts because the footprint for mining is very limited and is already at peak capacity. Players instead ""solved"" this issue by dropping belts entirely and using bots to mine. That's a shame. But what if there was another way?
Let's look into pipes. The current item standard is to treat 10 fluid as 1 "item"; so when 20 petroleum turns into 2 plastic it's the same as saying 2 petrol "items" will create 2 plastic. Pretty straight forward. A standard pipe can move a rather generous amount of fluid per tick over a reasonably large distance. Consult the chart below:
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Number of pipes : Maximum flow (fluid/sec)
1 3000
2 2200
3 1860
5 1560
8 1380
12 1260
16 1200
23 1140
41 1080
**166 1020**
209 960
293 720
359 600
459 480
759 300Fluid ore offers some nice advantages over solid ore:
- It flows super fast, faster than belts.
- It automatically balances between tanks. No belt balancers needed.
- Merging and splitting pipes is far simpler than handling complicated belt setups. Thus pipe based mining outposts can be set up easily.
- Fluid loads into and unloads from trains extremely quickly.
- Fluid Miners look much cooler!
Obviously an ore mine can't just output a fluid, it'd need some kind of input fluid to function. This primary ingredient can be as simple as ordinary water or it could use some "washing" material like sulfuric acid. Don't ask me I'm no metallurgist. Ultimately the demand for more fluids will place more fluid trains on the train network, which the devs have stated as a goal.
Very few parts of a factory need a dramatic increase in throughput. Generally the most demanding parts come from the mining outposts and smelting arrays. Fluid ore and fluid smelting offer a way to dramatically increase the throughput of these operations to keep up with the rest of the factory. Naturally once the liquid smelted ore is out it needs to be transformed back into plates. A simple assembler recipe can handle this quick process, or perhaps a few alternate low tech recipes can use the input directly (like using liquid iron to make iron gear wheels).
There is also another extreme throughput demand in the form of Green Circuits, but I don't think liquid circuits will work very well.
