lack of decorative elements - inconsistency with electric connections

[pato]

While on the first sight factorio is a very detailed game you will notice that most of this effect comes from colored belts and power poles.

When transfering energy you have to make sure that every pole is connected through a cable, but your devices get energy without beeing connected via cable.
It would be a mess to have hundrets of cables floating through the air but connecting them on ground sounds very reasonable.

As an example i made a cable connection useing heat pipes. They also perfectly fit the concrete tile blending.

The suggestion is to make a (GRAPHICS ONLY) change to connect every device to the energy source

small poles = thin weak copper cables
medium poles = isolated black wires with longer range
big poles = big 1 tile connectors
substations = powerfull heavy duty cables (like in example)

[slippycheeze]

WRT the heaviest duty versions, an "open topped" version of the real world bus duct is probably a good inspiration:

is huge picture

bus duct.jpg (141.25 KiB) Viewed 1536 times

[tehfreek]

I'm going to disagree that they need to be so grossly visible. The wires are there to transfer GW or even TW of power. Thus far the largest power consumption/production by an entity that I've come across is 80MW, which is multiple orders of magnitude smaller. Considering the already incredibly small size of power cables between poles, such a small cable would be nearly invisible unless zoomed in to an extreme amount.

Besides, the whole thing as is already invokes the Rule of Cool, so I'm willing to give it a pass.