How big is a fish??

[AngledLuffa]

A base level tank car fills up with 25,000 fluid. I don't know if this is well defined anywhere, but I think it is reasonable to treat 1 fluid as 1 liter. A real life tank car starts in the 20,000 liter range and gets bigger (much like AngelBob tank cars)

A single Factorian Fish squishes down to 200 oil. So *after* squishing, there are 200 liters of oil.

How big is the original fish??

[mmmPI]

A base level tank car fills up with 25,000 fluid.

What kind of car is this ? In factorio car have 80 inventory slot, barrel contain 50 fluid, and stack by 10, so you can have 80*10*50 = 400 000 fluids in a car. But then if you get 200 liter of oil from that 1 fish and you can put 80 stack of 100 fish on the car. That means the car can contain 8000 fish, or 1 600 000 liter of oil under the form of fish. So i suppose fish are more dense than oil. And it's not really a squishing but more an expansion of the fish, with some sort of dilution that somehow yield more oil than the initial volume of fish.

This or the barrel are very thick. A car would contain 800 barrel, and just the barrel would represent the equivalent of the 1 200 000 fluid missing. This would mean that 800 barrel = 1200000 liter , or that 1 barrel is about 1500 liter worth of volume like the metal around the fluid supposed to be contained. That would be very bad given the barrel contain only 50 liter of fluid. But that's necessary to balance out the math so that a car with 8000 barrel of oil would contain as much "liter" than 8000 fish. Now it is also possible that fish when put in a car can be packed more densely than barrels, and than barrel are not 1500 liter but just "waste" space due to their cylindrical shape. In order to know how much volume is "wasted" when counting it filled with solid cylinder rather than "compressed goo of fish", it would be required to know the shape of the car designed to hold barrels or fish. this leads to a dead end.

Still , i think if you get 200 liter of oil from a fish,and assuming there is no expansion, the fish is quite big, if you approximate the density of 1 fish to the density of water it would be a 200 kg fish, that would be 200 000 cubic centimeter. That roughly the volume of a cube whose edges are the cubic root of 200 000. Which is around 58 centimeters. That would also be the same size of a fish that weights the same as 2 large human. According to this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZodElWH6Qk , that would make it around the size of a pirahna if it was a cube, more like a pufferfish for the minimum size, and around or smaller than the size of a bottlenose dolphin regarding the weight of fish that is akin to 200 kg.

Now , because you can put 8000 of those in the car, and 8000*200 000 is 1.6 billion cubic centimeter that would represent a bloc of around 11 meters on each side. That's a big car, more like a truck that has this carrying capacity. Now of course if the fish is more dense than water, and expand upon squishing to oil, then the car could be of smaller dimension. But that woud still represent a car that is able to carry 400 or 1600 tons worth of fish/oil. You wouldn't pack 8000 dolphin in a 11m cube, in real life it would seem fish are not as dense as water.

Lastly , one can argue that 1L of water in real life would require around 4200 joules to gain 1°C temperature when at 15°C, and around , but in factorio game 1 unit of water need 200 joules to gain 1 degree which is just 4.7% of 4200 joules. That would indicate that 1 fluid is less than 1 liter. But also in real life it's not always the same quantity of energy require to heat 1 liter of water by 1 degree depending on the temperature of water and room temperature whereas it is in factorio, because it's a game and there are some simplifications , or things that do not quite match when trying to math everything. Like the volume of the fish. It depend from where you look at it.

It's a weird kind of fish if you imagine a 58 cm cube, that is weighting 200 kg and the number the engineer can eat in a minute. If we were to compare that to how much stuff humans can eat in a minute it would yield very different approximations, but also not my kind of research i'm afraid

[AngledLuffa]

What kind of car is this ?

I should have been more specific: I meant a tank car like what goes on a train, holding a fluid directly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_container

Thank you for your detailed exploration of my random musings. Nice to wake up to

[computeraddict]

A base level tank car fills up with 25,000 fluid. I don't know if this is well defined anywhere, but I think it is reasonable to treat 1 fluid as 1 liter. A real life tank car starts in the 20,000 liter range and gets bigger (much like AngelBob tank cars)

A single Factorian Fish squishes down to 200 oil. So *after* squishing, there are 200 liters of oil.

How big is the original fish??

A barrel of fluid holds 50 liters. Barrels stack to 10. Fish stack to 100. So a Factorio fish plus some stacking fraction inefficiencies take up about 5 liters of volume. Fish are the same density as water, give or take, so that puts them in the 4-5kg range. From a totally random chart of salmon lengths and weights, if the Factorio fish is a salmon it should be in the 70-75cm (28-30 in.) range.

[AngledLuffa]

It sounds like the problem here is not that the fish are huge, but that the train cars storing 25,000 units are very small

[mmmPI]

It sounds like the problem here is not that the fish are huge, but that the train cars storing 25,000 units are very small

It could be, because if a fish yield 200 oil, it means 25000 unit of fluid represent only 125 fish. And a car that can hold 125 salmons while still big, for 4 or 5 kg salmon you could do with a medium size refrigerated truck. The vanilla car is able to handle much more fluid than 25000 or 125 fish.

25000 liters of fluid seems a legit value for a big tank car from the wikipedia page, so the factorio car is huge !

If 1 fish yield 200 L of oil,but weight only 4 or 5 kg, that could mean oil has a very low density so that 1 kg of fish is 40 to 50 Liters of oil. For a density of 0.025 or 0.02 compared to water, or 20 to 25 kg per cubic meter but the value even for methane or propane which seems to have the lowest density is between 400kg and 500 kg per cubic meter where it would be 1000 for water https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/liqu ... d_743.html

I'm confused but maybe it has to do with productivity modules, because if the fish are processed with some, then the amount of oil you get is partially coming from another dimension right ? That could expain how the engineer is able to eat a fish every 2 second to me that would mean the fish is the size of a peanut or a chips.