Advanced piping (to go with new fluid things)

[Honktown]

After getting used to how annoying the new "can't mix fluids" system is, I had some ideas on improved piping: valves.

I searched the forum and there was some piping topics, mostly 2017, but they weren't working with the new fluid updates.

1) Valves. A basic recipe which takes 2 iron and might be available from fluid handling research. One can left click on it to enable/disable pass-through. Put before a machine, it would partially deal with the "can't mix fluids" error. The actual message should be changed to "bad fluid inputs" to make sense, but I don't think the devs are going to change it if that's still what we have after the beta became stable.

2) Pumped valves. A pipe which takes 1 iron, 1 steel, 1 engine, and has a storage of 1000 or 1500. Can be connected to the circuit network. When activated, it not only disables liquids going through it, it stores the liquid which follows it. This could simply be an extension of the pump if need be, since pumps already have an engine and can be connected to the circuit network. Under normal conditions you'd want a pumped valve to only fill itself to normal pipe volume, but when turned off, sucks the liquid back out. I figured 10 pipes worth of storage would be enough to empty a large enough connection.

If circuit wires could be used on assembler machines and read the current recipe, then a pump could read the recipe and turn itself on or off, making it easier to use a single machine for multiple recipes. Adding the ability to reverse-flow would also make it less error-prone to place pipes, cause you could suck a network dry without tearing everything up. This would also open up an opportunity to have more advanced plumbing layouts, because multiple fluids could flow through one main line at different times. Too many ideas in one post, but with a smart tank in combination, it could fill to less than maximum normally but accept back-flow, allowing for larger pipe networks that share plumbing. Plumbing logistics instead of pipe spaghetti, enigmatic error messages, and no advanced control.

Valve controls and a flexible tank would go well with fluid-simulating plumbing or graph-based plumbing, so the items would work in either case.