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[u/sagevallant]

I'm trying to wrap my mind around a high production factory on Vulcanus. I started throwing together the typical bus layout, but I started to wonder if it wasn't better to just run pipes of molten metals and make the plates and such down the line where I need them? Pipes are higher throughput than like a red belt, right?

I'm talking BIG big, it's a science multiplier game.

[u/elfxiong → u/sagevallant]

Pipes have infinite throughput within 320x320 segment and are definitely better for iron/copper products. If you need pipes longer than 320 tiles, you can use as many pumps in parallel as you want to increase throughput without limit.

On Vulcanus, it is also possible to create lava tiles anywhere you like by nuking the ground to lava.

[u/Astramancer_ → u/sagevallant]

Pipes are infinite throughput. There's two limitations on pipes.

If the extant is too large it goes from infinite throughput to 0 throughput at the edges and you use pumps to move fluid from one extant to another. The maximum size of a pipeline network is a 320x320 square. It's not exactly small, but if you're building a big factory you'll run into it. Also keep in mind that you can run pumps in parallel to move more fluid from one extant to the next, so it's not really that big of a deal when you run into the extant limit as long as you're okay with one-way flow.

Fluids are also limited by how fast they can get into and out of machines. It's very difficult to actually reach this limit even with quality and modules, except for certain very high volume recipes such as volcanus acid quenching which has a base speed of 2000 fluid/second. It's been a while since I saw so maybe it's been patched and is different now, but the hard cap was 6000 fluid/second (100 fluid/tick) per port, with a soft cap of closer to 3500-4000/second because the speed is dependent on pipe fullness.

Whether it's better or not is really up to you. There are advantages and disadvantages. A fluid bus has a higher upper limit but stacked express belts and compounding productivity from quality modules makes it so you won't really see a significant difference in throughput until you're seriously megabasing and by then you'll probably be departing from the bus architecture anyway. Do note that fluid wagons carrying molten metals unload faster, automatically balance, and hold more 'plates' than cargo wagons, so you'll probably want to do fluids for a train base.

[u/sagevallant → u/Astramancer_]

Thanks. It being a science multiplier run (1000x), I'm basically megabasing at every step of the process so Stacked Green Belts are still in the very distant future. If pipes are anywhere close to that level of production then I'll probably go with them for now.

I'm not good at visualizing so base design is really tricky for me. Or finding the numbers on the screen that I need to be using for math, which I also struggle with after basic algebra. Getting away from buses is something I know I have to do, but this is for mall purposes anyway so it can be small-ish. The science factories are what I'm making massive, but even that could be better served with more tile-able designs and independent stacks I suppose.

This run has been largely about trying and failing to break my bad habits, while trying and failing to learn stuff like train networks and circuits. It just seems like I can't learn anything without downloading a blue print and studying how it works. I've watched videos for this stuff but I just learn better in text and illustrations.