[Fluid Extras] Pipeline balancer, math question
[Look at attachment] Would this work? Or would this leave the left pipe more empty?
7 Replies
In principle, that should be fine, but pipes sometimes get wonky at 600 flow rates due to floating point errors and cause machines to underperform even when the math is good.
You can mitigate that by ensuring that pipes fill to 100% before turning on downstream devices, but IME it's better to just keep consumption rates below 600, or use parallel pipes at 300.
Regardless, back to your setup: what would happen is both pipes would initially fill at the same rate, 525 each, until the right side overflows due to more fluid coming in than going out, which would cause the remainder to go to the other pipe, eventually resulting in balance. (again, assuming the floating point error doesn't strike)
haha yeah that error has gotten me a few times, crazy how that still isnt fixed. But thanks! I thought due to the very faint arrows on the pipeline balancer that it would only be one way each. But his clears it up
TBH, I never noticed those arrows before.
Pipes automatically balance and they are bi-directional
Because liquid can go out both ends (at the same time!) if there is less liquid going down one path then there will just be more liquid to go down the other
As long as your pipes are full all the way through, and you don't turn all your machines on at once you can easily do 600m³\min.
But there is nothing wrong with building some tolerance in there as well in the form of producing 600 but only using a little less or just producing and using below 600
And junctions - even modded ones - do not have any throughput limit or volume capacity, they "don't exist" as far as liquid moving is concerned other than they connect multiple branches together.
>pipes
Check out the FICSIT Plumbing Manual linked below, which can also be found on the Satisfactory Wiki, for some tips on how to work with pipelines.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MdZ8Xr8P_SF_FL7B6WDjCZGS-x9Cwt-x/view
It looked to flat without something so I added cough structural shapes cough. They aren't meant to imply anything otherwise they'd be more obvious. And yes I concur with what everyone else is saying about throughput.
FYI... There is no floating point error "bug" that could suddenly "strike"
Floating point rounding resulting in a weird value can happen in any calculation involving floats
The potential situation with floating point rounding is a loss or gain of fluid from nothing. This happens with pipes but because the internal calculations are done in cm³ as floats to the whatever decimal you will never see the the effects because the overall gain \loss averages out to a net change of zero and it's too small to see even for the occasional runs of always rounding up when it should have gone down.
What happens tho is the more liquid you put through a pipe (ie larger than MK2 pipes) the higher the chance of those float rounding errors becoming noticable