Foundry question

[CasualGamer]

Is it more efficient to move finished plate or molton iron and copper- by barrels or fluid wagon?

Pardon my arithmetic inability.

[Nero]

The question is a bit too broad to give a precise answer.

If you mean in a trains fluid wagon from mines to the factory then yes (but you need to bring them calzite)

If you mean inside your factory with pipes then depends on your throughput and factory design

[CasualGamer]

I'm sorry. I'll expand on my question. Prior to Space Age I found it easier to convert the copper and iron ore into copper, iron and steel plate at the ore patch before moving it to production. I would make gear wheels and copper wire at the site of production.

Now, I'm reconsidering the production chain. Calcite is plentiful as I can ship it down from all of my transport ships that stop at Nauvis. It doesn't take much to create a lot of finished product. I am trying to figure out whether creating molten fluids at the ore site and ship it back in cargo wagons full of barrels or in fluid wagons is more efficient(Which holds more per train car) and I'm comparing it to shipping back finished plates per train car. I'll have to transport calcite either way. Transporting ore vs. molten seems like a big efficiency loss on plate given the Foundry boost and calcite usage. Unsure about Steel plate due to the savings on cargo handling by processing at the ore site prior to Space Age.

[Hurkyl]

Another option to keep in mind is that you can use pipelines to move the molten metal, if you're willing to set up the pumps as needed to keep segments from getting too big.

[god bless you]

I use both ways. They have different purposes.

[CasualGamer]

I hadn't given pipelines much thought. I used over 100 trains in my pre-SA build and pipelines used to be flow limited.I can see where even legendary pumps 'might' limit flow at some point. I play vanilla at base settings- nothing tweaked. I avoid YouTube and the pedia site, because I enjoy the puzzle aspect of creating a large factory. My math skills are lacking, which slows me down.

[god bless you]

There is no pipe limit in SA.
You can use multiple pumps to increase the through put.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3435192576

Those foundries eat 6k molten copper per second.
In my experience, they work fine with 5 legendary pumps, 15k/s.

[CasualGamer]

Parallel pumps... Of course....lol...duh I would still think over very long distances on Nauvis that biter swarms might become troublesome and trains would still prevail.

[knighttemplar1960]

It depends on what your main goal is and which planet you are on. You can rival fluid speed with stacked barrels but your limiting factor then is cargo wagon capacity vs fluid wagon capacity. Fluid (un)loading is limited by the number/quality of pumps/wagon. Barrel (un)loading is limited by the number of inserters you can use per wagon and the speed you can (un)barrel fluid. In this case the question may be... how congested are your rails? Empty barrels also have to be shipped back to be refilled. Depending on how you set this up you can significantly increase your train traffic using cargo wagons to move barreled fluids.

If you are on Nauvis and are trying for quality then you are best off putting quality modules in big miners and sending high quality ore off to furnaces that also have quality modules and sending low/no quality ore to foundries since lava and molten metals have no inherent quality. This gives you a 2nd shot at quality plates without having to waste time/ore by sending it into recyclers to try to upgrade the raw ore.

On Vulcanus you produce no ore so the ore question becomes moot.

Shipping ore in from other planets has through put problems too since you are limited to one cargo drop pad that you likely want to keep open for other products. You can have as many space platforms as you want since there are no rails to congest but your bottle neck will be the cargo pad itself and trains to move the materials dropped to other places on that planet.

For the math issue, none is required. Add machines until you either use up all of the input or saturate the output.

[POWER WITHIN USER]

If you're already making molten iron in Nauvis then move molten iron as pipe/fluid wagon throughput is obscene and you'll be moving a fluid that can be turned into 4 different things by a foundry.

[Sneaky_Bugger]

I´d go for calcite/ore on Nauvis too. You simply feed molten iron/copper into your foundries directly. The production rate of foundries is a bit crazy. Like mine go with 125 plates/s.
But no matter the way, calcite is cheap and plentyful so smelting ore with calcite seems the most efficient way.