Pressure Pipe for Water?

[Flooded]

Why do I need pressure pipes for water? Water is seeking the lowest thougness, so it flows automaticly - even straight up. (Just fill a glass with water, so you know what I mean)
Same process for other liquids. So i dont understand this game mechanic. I mean, the oil and water stations have their own pumps - or it would be impossible to gather oil out of ground...

[Kata Seiko]

Oil is actually pressurized either by heavier stuff being pumped into the ground if they don't have their own pressure in some other way (many oil wells have a pressure valve for that)..

It's physics. You may have also read on some pumps that they have a lift height - many of the pumps used in PC water cooling for example can lift water ~10m high. It is true that it doesn't matter what shape that pipe or object has that is attached - even a funnel will still be filled with a water level 10 meters up.

Back to the game - I have "overcome" that issue by building a "water tower": Water goes from the pump into a packager, a belt transports the bottled water to a high-up place (e.g. a tower I built for that) and the water goes from that packager into a large tank. Empty bottles back by belt - usually works better than figuring out pumps.

[Krieger]

At some point the weight of the water going up hill has more pressure than the pump

[Man's Best Friend]

You need the pumps to make the water go up, not down. You're going to have a really hard time pouring water into something above your source without some kind of pump. A siphon appears to violate this, but the destination is still below the source. They also usually require priming, which requires some way of lifting the liquid.

[Huren Ogeko]

That guy water tower solution works because the liquid is going up via conveyor belt so the water tower altitude becomes the source and as long as everything else is below that there is no need for pumps.
Although using packaged water and conveyors adds a level of complexity that I personally wouldnt bother with but I can see how it works.

[kLuns]

Packagers consume more power than pumps. And headlift can be shared so you need one pump per system and not per pipe

[Bobucles]

Water pressure isn't really a pressure. Think of it as an invisible ceiling that water won't flow over. If satisfactory had altitude meters then tracking this height would be easy. As is, just don't try running pipes over too much wilderness, it's too tough to track the height limit.

Pumps create a new ceiling for the fluid network. The pressure does not stack; every new pump is a new height limit. Storage tanks remove the ceiling and become their own height limit. The ceiling will pass through a tank if it is completely full, so it's pretty pointless to use a fluid buffer at low altitude.

[Huren Ogeko]

Originally posted by kLuns:

Packagers consume more power than pumps. And headlift can be shared so you need one pump per system and not per pipe

if you want to get glitchy about it you just need to fill a water tower once......bring a pipe down to the lowest part of the system and put a valve set to 0 and then you have a whole lot of free headlift at no cost.

[Vectorspace]

Originally posted by kLuns:

Packagers consume more power than pumps. And headlift can be shared so you need one pump per system and not per pipe

The wiki page on pipeline pumps has a table showing the "break-even" height for when it is more power efficient to use conveyors and packagers instead of pumps. Even the liquids with the fastest packaging rate, that height is very large.

[Huren Ogeko]

The higher the lift the more efficient the packager will become. I tend to not do the packager mostly because it requires more work like building more machines and having to prime the system with a number of canisters. For me pumps go on quick and I dont need a return line.

But I agree there is alot of benefit in terms of power cost using packagers if you are concerned about power in the game. I generally am not worried much about power once I get beyond biomass.

[kLuns]

The calculations on the wiki page don't count sharing headlift with other pipes.
This means one pump can provide more than 3000 units of fluid 50 meters of head lift.
That makes the packager obsolete at any height under 2000 meters.