How close to 600 m3/min of fluid can you go?

[Huillam]

I remember (in update 6 if I'm not mistaken) having built a huge array of overclocked nuclear power plants each requiring 600 m3/min of water only for them to be constantly shutting down.
It doesn't look like the issue has been completly fixed. How high can I go? 599? 500?

[Master Maniac]

It depends on how cleanly you can set up your pipes. Given that fluid can slosh and backflow, if it's not built in a way that optimizes the flow, you're going to have issues.

I know in update 8, I was able to get fully saturated MK2 pipes, so I believe that was fixed.

Protip, let the pipes fill completely before turning on the machines consuming the fluid. That helps a lot. Even better if you let the machines' fluid buffers fill by turning them each to standby mode manually, rather than leaving them unpowered, as I believe unpowered means they won't fill up, but I could be mistaken.

[Xort]

Depends on how you are distributing the fluid. A long manifold might not work. Also the fluids like going down hill more so feeding fluids from above into a machine works better. Also pre-buffer your pipes and buildings so they are full when you turn them on. An empty pipe feeding into full production may take an hour or more to saturate.

A trick is to build an industrial fluid buffer and fill it at the end of the pipe so you then have two supplies feeding into a pipe supplying consumers.

[Huillam]

That was a while ago but from what I remember:
Water extractors were oriented either east or west. Pipes ran north to south and only turned east/west when reaching the power plants.
Headlift was under control (even reactors that were fed by a pipe that never went higher than a pipeline support would shut down on occasion).
Each pipe was fed by five water extractors running at 100% which would feed a single reactor working at 250%.
Both the pipes and the reactor were full of water (I did that part first and I probably spent an entire week working the uranium/plutonium fuel rods after that) by the time I connected them to the power grid.

I will try the industrial fluid buffer. That can't hurt. Thanks.

[Lawn-Mower]

600 m3/min

[Dragonmaster]

Biggest thing for manifold builders is to loop the end back to the start. That usually solves 99% of the problem combined with the other suggestions like downhill and pre fill your pipes

[Dogwelder]

Originally posted by Dragonmaster:

Biggest thing for manifold builders is to loop the end back to the start. That usually solves 99% of the problem combined with the other suggestions like downhill and pre fill your pipes

I do this as well, really helps.

[Welbert Asker]

pipe MK2 allows 600 m3/min output. 2 fully overclocked water extractors should feed an overclocked nuclear plant. that's how it's done in my 200000 MW power grid

[Huillam]

Sorry I'm not entirely sure what count as manifold.
I found some screenshots from that time. The pipe network looked like that:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3334084016
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3334083931

[DaBa]

Originally posted by Huillam:

Sorry I'm not entirely sure what count as manifold.
I found some screenshots from that time. The pipe network looked like that:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3334084016
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3334083931

Manifold is when you have a single long main pipe/belt, and then you use junctions/splitters to split things into the machines without doing any balancing of the ratios, because in the end everything is going to balance itself out anyway as long as you meet the overall demand of the system.

This is an example of a manifold:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3334115359

When people say to close the loop what they mean is that you shouldn't have a situation where the end of the main pipe in the manifold just stops somewhere or goes into the last machine, you should instead loop it back around and merge it with itself ahead of the point where you started splitting things off.

Like this:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3334115390

Of course this is a very small system and using mk1 pipes so it's not the best example, but in a large system with fully saturated mk2 pipes that's what you want to aim for.

[Dixon Sider]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3334115750
This is what I do. I add pipes after the machines knock down the flow rate with their ingest.

[>< V ><]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3333033685

[>< V ><]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3333032059

[Darth[SW]]

Originally posted by >< V ><:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3333032059

Extractors have 10m head lift those pumps are probably too close to the extractors might be causing slight issues.

[SharkPlush]

It is critical these things be fully primed %100 including the consuming machines until the pumps fully stop.

I haven't had any problems with pumps and consumers matching throughput - unless there's an air bubble, and then all hell breaks loose.

[NocheLuz]

Last time I checked my pipe flow rate was 598 m3/min. But the next one and the one before that said 600 m3/min. After a while, it did change to 600 m3/min. So I think it's kinda good.