Liquiducts and Steam Compression

[Carrington]

So I've got a thorny problem and couldn't find any good data for it. Couldn't figure out a way to measure it myself, either.

Basically I have numerous boilers - mix of LP and HP - and I need to figure out how many faces of the boiler a single liquiduct can compress (e.g. I have X faces leading into a single liquiduct into a tank or engines or whatever). I've seen LPs that assert any number of faces can compress into a single liquiduct but this doesn't seem to be the case, because I have two LP boilers with 13 outputs each hooked up into a single line and one of the boilers is completely draining while the other has a full steam tank.

Does anyone know how the compression works or have an easy shorthand between boiler outputs and discrete liquiduct lines?

 

[Malkuth]

Trying to understand what your saying.. But think Direwolf in one of his videos showed that 1 face with LD pipe can run 2 Industrial Engines.. All you have to do is add a new face to existing pipe. and it doubles to 4... And so on. Or was it 4... Dammit.. LOL. No pretty sure it was 2 Industial Engines.. Kinglemming is around maybe he will tell us..

Easy enough to test.. Hook up two and see if they are powering full... Then add 2 more.. They should all be running at half speed.. Ad another face.. And bam.. Instant full power.

 

[silenos]

An unpowered liquiduct can take 80 steam, so you'll want 9 connections on a 36HP or 5 on a 36LP boiler. After that point you just need one liquiduct to transport the steam. I don't know where the actual cap is but my two 36HPs are both feeding into a single liquiduct leading into 36 ind. steam engines and they are all running full speed

 

[Carrington]

Trying to understand what your saying.. But think Direwolf in one of his videos showed that 1 face with LD pipe can run 2 Industrial Engines.. All you have to do is add a new face to existing pipe. and it doubles to 4... And so on. Or was it 4... Dammit.. LOL. No pretty sure it was 2 Industial Engines.. Kinglemming is around maybe he will tell us..

Easy enough to test.. Hook up two and see if they are powering full... Then add 2 more.. They should all be running at half speed.. Ad another face.. And bam.. Instant full power.

I'm asking about the throughput of a liquiduct. Boiler output is well established and available on the RC wiki.

An unpowered liquiduct can take 80 steam, so you'll want 9 connections on a 36HP or 5 on a 36LP boiler. After that point you just need one liquiduct to transport the steam. I don't know where the actual cap is but my two 36HPs are both feeding into a single liquiduct leading into 36 ind. steam engines and they are all running full speed

Ok, I may be over-outputting from one boiler then. I'll test with fewer outputs.

 

[zilvarwolf]

As suggested, and as far as I have seen, a liquiduct can carry a boatload of steam (I doubt it's infinite, but screenshots on the forums here suggest that a single pipe can carry 3 36HP boilers worth). The limiting factor is the connection points, or perhaps the limit is actually in the boiler, but no single connection point can pull more than 80 steam.

 

[Sphinx2k]

Liquiducts are kind of funny coded i think. I have 18 industrial steam engines on one line full power.
A friend got only 6 at one line not running full speed.
Looking for the cause of this we found that he had a loop in the liquiduct. Like so:
------
------
After cleaning up the loop in the line his steam engines working as they should.

 

[Dafuq?]

Here is a helpful thread. Apparently the author couldn't even reach the cap of the liquiducts with 8 hp boilers.

 

[King Lemming]

Liquiducts are kind of funny coded i think. I have 18 industrial steam engines on one line full power.
A friend got only 6 at one line not running full speed.
Looking for the cause of this we found that he had a loop in the liquiduct. Like so:
------
------
After cleaning up the loop in the line his steam engines working as they should.

A loop should not result in any sort of adverse performance. And there's nothing funny about the code.

As far as the operative limit, there really isn't one. That would require CPU cycles where in the vast majority of cases it really isn't an issue in terms of gameplay - you want liquid going from point A to B, you run the duct. If I hear of this being abused to some absurd level, I may have to look into it, but as it stands, there's no really great justification for imposing a strict cap on compressible liquids. Getting into the physics of it is more than really needs to be done in Minecraft.

As far as Tesseracts go, they currently transfer based on what they are attached to. In some cases, this seems to be just a bit too fast, so don't get attached to that notion.

 

[Sphinx2k]

A loop should not result in any sort of adverse performance. And there's nothing funny about the code.

OK i think you know your code better then anyone else
IDK after cleaning of the line to be a line (without loops) everything workes...maybe it was some other error we killed when trying to figure out why it did not work in the first place.

 

[Carrington]

A loop should not result in any sort of adverse performance. And there's nothing funny about the code.

As far as the operative limit, there really isn't one. That would require CPU cycles where in the vast majority of cases it really isn't an issue in terms of gameplay - you want liquid going from point A to B, you run the duct. If I hear of this being abused to some absurd level, I may have to look into it, but as it stands, there's no really great justification for imposing a strict cap on compressible liquids. Getting into the physics of it is more than really needs to be done in Minecraft.

As far as Tesseracts go, they currently transfer based on what they are attached to. In some cases, this seems to be just a bit too fast, so don't get attached to that notion.

Awesome, thanks!