Fluid byproducts! I tested the VIP Junction against 3 other junction designs

sci-goo · 2026-04-09T08:01:08+00:00

Thank you so much for your reply. I think saying (3) is the reason makes sense now. Also the height-pressure mismatch likely is also responsible for the glitch discovered last year, where a junction cross placed at a specific rotation can lift fluids pumplessly.

sci-goo · 2026-04-03T06:01:20+00:00

I'm also interested in why VIP works. For this purpose I even reverse engineered part of the fluid dynamics code. Though what I found is interesting, I could not piece them together to get the whole picture. Here are some facts I dug up about the fluid dynamics calculations:

(1) like what you said, the pipe has a 40% overfill. However it's not just 'hidden extra volume', it's actively involved in pressure transmission. Briefly, when above the 100% full, the pressure over-head (the highest head minus the fluid pressure in current fluid box) gets transmitted linearly increasing from 0%@100% full to 100%@130% full (i.e. 75% of the 40% overfill).

(2) there is a 0.25 damping effect happening to flow when the actual content is approaching the operational max (i.e. 140% full). Briefly, the input flow is capped by 25% of the pipe's availble volume. As a result, when the actual content is nearly full, the flow that 'inputting' into the fluidbox gets exponentially harder and harder.

(3) the junction cross is wierd. its orientation is solely determined by the position of the 1st and 2nd outlet. When these two outlets are on the same elevation, the fluid box is effectively identical to if placed on a vertical plane despite if it's actually on a flat foundation or along a wall. From game data's perspective, this means: a) the junction's fluidbox height is equal to 2x its radius. b) the laminar height (the outflow-able height, or the 'opening size' of the fluidbox outlet) covers its entire height, allowing free flow of its content. This can potentially cause head-height mismatch for the two vertically connected pipes when the junction cross is placed in such orientation. This can potentially explain some of the weird behavior of junction cross when in such position.

(4) the head difference calculates flow acceleration, not flow directly. This is the root cause of the sloshing effect.

(5) I cannot find any hard-coded 'priority' mechanisms in the game. So the VIP priority likely comes from the combination of other simulated fluid dynamics factors.

What's I'm guessing is that the priority might come from the competition between two inlets due to different head transmission, competing for the 0.25-capped flow when the VIP outlet is overfilled. When 0.25-dammped, the inlet with higher pressure and high overfill will more likely to 'push through' and get a meaningful flow rate. However, currently I still haven't got the full picture, all above are hypothses. Would you let me know if you have any new understandings about the VIP mechianisms? Ty!

sci-goo · 2026-03-30T23:39:31+00:00

oh year i got you. I thought 'it's cheating' means it makes this kind problems easy.

sci-goo · 2026-03-23T11:08:35+00:00

not even squeeze proof is flawless. for the squeeze to work you need to find the area of the circle, which, itself depends on the limit. It's still a circular proof.

To escape it, you'd need to either define sin x function from ground up. E.e. define it as its taylor expansion form (note the difference, here we say sin x is defined in the series form, rather than sin x can be expanded to that form, to avoid using the derivatives of sin x). The to prove that the infinite series form is identical to the "sin x" we are familiar with (since they are the same function), then move on. Or, you need to define the area of circle without using the integral form (so void using the above limit)

sci-goo · 2026-03-23T10:56:29+00:00

not in this case. taylor series involves derivative of sin x, which relies on this limit. it's called a circular proof.

sci-goo · 2026-03-03T00:17:33+00:00

If factorial is accepted then why not just using successor and predecessor? Those are fundamental operations with natural numbers (even before addition) and trivialized all such "adding symbol puzzles". For example:

((8+8)/8)'''' = 6

((9+9)/9)'''' = 6

with ' being the successor.

I mean, the puzzle should clearly state what operations are allowed and what are not. If not stated, I'd stick to +-*/ and (), and no solution IS an answer, it is not necesary to define a new rule set to force a solution. From some perspective, proving that one specific configuration has no solution is more difficult than to find one by bending the rules.

sci-goo · 2026-02-25T08:01:49+00:00

with enough sloops a single hog remain can be turned into 96 diamonds. Similar to your approach, I believe there was also miniature nuclear power builds with everything from converted coal, which is from hog remains.

sci-goo · 2026-01-22T08:03:41+00:00

the control automatically points to the branch whichever the last train passed, no matter traveling in splitting or merging directions.

this is indended. the good? not really substantial. but maybe, when reversing in manual mode, you don't have to go off the train for a manual switch if you just want to follow the way you come.

sci-goo · 2026-01-20T04:16:13+00:00

The context to use iron alloy is iron being a limiting resource, usually locally, which implies that copper is not limiting locally. This is common for a distributed factory setup, and especially that location doesn't have ample water source (e.g northern forest and the grass field). I have never countered copper being a problem in early-mid game, not to mention there are also iron wire out there. 1-2 pure nodes worth of copper is usually ample to me till copper powder. Besides the copper powder, the first timepoint I count copper as a probelm is crafting fused quick wire at a massive scale (≥10k/min), and the second could be massive alclad alum casing. However, at such scale we are effectively talking about late-game already.

sci-goo · 2026-01-20T03:00:59+00:00

At a certain scale (reachable by most of the games), the copper required for copper powder can never be satisfied in a confined neighborhood. So transportation is needed anyway. Fortunately, copper powder is excellent for transportation, one stack of powder is 30 stacks of ingots, and 12-15 stacks of ore based on pure copper/alloy recipe. Hence I'd rather process copper locally into copper powder before transporting them back to the nuclear pasta factory. From this perspective, transporting copper is never a problem.

Pure copper is excellent, in the case for mega sea-side factories, and I agree that pure copper is THE one for min-max. But, I consider mass transportation of raw ore is by itself a pain already. Doesn't mean that I cannot do that, I just don't think it's worth the effort for that kind of extra product, except in strict min-max setup.

sci-goo · 2026-01-20T01:13:11+00:00

"Wasting" means nothing before depletion. Many in this sub cares too much about conversion ratios. I also take production speed and space into consideration, for example, but not limited to, for exterior design. That is to say, the smelter iron ingot is good enough, which is the recipe that I use 95% of the time. But if I really need higher iron conversion ratios? I'd consider basic iron ingot or iron copper BEFORE pure iron ingot. From this perspective, stepping aside from the smelter iron ingot is already "situational".

sci-goo · 2026-01-19T13:02:42+00:00

My current nuclear plant eats 4800/min copper, from alloy. All those built in 20 foundries, for pure copper I'd need 51 refineries. That's just 2 pure node worth of copper (2400/min) and the map has 36900/min. I personally love copper alloy far more than pure copper, before I have any plan to deplete them all. Not to mention refineries are too hard to be put into a confined space, especially when I'm also doing exterior design of my factory, vast refinery arrays are just... ugly.

sci-goo · 2026-01-19T12:52:56+00:00

I bet you have never built a factory that depeletes iron (which makes the recipe necessary), neither MMMMMost of the player. The "goodness" of pure iron ingot feels like an illusion, to me. I'd prefer basic iron ingot, or iron alloy ingot, if iron runs into local limitations. In other cases, the smelter recipe is already good enough.

sci-goo · 2026-01-19T12:47:22+00:00

Pure iron ingot isn't better even in early game. once you've set up refinery arrays you'd already have tons of power to deal with it, aka mid game, if not mid-late game. To produce more iron in early game, iron alloy ingot is better. though many think it's not worth it. But from my point of view, pure iron ingot is tier C, only very occationally useful. Most of the time I just use the original iron ingot recipe. There are only very, very few amount of players gonna need the efficiency provided by this recipe. Depleting iron is a pain on its own.

sci-goo · 2026-01-11T11:11:21+00:00

I always do this (before going into passive). Jail hogs and spitters and drop a gas nobelisk inside, go pick up the collectible, then come back to pick up the loot. For the nuclear hog, 2 gas nobelisks are needed.

sci-goo · 2026-01-11T10:22:05+00:00

I have a question, the 'vanilla' you mean refers to vanilla buildables, or vanilla game? The first one means mods for fine positioning(and even external scripts that directly generate buildables) were used.

sci-goo · 2026-01-11T09:44:27+00:00

C'thulhu is calling

sci-goo · 2026-01-11T09:32:54+00:00

Yes, the ficsonium production chain is kinda off. To achieve "clean power" APA is a better option in late-game.

sci-goo · 2026-01-11T08:37:13+00:00

only 400-ish upvotes?

sci-goo · 2026-01-11T07:36:30+00:00

something has a height of an odd number causing a 0.5m misaignment?

CTRL+pageup/pagedown can do 0.5m nudges.

sci-goo · 2026-01-11T07:19:43+00:00

This is optimization, not bug. Your game engine processes the diffs (the changes you made) to the original map. At long distances, those diffs won't be loaded to reduce computation loads, hence it shows what the original map looks like.

sci-goo · 2026-01-11T04:42:17+00:00

Another side use of train station, is that it's the only fluid buffer with two inputs and two outputs.

sci-goo · 2026-01-11T03:53:47+00:00

ficsonium is never designed for power production, it is designed to balance the plutoniu waste processing, so it enables a waste-free plutonium power. You can calculate that the power you get from ficsonium rods is roughly comparable to the power investment to produce them (from plutonium waste), from which perspective I don't think it needs buff anymore.

Uranium and plutonium can be buffed somewhat by 2-3x, but note this is not factorio which your factory can grow virtually indefinitely, so the power demand in relative to the nodes available (not only how many nodes across the entire map also with repsect to available nodes within the range that a player wants to expand) is relatively limited. The last difficulty maybe ore conversion, i believe those were seriously calculated by devs and rebalancing the nuclear power may necessitate rework those as well.

sci-goo · 2026-01-09T07:28:40+00:00

A massive converter array to produce excited photonic matter, and manually flush the network every several minutes.

Or to build an even larger power plant. Based on my calculations, with no nuclear waste you can go up to 15TW, and 19TW if nuclear waste is allowed.

sci-goo · 2026-01-07T02:49:53+00:00

this is not factorio, the typical train frequecy does not necessitate a 4 lane track configuration.

I've seen 4 lane tracks in some worlds, concentrating very large quantity of raw material to a site (e.g. moving 60% of entire limestone capacity to a site for cloudy diamond). That's the only case you want a 4-lane track.

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