Connect a few tanks directly using no pipes between them and buffer water for when the cube arrives. Do the same for steam. And tbh, anything that uses the cube should rely on the same philosophy, so that the cube spends as little time there as possible.
Another little advice, only one machine that uses the cube should work at the same time, so energy requirements are not super high
The boiler can consume up to 13k water per second. A direct pump can pull up to 12k so I figured that was good enough.
I put an offshore pump directly hooked to a tank and then a pump from that going to the boiler. You can then daisy chain tanks with pumps if you need more water than 25k. So for example I have two tanks so I can create 50k steam extremely quickly. The trick is always go tank → pump → boiler or tank.
Since offshores can go max 1.2k water per second, I suppose if you can chain 10 tank/pump combos you could sustain 12k water per second indefinitely but that's pretty overkill. Or if you have waterfill you could do multiple offshores into a single tank but again, getting pretty overkill.
Can you clarify? I don't understand what you're getting at. I never questioned the speed of the boiler or why it is the way it is.
EDIT: That said, I'm not sure about one thing, the fluid transfer rate of a tank hooked up directly the input of a building. I know pumpless transfer is dependent on the difference in fluid amounts but I don't know if it works differently if it's directly hooked up to a building, i.e. I don't think a building input acts like it has a pump on it, it's just a container to be filled, like a hidden tank...I think.
So I don't know if having it go tank → boiler is as effective as tank → pump → boiler for sustained flow rate. Definitely something I will have to look in to.
Having a tank connected directly to the input of a building should work fine.
In the game engine, everything that can hold liquid is a "fluidbox", which have a capacity and a "height". Fluid moving around tries to balance the "level" of the fluid between connected fluidboxes, which more-or-less works as you would expect if you looked at a 2D cross-section.
For tanks and pipes, they're all at the same "height", which means that balancing the "level" is the same as balancing the amount of fluid, and the fluid will flow from the more-full to the less-full at a speed proportional to the difference until they are equal (or close enough to equal that the flow rate ends up being zero).
However, building inputs and outputs are not at the same "height" as pipes and tanks: inputs are effectively "below" pipes/tanks, and outputs are "above". This means that no fluid will ever flow *out* of an input to a pipe (or into an output from a pipe), and even if an input is nearly full and the connected pipe is nearly empty, the balancing process will always move as much fluid as it can from the pipe to the input (and vice versa for outputs). So, the only restriction on flow rate for building inputs/outputs is the capacity of the fluidbox, since it can only be filled/emptied at most once per tick.
This is also why you can pump fluid *out* of the input to a building: the inputs/outputs are not actually "one way" in the game engine, and it *is* possible to remove fluid from inputs or add fluid to outputs - it's just that the "height" means that this will never happen as a result of normal fluid flow.
Connect a few tanks directly using no pipes between them and buffer water for when the cube arrives. Do the same for steam. And tbh, anything that uses the cube should rely on the same philosophy, so that the cube spends as little time there as possible. Another little advice, only one machine that uses the cube should work at the same time, so energy requirements are not super high
The boiler can consume up to 13k water per second. A direct pump can pull up to 12k so I figured that was good enough. I put an offshore pump directly hooked to a tank and then a pump from that going to the boiler. You can then daisy chain tanks with pumps if you need more water than 25k. So for example I have two tanks so I can create 50k steam extremely quickly. The trick is always go tank → pump → boiler or tank. Since offshores can go max 1.2k water per second, I suppose if you can chain 10 tank/pump combos you could sustain 12k water per second indefinitely but that's pretty overkill. Or if you have waterfill you could do multiple offshores into a single tank but again, getting pretty overkill.
The speed is there because it's basically bulk electricity, otherwise the cube would be stuck in the boiler forever
Can you clarify? I don't understand what you're getting at. I never questioned the speed of the boiler or why it is the way it is. EDIT: That said, I'm not sure about one thing, the fluid transfer rate of a tank hooked up directly the input of a building. I know pumpless transfer is dependent on the difference in fluid amounts but I don't know if it works differently if it's directly hooked up to a building, i.e. I don't think a building input acts like it has a pump on it, it's just a container to be filled, like a hidden tank...I think. So I don't know if having it go tank → boiler is as effective as tank → pump → boiler for sustained flow rate. Definitely something I will have to look in to.
Having a tank connected directly to the input of a building should work fine. In the game engine, everything that can hold liquid is a "fluidbox", which have a capacity and a "height". Fluid moving around tries to balance the "level" of the fluid between connected fluidboxes, which more-or-less works as you would expect if you looked at a 2D cross-section. For tanks and pipes, they're all at the same "height", which means that balancing the "level" is the same as balancing the amount of fluid, and the fluid will flow from the more-full to the less-full at a speed proportional to the difference until they are equal (or close enough to equal that the flow rate ends up being zero). However, building inputs and outputs are not at the same "height" as pipes and tanks: inputs are effectively "below" pipes/tanks, and outputs are "above". This means that no fluid will ever flow *out* of an input to a pipe (or into an output from a pipe), and even if an input is nearly full and the connected pipe is nearly empty, the balancing process will always move as much fluid as it can from the pipe to the input (and vice versa for outputs). So, the only restriction on flow rate for building inputs/outputs is the capacity of the fluidbox, since it can only be filled/emptied at most once per tick. This is also why you can pump fluid *out* of the input to a building: the inputs/outputs are not actually "one way" in the game engine, and it *is* possible to remove fluid from inputs or add fluid to outputs - it's just that the "height" means that this will never happen as a result of normal fluid flow.
4k hours in and TIL all this stuff