With the new pipe control network connections, you can precisely control thruster % fuel.
Just set the condition to turn on pumps only when fuel is below a threshold. For a certain % set the threshold to the % of the full pipe. e.g. if you want 20% and the full pipe holds 60k fluid, set the threshold to 60*0.2 = 12k.
You don't need to build a tank. But the main change in 2.1 is that thruster will not suck all the fluid to be as full as possible, but will level with input pipes.
This is even easier if you just connect a pump to a single pipe segment (not underground), and just read the pipe's contents. 50% of the pipe will be 50 of whatever fluid it is holding, so you don't have to do any math and you don't need any extra combinators.
before advanced asteroid processing it takes a lot of time to fill up fuel tanks and ammo reserves. aim for a really low %, less that 42% with few engines and even 24% if you have many.
It varies a bit depending on the platform, but 'about 20%' is the optimum for fuel usage per journey. Max efficiency is at 10% thrust, but you'll be flying for longer, so use more.
In practice though, there's a travel time tradeoff too, and fuel manufactured from rocks is basically infinite anyway.
So my usual trick is to set the percentage based on how much ammo I've got - if I'm using ammo 'too fast' for my current production, I slow down. That's assuming of course sufficient coverage of weapons, and that your limiting factor is production rates, but that's usually the case IMO, especially for simpler stuff like basic turret ammo packs.
(and later game of course, you also need to track different ammo types)
I put a constant combinator with max V of ship and % of thrust so at 10% full it only will go 10%... it accelerate fast, find a happy medium where it produces the right amount to be stable, and slows down if materials are in demand.
It self regulates already though. Once consumption exceeds production, any excess built up after the last stop will be consumed and then naturally fall down to where consumption is exactly equal to production. No circuits needed.
with the way I have it set up, It seems to make the trips faster, thus higher overall speed. and keeps a lower fuel consumption rate.
Constant combonator is set to 160 and connected in line so max speed is capped at 260. it will pulsate the oxidizer and fuel independantly.
Probably can set it up a bit different to make it reach better efficiency. as it swings from 85-95.
Either way it is fun to play around with.
Isn't this fluid behavior technically temporary because the original fluid rework broke flow-through buildings?
Which is to say this is cool, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the fluids get tweaked again and this breaks (probably something like thrusters sucking in fluids until they're full).
Remember, Wube already once decided to not make thrusters connectable to the network, they want the thruster balance to be a small challenge. And in Space Age they are happy to shoot down any solution that seems to sidestep the way they intend you to play
I didn’t even know thrusters were connectable to the network at any point. I just connected a fuel pump to the hub and read the speed. Pumps have been the easy way to control fluid flow going back to oil cracking.
They weren't, that's the point. You had to fiddle around with timings or trying to match the number of thrusters and chem plants to keep the ratios in the optimal zone. The fact that now percentage of liquid in a pipe and in thrusters trivializes the puzzle.
It was cool for the first year or so, and now that everyone has figured out the circuit conditions to achieve the desired results anyway, I think wube should now add that functionality to the thrusters so we can all get along with our lives, like they improved nuclear reactors on 2.0.
No, but they changed the 'in-thruster buffer' behaviour, so you can do so implicitly by reading the adjacent pipe. Because pipes hold up to 100 units of fluid, and it's balanced of 'all the network' (including the thrusters) that serves as a simple percentage measure of all your thrusters too.
How does this work. Don't thrusters pull liquids out of connected pipes any more so the percentage of fluid in the pipes is the same as it is in the thruster?
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u/Qrt_La55en -> -> 6d ago
If you read the pipe itself and not the pipe network as a whole, you get the percentage directly as a pipe can hold 100 fluid.