Oil pumping stations and oillines? (possibly water)

[Dexxter]

Just a crasy thought that has been buzzing in my mind for month.
Would it be totally out of concept if there would be oil pumping stations in the game, and oilpipes, that would deliver it to the next station? As a concept it would work as such:
- You build pumping station next to a oilwell or water collector
- then you build similar pumping station to a watertower or refinery
- then you must build pipes through the terrain to connect the two.

Now as the system goes, you must issue which pumping station would connect to wich pumping station, and the pumping would start. Each pumping station could pump certain amount of liquid from the station to pipes. Pipes would then start to fill from pipe to another transfering the liquid from station to station. so each segment would just refill the amount from last pipe to another, thus carrying liquid forward. each of these new kind of pipes could be little bit longer than standard section, lets say like 3-5 sqrs.
Now, you could not build a railway ontop of it ofc...

does this sound totally out of concept?

[Eddi]

yes.


honestly, it has been discussed multiple times in the past, just read those discussions...

[kamnet]

As much as *I* like the idea, I can understand why most people would not. It turns the game away from focusing on transportation to micro-management of resources, which it wasn't designed to do.

I've thought about this recently, especially with regards of transporting oil from ships to transfer stations or refineries. What I'm going to do in a future game is set up a offshore pumping station that will transfer to to an on-shore refinery, and seriously abuse the advanced option of maximum size a station can be spread out. Put a single station tile (of any type, using ISR) next to the refinery, and put another one out on the water, put a dock next to it and VOLIA.

[Dexxter]

As much as *I* like the idea, I can understand why most people would not. It turns the game away from focusing on transportation to micro-management of resources, which it wasn't designed to do.

I've thought about this recently, especially with regards of transporting oil from ships to transfer stations or refineries. What I'm going to do in a future game is set up a offshore pumping station that will transfer to to an on-shore refinery, and seriously abuse the advanced option of maximum size a station can be spread out. Put a single station tile (of any type, using ISR) next to the refinery, and put another one out on the water, put a dock next to it and VOLIA.

yes, you can do that even now, but if you would make the pumping stations to be replaced after some time, like you must do with trains, you would need to still micromanage those.

Lets say that you have broken pump? then the oil would not transfer along the pipe, the profits would loose at one point untill you fix the pumping station.

Lets say your pipe has gone broken somewhere? then the oil wouldnt transfer from pipe section to next, but would leak out instead? you would receve pipe broken news report where you could go and replace that section of the pipe. While the oil would not transfer to second section and leak out (disappear instead of transfer). Broken section would be shown as broken section as graphs also.

You dont have enough pumping power to transfer all the oil in the pipes? the oil would start to stack up again on the station = loosing popularity & p***ing town off.

then your asking about the question: how would it develope? how would pipeline from 1970 differ from pipelines from 21th century? because technology advances, you could first make only copper tubes with low volume and when compaunds are developed due time, you could make "titanium" pipes wich are more reliable and not so volitile to burst (track type) Then you could make a better and higher tech pumping stations that could handle bigger loads to the pipes, maybe at some point starting to need electricity as goods too, wich comes to the secondary idea of electricity lines, high voltage lines that you could draw from powerstation to cities (city needs transformer)

codingvice this only dees implication of new subsystem, "linetransfer" where the context of trains is stationary. On pipelines the oil would travel 3 lines per round. on electricity it would travel 7 lines / round. On water pumping because viscosity is lower, it would flow faster, lets say 5 lines / round. This sets up how fast pipe would leak and deplete upon burst or being cut off.

Then your asking would this provide constant moneyflow and slow down system? No if the collected flow is dumped on storage on pumping station, before (upon getting full) is dumped to the station. On each dumping station is storage wich would start to fill up. When its full, it would unload that storage to the station giving you "monthly" profit instead of constant flow, thus receding the need to constantly calculate profit in the game.

[zc15-nyonker]

As much as *I* like the idea, I can understand why most people would not. It turns the game away from focusing on transportation to micro-management of resources, which it wasn't designed to do.

I've thought about this recently, especially with regards of transporting oil from ships to transfer stations or refineries. What I'm going to do in a future game is set up a offshore pumping station that will transfer to to an on-shore refinery, and seriously abuse the advanced option of maximum size a station can be spread out. Put a single station tile (of any type, using ISR) next to the refinery, and put another one out on the water, put a dock next to it and VOLIA.

yes, you can do that even now, but if you would make the pumping stations to be replaced after some time, like you must do with trains, you would need to still micromanage those.

Lets say that you have broken pump? then the oil would not transfer along the pipe, the profits would loose at one point untill you fix the pumping station.

Lets say your pipe has gone broken somewhere? then the oil wouldnt transfer from pipe section to next, but would leak out instead? you would receve pipe broken news report where you could go and replace that section of the pipe. While the oil would not transfer to second section and leak out (disappear instead of transfer). Broken section would be shown as broken section as graphs also.

You dont have enough pumping power to transfer all the oil in the pipes? the oil would start to stack up again on the station = loosing popularity & p***ing town off.

then your asking about the question: how would it develope? how would pipeline from 1970 differ from pipelines from 21th century? because technology advances, you could first make only copper tubes with low volume and when compaunds are developed due time, you could make "titanium" pipes wich are more reliable and not so volitile to burst (track type) Then you could make a better and higher tech pumping stations that could handle bigger loads to the pipes, maybe at some point starting to need electricity as goods too, wich comes to the secondary idea of electricity lines, high voltage lines that you could draw from powerstation to cities (city needs transformer)

codingvice this only dees implication of new subsystem, "linetransfer" where the context of trains is stationary. On pipelines the oil would travel 3 lines per round. on electricity it would travel 7 lines / round. On water pumping because viscosity is lower, it would flow faster, lets say 5 lines / round. This sets up how fast pipe would leak and deplete upon burst or being cut off.

Then your asking would this provide constant moneyflow and slow down system? No if the collected flow is dumped on storage on pumping station, before (upon getting full) is dumped to the station. On each dumping station is storage wich would start to fill up. When its full, it would unload that storage to the station giving you "monthly" profit instead of constant flow, thus receding the need to constantly calculate profit in the game.

I like that idea, especially the electricity part. All other industries produce something when you ship to them, but power plants just use coal and do nothing with it. Also, the pumping station would take many trucks off the road: Sub tropical cities that are very large consume so much water that Buses would be slowed to a crawl, and adding new services in the city would be impossible if the water towers were supplied by trucks alone.

[michael blunck]

One could (mis-)use the "new track types" feature for this. Although, "pipelines" would have to be built from rather weird menues (rails resp roads).

regards
Michael

[Dexxter]

One could (mis-)use the "new track types" feature for this. Although, "pipelines" would have to be built from rather weird menues (rails resp roads).

regards
Michael

Errm, i dont think it would be any harder to apply than the railroad cart, but you cant build it on road, cant build bridges ontop of it etch.
pipe on slope would transfer slower, and effect the damage on train as repair interval etch. You only need to use the loading algorithm on this 1, offloading the material and loading it on same time, only you cant see this process. Each pipe section would basicly act like a traincart. at the time its going to get broken, it burst. (send newsflash that pipeline has burst, so you can go there and replace it, or just wait untill repair crew gets there. While this happends, naturally the pipe is broken and cannot travel = cant offload to next section of pipe.

Im trying to say its doable within current game systems... Just put it underneath the shipping section and you get room to make pumping stations and "railtypes" (pipeline)

I've thought about this recently, especially with regards of transporting oil from ships to transfer stations or refineries. What I'm going to do in a future game is set up a offshore pumping station that will transfer to to an on-shore refinery, and seriously abuse the advanced option of maximum size a station can be spread out. Put a single station tile (of any type, using ISR) next to the refinery, and put another one out on the water, put a dock next to it and VOLIA.

actually this is prevented if you could only use this to transport oils and water... using oil or water pipe = material used. so the station at this point would not transfer anything else than those liquids.
then you could also use conveyer belts to transit some ores etch, but im not gonna ask for that too.

[stevenh]

One could (mis-)use the "new track types" feature for this. Although, "pipelines" would have to be built from rather weird menues (rails resp roads).

regards
Michael

Hah, Imagine the depot and stations... and then you would build 'bulges'? that traverse up and down the pipe looking like a snake eating?
How very creative...

[Dexxter]

One could (mis-)use the "new track types" feature for this. Although, "pipelines" would have to be built from rather weird menues (rails resp roads).

regards
Michael

Hah, Imagine the depot and stations... and then you would build 'bulges'? that traverse up and down the pipe looking like a snake eating?
How very creative...

thats not actually bad idea to candyland scheme...

[NeCroFire]

Old topic, but I like the idea.

It's clear that such a pipeline could be abused, but there should be some negative sides to it to prevent abuse.
- You could limit the amount it can transfer.
- It will only be profitable after a certain distance. (e.g. Transferring between to points that's only 50 blocks apart should result in a loss, not a profit)
* Or you could make it so that it's only profitable on short distances (e.g. Transferring between to points that's more than 150 blocks apart should result in a loss)
- Only one pipe should be allowed at a station (Maybe you could still connect multiple pipes to a "Destination" station?). You would need a start and end point.


So even if you use the pipe, it might at maximum only transfer half (or 2/4) of what an oil well can produce. So you would still need to use trains or vehicles to transport the rest. So your "pipe network" would only transfer some of the goods (oil, water, ect) and never replace anything (unless you really don't need to milk an oil well for everything it's worth ). This will free up the your train/vehicle/ship network and in the end you could possibly have bigger games? I'm guessing pipe lines would use much less CPU power as it won't need a pathfinder for one thing. So you could have a bigger network with the same limit on trains/vehicle/ships/planes as there is now??

I vote yes to the pipe line idea

[TiagoTiago]

How about dealing with pressure, and needing "repeaters", pumps midway to keep things flowing overcoming the friction of the pipes (if you set a pump to pump too fast for the pipes ahead, either due to the lenght of the piping or because it is going uphill too much, at one point in the pipeline pressure would start to build up, or even better there would be a peak spot where pressure would keep rising if the pump can handle it, eventually reaching a level where the material won't go any further, and a gradient of pressure on the tiles comming before it, each pipe type would have different properties like diameter (which determines how much litters/cubic metres per second can flow at a pressure of about 1 atmosphere), material and texture of the inside(which would determine how fast pressure builds up with length and/or pressure and/or flowrate), pressure ranges starting with empty to almost full and then going from the safe range to the lifetime reducing range and finally the instant catastrophic failure threshold (self explanatory); to keep a healthy pipeline you would need to add additional pumps along the way to keep the stuff flowing and the pressure in the safe range.


To visualize the flow, we could have somthing simple like pallete cycling a wavy texture (with the pipes seen as crosssections) with the speed of the the cycling based on flow rate vs pipe diameter (same amount per second in a thinner pipe moves faster), and the direction obviouslly dependent on the flow direction; as for pressure visualization, perhaps a change in the cycling fluid texture and also perhaps the flow rate would change based on the pressure providing another clue. Also kinda like the signs on train tracks you could have the option of adding instruments to pipe sections that would give you numeric or dial readouts on those values.


Besides the issue of blowing pipes due to overpressure, there is also the issue of making sure things flow in the right direction, the momentum of fluid is calculated based on the impulse applied by pumps and gravity, and the pressure gradient (which tries to make the fluid move towards where the pressure is lower) bouncing back at significant obstacles (like a sudden reduction in pipe diameter, a valve almost or totally closed etc), for each tile moved the moementum is reduced by a certain fraction(the exact amount depends on the pipe characteristicvs, fluid pressure and flow rate) ; so you gotta becareful when joining more than one source or spliting a pipe to more than one destination to avoid the stuff flowing the wrong way (or not flowing at all if you got one way valves)


Besides water and crude oil, we could also have natural gas , refined fuel, etc and perhaps even sewer material (from factories, cities etc, into either a water treatment facility or a body of water)


I haven't really tried to figure out how electricity would fit, perhaps it would need a class of it's own

[kamnet]

Recently a new discussion opened up in the Graphics Development thread regarding extending the game to transport/transmit electricity and oil.

http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=52505