Tubes Between Mine And Smelter Instead Of Trucks

[TH300]

Special Tubes between mine and smelter instead of Cargo trucks

Originally proposed by omagaalpha

Related ideas:

- Cargo Train
- Monorail / Maglift

Description:

Tube would have to be direct connection from smelter to mine.
Maybe allow cargo trucks to dock into these tubes.
Ore transfer rate similar to truck rate to keep balance.

This is a good idea, because:

- Easier ore hauling.

This is a bad idea, because:

- Takes away an Outpost2-typic element from the game. Defense of ore routes no longer necessary.

[Starfox00000]

hell y not just put the smelter on top of the mine and have infinate ore?

[thablkpanda]

I like bringing up old topics, but I think this one needs to be explored and 'conversed' about more.

This is a good idea, but I think it needs some drawbacks that make it less desirable in some way to cargo trucks.

Like, make it slower transfer than cargo trucks, but make it like a backup to your cargo truck routes... So then you still have to defend the route, but if your base gets infiltrated to a certian degree, you still have a connection to the smelter to get ore.

Kind of like the Eastern Pipelines... I know when my company built a local Walgreens store (Drugstore chain for those of us unfamiliar) we were building on top of the Eastern Pipelines, and had the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Comission) breathing down our necks not to break the pipelines while digging for fear we release hundreds of thousands of gallons of highly flammable jet fuel into the ground.

What I'm getting at - is we have them in the real world, and it makes sense..

Discuss?

[Betaray]

so while using tubes the mine only yelds 75% or so of its max output? due to wastage in converting it into a slurry and vice versa?

would the game allow both cargo truck traffic and tube systems to be running at the same time?  and if not how will the game know if the cargo trucks arn't there, would it check to see if there are any trucks with an ore route to that mine, and if not than it would start the tube system if its conected?

[TH300]

the ore would probably go through the tube, if no cargo-truck fetched some for a while.

However, I'd like to see an elaborated explanation, why this gives you less ore then with trucks only.

[dm-horus]

In fact, moving ore by tubes would be more realistic than cargo trucks. If anything using tubes would be more efficient because the ore moves at a constant rate instead of intermittently as it does with trucks. Even if less is moved at once, simply being constant is more effective as time goes on. Turning down the yield would only put you backward in terms of realism. A good way to balance it would be to give it extremely high power demands.
The energy required to run the conveyors from the mine to the smelter would justify it nicely.

[thablkpanda]

There's Chris again, with another brilliant idea..

I'm not being sarcastic.

That really is more realistic; and Chris is right about the power balance.

Thank you guys for sorting this out for me; and exploring it a little more.

Like a think-tank.. Just without the clunk sound...

-Chris

[Betaray]

so your saying adding a power requirement to mines?

would it be like 10 power is required for each square the tube is on?

what would that mean for emp than?

also if I remember ore and metals and such are transferred in tubes in the form of a suspended oil baised slurry

it has to have some sort of ore disadvantage, or else noone would use trucks unless the mine was very far away from the smelter

[Mez]

The slurry is a result of melting the ore down isn't it?

If so then it would need to be kept hot during transportation through the pipes or it would solidify. Then maybe the tubes would have to be  of a special kind of metal, giving the tube a high cost.
Also half the tube would need to have a form of heating element in it to keep the slurry hot (or am i completly wrong, i don't know what the properties of the slurry are).

What do you think?

[Betaray]

the slurry in op2 are pellets of metals suspended in an oily fluid, which means that it has to keep moveing or else the pellets would settle and clog

from what I understand there is no need to keep the slurry hot

perhaps have a limit in the length between the smelter and mine, such as if its say more than 5 tiles away it wont work, sense over that length the slurry would settle down or somthing

[dm-horus]

even that is overly complicated. theyre in the future and efficiency determines whether or not humanity survives. the amount of fluid required to suspend any material in even a closely viscous consistency would be enormous. you would need more fluid to suspend the ore than you could ever make. and, the word slurry doesnt always refer to something that is in suspension. most slurry is dry, especially in mining terms. slurry doesnt have to be hot.

I have a feeling it would be just like modern mine conveyors. A belt or screw that drives the ore down the pipeline. modern mining conveyors use a combination of these two.

as for the smelter itself, i dont think there should be a cost in ore. having a high power requirement is far better because the cost of building additional power plants to serve the smelter would come out just that same as though the smelter yeilded less ore, but is more realistic in terms of economy. why would anyone build a smelter like this if it yields less? they wouldnt. but as is known now, high power requirements are often acceptable in favor of higher productivity.

this formula makes it so that only high mark games will see the benefit of these smelters. it is doubtful anyone would invest in them during a rush game, which wouldnt make sense anyway.

I like the idea of building the smelter on top of the mine and requiring a tube connection. then we wouldnt have to worry about tube distance or making a new class of tube. but i do think both types of smelters (or mines) available is smart. this would give the smelter as many options as advanced power plants.

you can have cheap power, but not much of it.
you can have lots of power, but its expensive.

you can have cheap smelters, but you have to use trucks.
you can have higher yield smelters, but they cost more power.

i think this concept is more realistic and logical.

[thablkpanda]

I'm starting to like Horus' idea better- it's giving way to the future of 'mining' or whatever you'll call it. And yes, it's also more realistic.

Very true about the slurries Chris, I don't have to tell you this - cuz you already know, but aluminum is melted and transfered into slurries all the time; and it's moved along pipelines to get it from point A to point B without the usage of trucks to this day (along small distances of course).

I have a contract with a preprocessing plant that's been around for years called Controls Southeast; they develop aluminum and steel pipe fittings/conduit fittings and pipes. They have a plant that stretches across about a square mile, so they contracted my company to power several heating systems that keep their pipe extremely hot underground and sheathed to transport their aluminum across their plant.

This has to be kept extremely hot, and on an angle (or pumped) to keep it from solidifying and clogging. (You can imagine they have incredible electric bill costs; because of this heating system my company installed.

But the system is amazing, I wish I could show it to you guys; it's something to stand in awe of..

-Chris

[dm-horus]

ya i actually just took a look at a system like that recently. im in a Boeing family, and they use screws to move aluminum chips. i had heard of the molten transfer but not seen it until recently so i didnt know how common it was. what makes me wonder about this process however, is that the mines process more than one ore. theyre broken down into "common" and "rare" common having lighter more necessary metals including iron, copper, aluminum, zinc, etc.

how feasible would it be to hot transfer more than one ore type? they all have different melting points right? i think this would be something more common WITHIN the smelter itself, and maybe not so much between the mine and the smelter? although maybe since this is the future, the colonists have developed an efficient way of doing this.

[thablkpanda]

Yeah, that's what I'm getting at.

Somewhere, people refine the aluminum for Controls Southeast to use, and it's solidified, and hardened into a transportable size and shape, and sent to Controls Southeast via truck or whatever (in our analogy; this is all within the mine).

Controls Southeast gets the hardened and huge blocks or aluminum, and melts them down to transport across their plant (this is still in the mine for our analogy) and finally, the tubes transport the 'slurry' across the plant (underground via tubes in our analogy) to a refinery and re-hardening (I made that word up) smelter type-place.

-Chris

[TH300]

I tried to find an explanation for smelter and mine not being integrated in op2 and I thought of the following:

in op2 mines are often in areas with many disasters, thus building a smelter there is quite risky. They decided that it'd be better to build the smelter in the base which is at a safe location, so that only the mine (which can be replaced easily) can be destroyed by a disaster. Unfortunately they didn't think of how many more trucks are needed to transport ore from a far away mine to a smelter.
Maybe a smelter was also supposed to serve more than one single mine, so that having it in range of several of your mines would actualy give an advantage.

I'm thinking of making op3 like this. What do you think?

[thablkpanda]

I just had a great idea.

I'ma build a mine, a bazillion miles (estimate) from my smelter, and run approximately one gajillion cargo trucks between the two.

On the other side of the world (closer to home base) I'll build smelter and mine extremely close together, and run one or two trucks between them. I think I'll get the gajilliion trucks started running first.

-Chris

[dm-horus]

you and i need to play an around the world match to do some of our testing. ive got a number of theories i need to test in a map that size as well!!

i had a thought about why mines and smelters are not joined, and i think it simply has to do with logistics. on a planet where diasters are frequent (as you said) and areas of danger may shift from day to day, it is better to have multiple mines feeding a single smelter via trucks which can simply be rebuilt. i think youre on to something, TH300. but i also think that having the advanced smelter would really add to the game in a logical way. i wouldnt be amazed if given the time, the game would have been shipped with this structure. it seems like almost every building in each faction has a basic, standard and advanced progression - except mines and smelters. common and rare ore types dont really count, imo. considering that the larger and more developed a base is, the more likely it is to begin taking more liberties with cost and upkeep. that being said, wouldnt it be likely that once a colony got to the point that its not struggling to survive, that it would some up with a more productive smelter? if said colony was developed enough to even consider it, they would likely have no problem building the extra power plants required to run the structure.

the more i think about this concept, the better it seems! we shouldnt have a problem writing the research entry for this addon, i think.

[Sirbomber]

Am I the only one who thinks this idea sucks?
It'd be too easy, and there's nothing quite like blowing up enemy ore trucks!
Rolling an Earthworker in to destroy the enemy "ore tube" would make me sad...

Oh, one more thing:

hell y not just put the smelter on top of the mine and have infinate ore?

Somehow I think he was being sarcastic...

[TH300]

Am I the only one who thinks this idea sucks?
It'd be too easy, and there's nothing quite like blowing up enemy ore trucks!
Rolling an Earthworker in to destroy the enemy "ore tube" would make me sad...

Oh, one more thing:

hell y not just put the smelter on top of the mine and have infinate ore?

Somehow I think he was being sarcastic...

I don't particularly like it either. But if it fits in well, and if the majority of people are not against it, we might put it into the game.

[Mcshay]

I hope this idea is not added into the game, or if it does has some great cost to it. It makes sence to use tubes to move ore from mines to the smelter, but it will destroy the idea that ore routes can be endangered by enemy attacks. However if tubes are made attackable, i might see it working.

[dm-horus]

well that is the entire point. you can have smelters that dont require trucks but ONLY at extreme cost. this would normally be prohibitive in multiplayer games unless all players were at cease fire to very high mark.

the idea isnt bad, it just provides a balance issue - IF it were simply inserted into the game - but we arent suggesting that. to keep it balanced it must somehow be eliminated from most multiplayer games by prohibitive cost. this relegates the benefit of the smelters to high mark "colony builder" games where the AI is either not attacking (or hasnt triggered yet) or in a high attack mark multiplayer game. the object is that if a colony became large enough to require better productivity, why would they continue to waste efficiency on trucks? they wouldnt. theyd automate the process and the smelter idea reflects that.

i think we have come up with excellent ways to prevent these smelters from taking over early games. making it cost and power prohibitive means that it will only ever be built:

when the player isnt in fear of being attacked and can afford to devote their resources toward supporting the advanced smelter.

in high attack mark multiplayer games when both players have the time and resources to devote toward building advanced smeltersw.

when the player is in a superior position above opponents and can afford to build the advanced smelter - BUT if the player chooses to build it, this provides an economic opportunity for the opponent to attack.

this also makes power plants a VERY juicy target for hit and run colony raids. even when against a much weaker player, the player with advanced smelters will have to devote substantial defense to their power plants or risk losing his smelters or the rest of his colony to maintain resource production.

this idea continues to add strategic opportunities.

[Sl0vi]

or better yet! Bring Earthworkers into combat

[james239]

like the idea of the tubes being attacable, that way you'd still need to defend your ore routes... and maybe make them affected by EMP, it'd stop the pumps or heating elements.

[Betaray]

mabe make it so that earthworkers can destroy tubes without damageing themselves

[dm-horus]

I think that is something almost everyone has been waiting for. Im tired of having to build 5 earthworkers to clear an old tube. This would give earthworkers a slight combat function.

Who wouldve guessed that?!