Tanks NEED automation

[Icewave]

I've seen the other posts and I'm hoping after enough klei will make a change. I made an account solely to post this, it would make tanks so much easier to use and infinitely more useful.
love the game tho!

[Icewave]

I mean we already have the mechanics needed as you can manually disable tanks which works as it should. maybe for balancing we could have powered tanks that use power when liquids or gasses enter as a pressurized tank with a higher capacity and allow for automatic opening and closing such as the mechanized airlock. or just have it use constant power? 

[SpreadsheetGamr]

I don't think it would work actually.  What would you want the automation to do?  Send or receive?

If it sends, would it send green when it's empty or full?  See, if you do one, then the other state is not measurable, which is a problem.

If it receives, then when the tank turns off it means no gas in AND no gas out.  That's also a problem.

What you can already do is measure gasses flowing in or out of the tank, and close or open valves automatically based on that.  If you want to know if a tank is full, for example, make an overflow inlet pipe and measure for the presences of gasses.  Maybe you haven't thought of that or don't know how?

[AndreyKl]

14 hours ago, SpreadsheetGamr said:

If it sends, would it send green when it's empty or full?  See, if you do one, then the other state is not measurable, which is a problem.

I had a couple situation where 'automated tank' that works identically to Smart Storage would have been very usefull.

Example A, Output: I had a "Slush gazer->Metal Refinery->Insulated Tank->Water sieve->water storage" early setup. It worked excellent for small orders, but failed miserably for large ones: the problem is that "Water sieve" is very slow so after each Refining operation it takes some time to filter out pwater from tank and so hot pwater stays in pipes and refinery, heats up surroundings. A "smart tank" that reports green signal when water is below some level would have solved the issue very well - turn off refinery when no space in tank. Obviously there are workarounds, and better setups, but I think this option still counts. P.S. later I just started pumping oil from my steam turbine setup to the refinery and dumping heated one back (turbine started working non stop)

Example B, Rationing: if we need exact amounts of liquids and gasses (like steam for rockets or coolant for refinery) we can use automated valves and pipes, like: place 10 pipes, valve on each side, open input, close output, wait till it fills up, close input, open output... Such setups are possible, howhever they have a number of issues: 1. setup doesn't distinguish miniscule amounts, so it can't accurately judge that there is exactly 10kg of liquid in this specific pipe, only 'there is roughly 100'. as result using such setup for rationing 'tile values' is very hard to achieve. 2. precision. since setups can's distinguish 1kg from 10, it can misfire. 3. speed - it waits to colelct liquid/gas prior to sending it further and some setups have to work slower, like 2kg/s to achieve needed values 4. size... and Automated/Smart liquid/gas tank would fix all/most of these issues, like sending exactly 999kg of water or 690Kg of gas

Example C, Smart buffer. Sometimes we want to either have a reserve of fuel for generator or to switch something off when generator is running low, so we place a smart gas tank, it collects, lets say 50Kg of hydrogen and after that reroutes the rest to freezing chamber. Or opposite - when ethanol tank is running low, we turn on backup power source