Help with a pipe setup needed

[i am ergo]

Hey everyone! I knew this game would eventually bring me to the forums.

The problem, as the gurus among you have immediately noticed, is the blocked pipe at the bridge that leads to the two refineries. The top and bottom cutoffs leading off the screenshot form a perfect, complete loop 'round my soon to be industrial brick. There's a pump next to the loop offscreen loading the loop with pwater, which stopped once the refineries drank their fill. The left refinery isn't showing the 800 kilos it's chugged properly, but I checked the contents, and they're there.

Anyway, I cannot for the life of me understand what's causing the blocked pipe issue.

 

Oh yeah, and don't mind the opened aquatuner chamber. I forgot to put the steam turbine's liquid vent in and had to re-open it for a second.

[nakomaru]

What happens if you do this:

[i am ergo]

28 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

What happens if you do this:

 

Holy moly, that did it. Thanks a bunch! You think the pipe was reading the inputs/outputs up and down the junction all effed up?

[nakomaru]

Basically you have exits on either side of the jammed port so the junction can't figure out where you want flow to go.

General rule: fewer junctions, more bridges.

[Zarquan]

50 minutes ago, i am ergo said:

 

Holy moly, that did it. Thanks a bunch! You think the pipe was reading the inputs/outputs up and down the junction all effed up?

The issue was that green outputs "push" and white inputs "pull."  If there is a pipe segment with greens on one end and whites on the other, the pipe will try to push from the green side to the white side, which was the wrong direction.  By adding the bridge, you cause that segment to no longer see the white input.

[i am ergo]

48 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Basically you have exits on either side of the jammed port so the junction can't figure out where you want flow to go.

General rule: fewer junctions, more bridges.

The weird part, at least in my mind, is that the bridge doesn't technically change anything. It doesn't circumvent the junction. The "dilemma" is still there, with the input and the output on either side of the bridge's exit. The bridge merely forces the water to enter the junction.

Still, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. It's a solution. And I learned my lesson. Thank you!

[Zarquan]

51 minutes ago, i am ergo said:

The weird part, at least in my mind, is that the bridge doesn't technically change anything. It doesn't circumvent the junction. The "dilemma" is still there, with the input and the output on either side of the bridge's exit. The bridge merely forces the water to enter the junction.

If this helps, the junction may still exist, but the bridge is a traffic direction device, forcing the pipe to only go one the way you want.

[Jorge Junior]

Do you want me to send a professional cooling system about this issue?

[nakomaru]

By the way, the bridge and its particular placement serves one additional function.

Whereas junctions merge and split using round-robin (equal) priority, bridge exits yield full priority to the existing flow. This makes it so your exterior loop flow will come to a complete stop and let your refineries exit at full throughput in this position.

If you instead placed the bridge going upwards from the lower refinery merging point, the refineries would never be able to empty while the outer loop is full.

Bridge inputs also have priority, meaning your current system will correctly try to refill the refineries at full throughput, rather than if the input was also a junction.

[i am ergo]

That makes a lot of sense, nakomaru. I'll try to keep that in mind in the future.
Begs the question if the UI for pipes could use a small tweak/upgrade from the dev team. I mean I love knowing stuff that's not readily displayed/told to the player by a game... but I love convenience too.