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Ideas for transportation and plumbing


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I've had a couple of ideas for transportation and plumbing for some time now and I thought I should put them in a thread. Some ideas that I'm going to list have been suggested before by others, but I thought it'd still be a good idea to include them in this thread.
So first of all, I think for existing plumbing it would be nice if we could make pumps with an input and output that can draw gases/liquids through vents. To make that work, an overhaul of the current pipe mechanics would be needed, although that probably wouldn't hurt. Someone posted something about finding mentions of a "liquid channel" that moves liquids into pipes by pressure in the files and I don't think that such a building could work or be balanced with the current pipe mechanics, so that shows that the devs have probably thought about changing how plumbing and pipes work. I was also confused as to why the high pressure gas vent has the exact same cost as the normal gas vent and requires no power, but perhaps if it is the case that the devs want to change piping, then they'll make a pump require more power to pump gases into a pressurized area through a high pressure vent.
Second, a way to bottle and unbottle gases would be nice. This has been suggested before, but I don't think in the exact way I would want it to work. The "gas bottler" could be a compressor that requires a gas input and power, while the unbottler could just be some generic building that lets dupes deliver bottles to it and releases their contents. I've seen a suggestion for also connecting the unbottler to gas pipes, but if a player just wants to release gases into a room, a single building would be more convenient instead of a building that connects to a vent with a pipe and if the played wants to deliver gases to buildings that are far away without building pipes, they should just be given the option to let dupes directly deliver bottles to the buildings.
I also have some ideas for item transportation. As suggested before, conveyor belts would be nice. They should require power and I think they'd probably work best if they occupied their own tiles, but to prevent players from having to build everything out of conveyor belts around machines that produce solids, there should be item permeable tiles (there's probably a better name for those). So for example, in a room with multiple floors of fertilizer synthesizers, the player could place item permeable tiles below the parts of the synthesizers where the fertilizer falls out and then transport it all into one spot with conveyor belts at the bottom of the room.
Additionally, I think some kind of "item plumbing" would be nice (something similar to the pneumatic vents and tubes in Portal 2), to automatically collect materials produced by machines instead of having dupes run to the machines to collect them all the time and to clean up large quantities of debris, for example from excavations that were far away from the base. To balance it and not make it too easy to use, the item pumps should have a relatively high power cos (which also makes sense since solids are quite heavy). It should also come with item filters and upgraded storage compactors that pipes can be connected to. Late game buildings that require solids could even come with an input for item pipes. This seems like it would especially be useful for a nuclear reactor, as it would allow the delivery of radioactive materials to it without dupes needing to constantly carry them and if lead is added as a building material, lead pipes would allow us to move radioactive materials around without spreading radiation everywhere. Item plumbing could also be used to add more automation to other things done with solids. To give an example of what I mean, there could be an advanced ore scrubber that requires an item pipe input and output and power instead of duplicant operation.
In terms of duplicant transportation, elevators would be nice. They would provide very fast vertical transportation at the cost of power (and with the requirement of actually building a straight tunnel). The actual elevator building could be put at the top of the tunnel that's used as the elevator shaft and the elevator's rope and the elevator shaft's base could expand down as the tunnel is dug out, similar to the pitcher pump. If the devs want to add additional realism, they could add a little checkpoint building with a button that dupes need to press to make the elevator move to them, but an elevator that just magically moves to where dupes need it would be fine too.
That's all the ideas I have for now.

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