New Building - Blast Furnace

Question

Both Smelter and Foundry are going to have a Mk2 version and, if I'm not mistaken, those are going to be just the same models working faster (up to 50%).

I was thinking about something past that point without having a redundant Mk3, look alike, version : which would be a Blast Furnace.

Quite huge building having the feed hatch on the top and a couple of ground level outputs. This new machine would work as both Smelter and Foundry simultaneously, even with one single merged input. The strong point of this building would be a bigger internal buffer to compensate the input feed without lacking efficiency, matched with an output rate slightly better then Mk2 counterparts. Also this may "spice up" the variety of looks and production approach in our factories.

Does it sound viable?

Answer 1

If you want to go with that approach then it should be a much larger building but also smelting much larger quantities. I am talking the size of fuel power plant at 20mx20m but able with push 4-5x a smelters speed.  If you want to add another building that covers the purposes of another type,then go for an endgame type of building.

You would need higher tech level and building would be overall more expensive compared to its lower tiered versions so it needs a selling point.  The visual of the large buildings gives you more of an upgraded feeling.  Having several smaller buildings just feels more messy than a single big one.  You could also use this as a building required for smelting S.A.M. if you wish to add unique functionality to it.

Comments

Maybe have it take more than 2 ingredients - ie iron ore plus coal plus limestone to make steel ingots.

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Indeed. I meant a huge building for endgame purpose having multiple internal buffer to manage various types of material at once. About the functionality was aiming something like "slow to getting started but gargantuan production in due times"

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FEED (single input so it have to be balanced in advance) 30 Iron Ore + 30 Coal + 6 Limestone
PRODUCE (2 outputs) 8 Iron Ingot + 20 Steel Ingot (every 6 seconds)

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You might be able to make heavy steel output, but the output would be 8 pig iron which has a lot of impurities and would have to further go through a refinement process to get iron ingots.  But still, increasing the steel production is great and use the waste for iron production which wouldn't be a bad idea.   The mix of input belts on a line of furnaces can get extremely messy if you dont have a compact style for it.

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Well, since we're talking kinda sci-fi here, I assumed the pig iron would have been purified in an inner secondary chamber, you know, since the output provides ingots and not melted metal, there must be something more at work into the building. I do agree about the complexity of the input line, maybe we will have a serious testing ground on smart/programmable splitters for once.