Very low return when melting iron plates (and related items) into molten iron — intended or bug?

Hi!
I noticed something that looks potentially unintended in Age of Production (I’m on v1.7.7).

In your mod there’s a recipe to melt iron plates into molten iron:
40× Iron Plate → 20× Molten Iron (32s) (recipe: aop-iron-plate-melting)

In vanilla Space Age / Foundry casting (ignoring the Foundry’s built-in productivity for a fair baseline), the casting ratio is:
20× Molten Iron → 2× Iron Plate

So if someone ever converts plates → molten → plates, it becomes:
40 plates → 20 molten → 2 plates
That’s a 5% return (20× loss), which feels extremely harsh unless the intent is “resource sink / disposal only”.

A few questions:
Is the 40 plates → 20 molten value intentional, or could it be a misplaced scale/typo?
Are the nearby melt recipes for iron gears / iron stick / steel beams meant to follow the same “very low return” mechanic as well?
What is the intended gameplay purpose of these melt recipes? I initially assumed they’re meant to enable converting crafted items back into molten metal (e.g., for reprocessing or changing product chains), but with a 5% return they look more like pure disposal—maybe too low to be useful.

If you can confirm the design intent (or point to the intended use chain), I’ll adjust my expectations/modpack accordingly. Thanks!

Its intended or it would be op.

I did calculations to make the ratios equal. They return very little molten metal so there's no chance for loops to happen

Thanks for the quick reply!

Got it — makes sense to keep the molten return low to prevent any plate→molten→plate loops and avoid it becoming OP. I’ll treat these melt recipes as disposal / anti-loop mechanics in my modpack.

Appreciate the clarification!