How does the t2 Iron smelting work with Carbon, but not use limestone/lime for flux, or use Oxygen for the carbon to act as fuel. What does the carbon do?
Why is chlorine and Caustic solution voidable? I guess it is to avoid unavoidable roadblocks, but I have to wonder how those are dealt with in real life.

Why doesn't Caustic solution, as well as a lot of other items/liquids not have chemical names, when they are well defined, and not abstract, "I don't actually know what is in there" like sludge or wastewater, or "It can be made in several ways" like Plastic. Especially the synthesized ones

Why can't you break down the complex hydrocarbons, and only burn them?

How does pressure work exactly? I have a vague idea, given the floor/ceiling height model of pipes, but am still unclear on some things.
My guesses, but not certainties.
40% pressure from T1 pipe is enough to fill a T2 pipe with 60% cap to 2/3rds capacity. A t2 pipe at full possible pressure is 50% faster than t1.
Pumps either pull, or just accept any fluid that hits them, so their floor on the input is probably negative, and the output is above 125%, because of the biggest tank's pressure cap.
Do vents and outflows have a pressure floor above 0% pressure, because that is implied, but never outright stated. I think it is 25%, but this isn't written anywhere that I could find.

Why is caustic solution not lye solution? Can you make it in another way later? Although that would give it a different chemical makeup, so shouldn't produce saline when combined with Hydrochloric acid.

Why is caustic solution used for Bauxite processing instead of electrolysis?

What can productivity modules be used on, and does this produce positive feedback loops that will ruin my perception of equivalent exchange?

Lastly, Awesome mod, just got into Green science, and it has been huge fun so far. I especially love how, at least so far as I can tell, every single item can be reused, upgraded, or broken down..... Except for the chassis you start with, which you can't craft either... Hmm.

Is there any other items you cannot reuse, upgrade, or break down?

How does the t2 Iron smelting work with Carbon, but not use limestone/lime for flux, or use Oxygen for the carbon to act as fuel. What does the carbon do?
Why is chlorine and Caustic solution voidable? I guess it is to avoid unavoidable roadblocks, but I have to wonder how those are dealt with in real life.

Why doesn't Caustic solution, as well as a lot of other items/liquids not have chemical names, when they are well defined, and not abstract, "I don't actually know what is in there" like sludge or wastewater, or "It can be made in several ways" like Plastic. Especially the synthesized ones

Why can't you break down the complex hydrocarbons, and only burn them?

How does pressure work exactly? I have a vague idea, given the floor/ceiling height model of pipes, but am still unclear on some things.
My guesses, but not certainties.
40% pressure from T1 pipe is enough to fill a T2 pipe with 60% cap to 2/3rds capacity. A t2 pipe at full possible pressure is 50% faster than t1.
Pumps either pull, or just accept any fluid that hits them, so their floor on the input is probably negative, and the output is above 125%, because of the biggest tank's pressure cap.
Do vents and outflows have a pressure floor above 0% pressure, because that is implied, but never outright stated. I think it is 25%, but this isn't written anywhere that I could find.

Why is caustic solution not lye solution? Can you make it in another way later? Although that would give it a different chemical makeup, so shouldn't produce saline when combined with Hydrochloric acid.

Why is caustic solution used for Bauxite processing instead of electrolysis?

What can productivity modules be used on, and does this produce positive feedback loops that will ruin my perception of equivalent exchange?

Lastly, Awesome mod, just got into electric science, and it has been huge fun so far. I especially love how, at least so far as I can tell, every single item can be reused, upgraded, or broken down..... Except for the chassis you start with, which you can't craft either... Hmm.

Is there any other items you cannot reuse, upgrade, or break down?

I've answered these on the Nullius Discord.

Can you please duplicate the answer there? For those from stoneage without discord?

Anachrony — 03/03/2021
Carbon is a reductant that helps strip oxygen atoms from iron oxide and turn them into carbon dioxide. It's not being burned as a fuel.
Aqueous sodium hydroxide isn't the worst thing, once it gets a bit diluted. It's a common culinary ingredient. The seawater here tends to have a lower pH anyway and can absorb it.
Chlorine is voidable purely for gameplay reasons. You can't make the thing to neutralize it without making even more chlorine.
Pure sodium hydroxide is a solid, and that name is already used. Aqueous sodium hydroxide is a mouthful. Even though it could technically refer to other basic solutions, in practice aqueous sodium hydroxide is so commonly by default that "caustic solution" is virtually a synonym. Look up the term "caustic solution" and see how often it's implicitly understood to refer to aqueous sodium hydroxide.
Break down complex hydrocarbons how, specfically? You can break down ethylene and propene with pyrolysis, it's just a bit higher tech than burning them. Use Recipe Book to browse all uses of materials. You can't break down benzene with pyrolysis, because it's fundamentally more stable, and the common results of benzene pyrolysis don't correspond to other useful Nullius materials.
Yes, pressure is height based. It's the only real way in the Factorio game engine to make one pipe faster than another. Making the pipe higher volume generally makes it slower, not faster, but making it too low volume has problems in some cases too. Only making it taller is consistently faster.
Pipe 4 (100%) is height 2. Pipe 1 (40%) is height 0.8. Vanilla pipe is height 1. The speed is not quite a simple linear function of height. It does depend on pipe length, but I did some testing:
Using a setup with 10 above ground pipe segments between pumps connected to tanks on both ends. The vanilla pipe had around 1400/s under that setup. Nullius pipe 1 was around 1100, pipe 2 was around 1600, pipe 3 was around 2200, and pipe 4 was around 3000
But making pipes taller has side effects, hence "pressure". Yes, you're right that a pipe 1 will only fill a pipe 2 2/3 of the way since it's 2/3 the height. Pumps will fill a destination to any height, without regard for pressure. For a long pipeline they're essential to maintaining speed, though for low tech pumps you do need to keep an eye on the throughput of the pump.
Chimney 1 and outflow 1 have a floor slightly above 0. Chimney 2 and outflow 2 do not.
I considered using the term lye, but it's mostly used for culinary purposes or in old-fashioned sources. Modern industrial chemistry sources tend to refer to it as caustic solution, and it's understood to mean aqueous sodium hydroxide. The tooltip for caustic solution gives the chemical formula as aqueous sodium hydroxide, so there is no ambiguity about what it's meant to represent.
Common modern aluminum production is done almost exclusively using cryolite, a flourine product. It can't be done with just any electrolyte. Flourine was considered, but ultimately not added to the game, and if it was it wouldn't have been fundamental enough to make it one of the low tech resources suitable for the earliest Aluminum recipes, so there still would have been non-cryolite based aluminum recipes early on. Prior to the current process they used various, less efficient methods. Direct carbothermic reduction was always one of the options they experimented with, but they never got it working as efficiently as with cryolite.
Productivity modules can be used on almost anything, with the exception of certain recipes that are easily reversible, are "waste management" rather than productive, or a few other special cases. This should be balanced such that using loops of recipes do not result in more material than you started out with, even with max productivity bonuses. For circular recipes there is inefficiency at each stage, which productivity reduces.

sneakyrusski — 03/03/2021
I feel like I’m back in a classroom :nerd:
Anachrony — 03/03/2021
Chassis are not generally used in recipes due to a flaw in the game engine. It will easily just destroy all the equipment in it. So they are intentionally never used as intermediates. And since chassis 1 is not an intermediate and you start with it, there's no reason to craft one.
In general you cannot reuse, upgrade, or break down end point products, like tier 3 buildings. But normally your base will continue to grow in size, so you'll just need more of them, not less. And there is nothing higher tech to replace them with.
The main thing with being able to break down materials is for things that can be produced as a byproduct. Any recipe that has more than 2 outputs, it's careful to make sure you aren't stuck with too much of 1 output that you can't do anything with. In some cases, one of the outputs can be produced by other means, so it can be viewed as just a byproduct of the recipe, so there should be a way to get rid of the byproduct if necessary, but the other output may be the "main product", and you manage it by not using that recipe unless you need the main product.
Ranakastrasz — 03/03/2021
So that is why coke is used for iron smelting.
is raw sodium common irl, or is there a different way chlorine is dealt with?
Huh. Could jave sworn that one was missing a chemical name. Going to have to check again.
Understood, I saw the uneven production numbers, and my grasp on chemistry is relatively weak.
Pressure, good to know I was largely correct. Weird flow rate mechanics. is the pipe's capacity a large factor along with height?
did I correctly determine the height of the outflow 1s?
I am weak on how bauxite becomes aluminum, and I only really knew it involves electrolysis, or at least one method did.
Good to know productivity is used sanely. Wait, does that include finished products, like inserters?
yea, ran into the armor issue with one of my old mods.
cool. That helps psycologically. I despise making wood and iron chests in vanilla because they become useless, despite how little they cost.

Anachrony — 03/03/2021
Yes, almost everything. Though the max productivity bonus is a little lower in Nullius. There are relatively few pure finished products, finished products are just intermediates for something else. So it just allows it for everything (even if they're truly finished products that aren't used as intermediates).
Anachrony — 03/03/2021
They'd run into the same issue using sodium, which is that it is normally produced from salt, so they'd be producing what they want to get rid of. I believe that excess chlorine normally goes into a special incinerator and ends up as solid waste that needs to be dumped in a landfill. I don't want to deal with permanent solid waste in Nullius. I think there are enough waste byproduct struggles in the early game, so I'm willing to handwave away this one to make it a bit easier to deal with.
Anachrony — 03/03/2021
It's height 0.2, aka 10% pressure.
Ranakastrasz — 03/03/2021
cool. always thought productivity restrictions were weird. this direction actually seems workable.
Chlorine. and that answers my question sufficiently
Huh. I tested it with a basic, 15k capacity tank, and it dropped to 4.5k, i think. That is around 25%, i think.
Anachrony — 03/03/2021
Did you use a valve?
Hmm, I tested it, and it went to 3.5k. I think the problem is that there needs to be a certain amount of fluid in the chimney for it to be voided, which creates pressure in it beyond the minimum threshold. I could improve that by increasing the volume capacity of the chimney/outfall
I'm doubling the chimney/outfall capacity to 1000, so the volume of fluid needed to get to the minimum amount in the void recipe will increase the pressure by half as much. I'm also dropping the minimum pressure threshold from 10% to 5%.
The normal void recipe is 100 fluid -> nothing. So if the volume was 500 and the height was 1, it would need up to 10% additional pressure to fill up all the way to 100 fluid, in addition to the 10% baseline. Given that the tank is 85% max, that works out close to 25%. Now it should be 5% baseline plus an extra 5% to fill it to 100, which is the 10% pressure threshold intended.

Not gonna try to format any of that, or make sure it is all relevant, just copied the response and following posts.

Oh darn, that is a lot of text )
Thank you )