Since pipes are now treated as contiguous segments, and flow technically increases (??) with pipe segment length, I wonder how this affects the economics of long distance pipelining.

An emergent gameplay effect of the old fluids system losing flowrate was that pipelines were inefficient and basically pointless for oil products midgame without a ridiculous number of expensive pumps and tanks- and even after all that, would never perform as well as a single railcar for oil. This would force players to develop their rail network to deliver oil in any serious volume. Forcing players to develop rail is a good thing because many would skip it otherwise.

Pipe to ground uses 15 iron to cover 10 tiles end to end (1.5 iron per tile).
A straight rail segment covers 2 tiles of distance but costs (5.5iron/2tracks)/2tiles = ~1.4 iron per tile. However, 3/4 of that is tied up in time and energy intensive steel plates, and this also doesn’t count the additional expenses of all the signaling, switching, load/unload stations, etc that you have to build and spend player time on.

This leaves the largest benefit of trains being capable of surviving hostile terrain in Biter Land… since pipes can be chewed thru they’re not great to leave exposed. But in most other cases pipes actually seem like the more efficient option now.
Feels so strange. I think this is going to be a positive change overall but it’s going to result in some general playstyle changes.

Probably the biggest single change now is that building bazonkers-sized nuclear reactors just became infinitely easier…

Seems like all possible fluid weirdnesses are fixed with this. A bit sad that the fluid became less realistic. But I think now we can make use of the predictable logic of the fluid system in our designs, and can actually reason about why some designs work, and some others don’t.