Fluid Efficiency, especially Space Pipes

[rugged frigate]

I've started to realize that I don't understand how to make fluids efficient, especially with regards to space pipes. Could someone explain to me how those little paint dots on the space pipe work, and how to calculate how much paint I need vs how much paint I'm delivering?

At first I didn't realize space pipes were actually more like conveyers than pipes, but got lucky that I thought to combine multiple miners of the same color on the same lane. It seems like that can support 4 miners without losing efficiency? But then I went and tried to add more pumps to each miner (see screenshot), and I don't think that worked as expected. Since 4 pumps is faster than 1 pump, I'd expect 12 pumps to be even faster than 4 pumps. But as far as I can tell, each blob on the space pipe is still the same size, nor are blobs added any faster.

Do I really need to put 4 miners per lane on a space pipe for maximum throughput or am I misunderstanding something?

[dusk hollow]

what's put on the space pipe is defined by the fluid launcher, and it's 4 pumps per launcher

suggestion:

you can see each of my miners are outputing on a different level

[rugged frigate]

The downside of that approach is that now you can only use that pipe, or anything connected to that pipe, for red paint. Which is only a downside for me because in my folly I connected pretty much all of my space pipes, of every color 😬

[dusk hollow]

it also seem the setup I showed above can fill 1/4th of a space pipe, since a pipe is 7200 units/min times 12 and this does 1800/min times 12

how you fill your pipe is up to you indeed

[rugged frigate]

Ok, that seems to confirm that to fill a space pipe you need 4 miners per lane (or per level, if using a setup like in your screenshot).

[misty stirrup]

It doesn't "fill" it, but it's generally enough. With a maxed out pipe (4 gens per level) you can supply 48 painters, which is normally more than enough

[high pecan]

4 pumps fills 1 launcher

and you can fit 4 launchers per lane, just like how 4 launchers fills a normal pipe