I already heard that blast furnace is not worth efforts. Decide to check myself. Building big structure should be fun...
Yes it's big, require a lot of thing to build, and some calculations. But even at a building stage, before I met possible troubles, like too much energy consumption, or not enough some input resource, it's apparently not worth efforts. In minimal configuration, is expected to output 3 green belts of technum-rods. Normal 3 lines or Crushers II + Adv.Smelters will obviously takes much less resources and space, while producing same 3 green belts of rods.
#Blast Furnace impressions. Must be modified some way.
torpid pike
torpid pike
If it would be an energy generator of such scale, I will definitely build it, since dozens of steam turbines even for small size factory is a lot to manage, and will have to add more soon. But a mega structure, that gives just twice productivity of technum-rods (3:1 vs 3:2 for normal crush & smelt) while also consuming a lot of side products is very questionable from economic point of view.
outer delta
Yea the footprint is huge for what it does, the material economy isn't so bad although you will need to keep supplying stone which can't be fracked
A full setup uses 2 green belts raw ore, 0.4 green belts, 0.4 green stone to make 6 green belts of plates/rods
While a tier 2 system uses 32 tier 2 crushers and 86 advanced smelters (or 128 small smelters) can do the same but needs 4 green belts raw ore
As for power I haven't really looked into it because I have gone heavy solar
But according to Planit the tier 2 method uses 19.2MW vs the tier 3's 33.64MW
This can be looked at as 3.2MW vs 5.6MW per output belt but that's still a small price when you get to the tier 3 stuff
I just hope we get tier 3 steel soon
torpid pike
To say it simple, Blast Furnace allow one to gain twice many rods or plates from same amount of raw ore, but spend twice amount of power. I still doubt, that it's a good trade, since setup effort is much more complicated. And this Furnace can get stuck, as I got it, on some accidents, like global power failure.