I looked through the other threads about adding mechanisms/hydraulics etc but have not found something exactly like this so here goes.
Instead of having a pump simply be able to move water from level n to n + 1 you could have a setting on the pump for pressure, or levels to move the liquid up. Now this may be problematic as I believe there was an issue with volcanoes causing enormous fluid calculation lag if the area in which the fluid moved was not perfectly smooth (hence why they are the same shape all the way down), but having the caveat of a straight shaft above the output tile is a minor inconvenience. This could be either solved by having no twists/turns between output tile and location the water is pumped too, or some sort of connection that must be added to the business end of the pump and then piped to the output location.
For each Z level of pressure that the pump moves the liquid you could have it draw more power, or depending on what it is pumping draw more or less power (magma heavier than water etc). This functionality would also seem to be more true to actual fluids being pushed rather than just flowing to the lowest spot. This would also allow the current pump design to function normally as you can just set the "pressure" value to 1 or the same Z level that the pump operates on.
If each tile of water has a pressure value associated with a Z level then the pump could just change whatever water is passed through it to a higher z-level of pressure. I am sure it is not that simple, or even if my understanding of fluids in DF is accurate, but just a feature that I thought would add a lot of interesting dynamics/more realism to the game as well as be relatively easy to add in without creating totally new objects.
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Topic: Pump power levels. (Read 350 times)