I'm a bit concerned about the balance of the blast furnace, even though it's WIP.
After digging into the code, I've found that the blast furnace
* heats up to about 50 000 before it can work, after which it has a very modest heat consumption of 1HU/t.
* has a progress meter of 6000, which is filled at a rate of 1/tick assuming the furnace stays hot and has air. That's 5 minutes.
I'm okay with a cost of 6000HU per ingot, that's entirely manageable, but I don't like how slow it is. There aren't many things that use refined iron, yet, but it's already a bit ridiculous.
For example, a steam turbine will wear out after 86400 ticks of operation using superheated steam (It lasts half as long with regular steam). That's 72 minutes. It costs 27 refined iron, which would take 162 minutes to create. If I want to run a two-stage steam turbine setup, I would need to run seven blast furnaces constantly, just to keep supply enough refined iron to keep operations running smoothly.
Fortunately, blast furnaces aren't terribly expensive, but I still think it's a little crazy how many of them I need.
Is there a reason why the blast furnace runs so much slower than the other machines? Most of the basic machines only require 400 ticks, and can be overclocked.
