Atmospheric Pipe Changes Megathread

[TrickyWolfer]

To be clear, the reason for the manifold change is because constructible atmos made it trivial to just build your entire pipe network out of unbreakable manifolds.
I don't think that's good, but the fact that people are so attached to unbreakable pipes just to get away from the TEG gameplay loop of constant repairs may be telling.
Ideally I think the TEG should be more like the nuclear reactor and singulo: low(ish) maintenance when things are going well, but very dangerous when pushed too far or misused.
Suggestions on how to do that are very welcome: one potential idea would be making pipes burst only on rapid changes in pressure/temperature.

In a high-engineering gameplay, low-maintenance TEG is achievable by the fact that the pipes were unbreakable. The main holy-grail about HPD is that it scales with the knowledge of the engineer to develop that safe loop that doesn't kill engineers in one go (since the scaling leak), while also be able to be fully functional on managing the atmos calculation. It looks easy, but the TEG system works in a more complex way that is downright unintuitive; Atlas be a good example of it being a modernized engine but it doesn't seem to work unlike other older TEG setups such as cog1, 2, kondaru, and back then destiny, horizon, and clarion. It's the poor research surrounding the engine that made that the gameplay loop looked really simple, while in reality, to even reach this point, it takes back and forth asking people in the community and a whole lot of local testing.

When pushed too far, the system can and will be very dangerous by a plethora of reasons: Hotwired APC will continuously zap you, heat will still crawl from floors, excess piping would lead to game-breaking bugs that would be hard to detect, TEG throwing a fit and turned possessed. Not to mention trading off resources that the station would sometimes be underprepared for anything due to the massive pipe laying you're going to do. The current situation wasn't about hugging unbreakable pipes, but it was more of a necessity due to game-breaking things are way up on the current limit we have right now (HGC's limit, density items, etc).

Even then, HGC is very limited, especially for wide loops such as cog2 because it would meant that it's really hard to get everything done when with HPD and a bit of good knowledge, you could bypass the necessity to yell at mining and science for the entire round. It scales with knowledge, again.

I understand TEG needs to be limited, but the current thing right now is that Toxins got caught in the crossfire when the main goal was to make engineer's life slightly harder. It is already hard, the current gameplay loop to figure out a really underresearched engine takes an entire community and station is already enough, at least for me. There's a specific configuration of loop, specific gas mixing, specific wiring and or things to do to avoid bugs is something that's rarely mentioned.

If there is an alternative for a true unbreakable pipe, even if it would meant trying to power through azones in just couple of minutes or sweating in QM, anything to make sure that the pipes doesn't burst past 1e28, I'm willing to take it