Posted on NMS FB page
P.s. really cool surprise this one after building my base waterworks recently, these will be superb additions 
Looks like it could be a while. Maybe HG is working on the finishing touches.
You can practise by using the classic pipe, as it received the same behaviour
… Which suggests to me that they’re working on adaptive fluid dynamics. Just the sort of thing you would need if you were going to create, say, procedurally generated rivers or lava flows…
I had the opposite thought: they must have been puzzling about the (widely recognised, unsolved) problems of procedural rivers and waterfalls for years now, and they just only reached the point where they can calculate a few metres of pipe flow?! 
The advantage of a pipe is, that the player placed it manually, and its beginning and end are well known and within a small, known area; that makes it calculateable.
It’s not a procedurally generated pipe that stretches from an equatorial cave system to the ocean while making a short zigzaggy detour that just misses being useful to a local trading post, I wanna see bubble flow in that! 
Yes, and snap mechanics does not allow to turn a pipe around either, so you’d expect it to always flow correctly in one direction.
Sadly enough though, the flow within these new pipes is not consistent and direction does not always make sense, as it is based on individual orientation and context of the shape.
I can imagine…I just built a structure with the regular pipes. It is so difficult to know which way the pipe is oriented. Instead of building say a cube with a ring of pipes around it coming from the top of the cube, I found it easier to start with the pipe out of the top and the ring and then delete the cube and replace it by orienting the cube to the pipes… now, add some fluid running thru those pipes…I guess flipping the pipe does not help.
This and the perspective issues with items looking like they are on a surface and then finding out they are not, are both frustrating. With my limited knowledge, I think I can now see why a game like The Sims has snap points on surfaces so that items will only sit in certain places. Not a feature that would be liked in NMS
One of the reasons it’s difficult to build a procedural river is that a procedurally generated voxel cannot interrogate its neighbouring voxels. This cannot be allowed because of the cascade effect - all voxels interrogate all other voxels (or at least, all neighbouring voxels).
However, when adding a new section to an existing pipe, the only way the direction of fluid flow can be determined is by interrogating the rest of the pipe. The problem of flow direction could not have been solved if new voxels were unaware of the state of their neighbours. This suggests that the problem of interrogation cascade has, to some degree, been solved.
I did not, however, say that HG have solved all the problems of adaptive fluid dynamics. I said they appear to be working on it.
Yes and no. This can be a state that is carried by the object itself, which is set once if one of the attached pipes changes or a new one gets attached. The state of the object needs to change anyways under these circumstances, since it must now use another mesh. Also, you only ever need to know the neighbors for that. You don’t need to know the neighbors neighbor. Thinking about it coarsely, I think this goal should be achievable with a static animation without any intelligence whatsoever. You just load in another animation for another piecee of pipe.
The essential thing, however, even if you want to analyse the whole system (which you really don’t have to), is that you can count on there being a very limited number of pipes, and that they are all known at the time you do the calculation.
An algorithm that cascades through neighbors can get heavy on the CPU if there’s too many of them, but that’s mostly just a matter of optimisation. The point where it becomes impossible is when you don’t know the neighbors because they don’t exist yet (because creating them puts much more strain on your CPU than the actual algorithm, not to mention your memory). The pipe system won’t have either of these problems, since the whole system exists if one part of it exists, and, as mentioned, you can solve that problem for each element individually because you only need to know a direct neighbour. And the major reason why you only need the direct neighbour is because the bubbles don’t follow the laws of physics and don’t have to.
You could of course make something like a procedural aqueduct of pipes with this tech. That would be possible because noone would think twice about water in the pipes flowing upwards. So what, there’s a pump somewhere in the system, who cares?
But we’re not that lenient when it comes to natural rivers…
Bubble Pipes are up and running and flowing.
In this case, both wall pipes are flowing into the one going into the floor however, that is not always how it works.
It seems the liquid flows upwards until a pipe bends. The bent pipes seem to always flow in the opposite direction. I was able to change the flow direction by connecting and disconnecting bent pipes…will need investigating.
4-way junctions are a bit different and perform as if liquid is coming in from all directions.
They look really nice though.
And they can be glitched to different sizes.
Hmmm. Gek Hookahs? We need flexible tubes to connect. 
The cushions are a nice touch. Now for the flexi-pipe with lip tip. LOL