I think it would be neat if you could dedicate a plant to one entire process, and then by pumping the ingredient into the export bay, you could use this ingredient elsewhere at any of your plants via the import bay. Obviously, the amount you import would be based solely on what you could produce, and there might be a fee involved in shipping just like the normal ingredients.
Yeah, moving ingredients between buildings will be awesome to have. I would like to try to make something bizzare with large prod chains xD
Especially when you try to get completely rid of all sideffects, this would be nice. Like shake stuff around, mix in something new, only to take out at the next stop and shake it around again. You end up needing quite a few ports to do this (and it may not be profitable in the end, but that’s a different story).
I like the idea - But it will need some additional interfaces to work intuitively.
Well I actually hoped at the very beginning that you could send stuff between the building using those lines showing which building part connects to which different building. Since we can’t do this that way I would suggest for making this possible with some additional ports just at those spots which wouldn’t be possible to use for export or import but just for the transportation between buildings
Saving or stockpiling processed ingredients seems key to allowing the player to move on to bigger and more complex operations, Factorio-style. Rather than building an entire chain from square one each and every time.
This was just something I expected to happen as I have been playing through. It may require a few other mechanics like the ability to stock products in one of your warehouses, but rebuilding an entire line every time gets frustrating and drops the fun factor for me. I was pretty surprise by the current methodology.
Agreed.
The possibilities here are endless. This could vastly expand the logistics aspect of the game.
Here are a few of my thoughts
Loading/Unloading Bays Used for importing and exporting “internal goods” They could possible have a storage capability (with limited capacity).
Pipes: for building that are close together. These would basically just be belts made specifically for this purpose.
Trucks for building that are farther away. In hopes of following the “realistic” aspect, trucks would deliver “batches” of ingredients, rather than have a 100% continuous (“Just in Time”) system.
As a matter of fact, the “Continuous” import and export of ingredients is highly unrealistic in the first place. I know it makes the game easier and all, but maybe they could create different difficulty levels which would affect aspects such as this. For example, the easiest difficulty could be how the game is now; product would flow smoothly from one end of the line to the other. On the other hand, the hardest difficulty could have delivery/order batching, machines could have downtime/maintenance and breakdowns, and emergencies could arise.
I really like this idea! Imagine the massive, crazy drug production chains we could make.
Rubs hands together maniacally yesss… indeed
Cancer/Anesthetic/HIV/Alzheimers 
Of course, in a perfect world with a damn Catalyst5…
Although I would love this idea, it is not an ideal situation. For example, let’s say that you have a drug that you want to break off a “dry throat” sympton, then pump it out in order to make a few other drugs with it…the export rate equals the import rate (sending 1 of this out means you can get 1 in), otherwise there would be exploitation (send 1 out, get 50 in, pack and sell).
Now think about that for a second…
For each drug that you cook up on one side has to have the factories placed to make it, all the chains exactly the same for production, just so that you can use that amount somewhere else. There is no difference to what we currently do except that it is done in one block rather than separation. This is what I mean:
A -> B
A -> B
A -> B
AB
AB
AB
See the difference? Now if the game were similar to Atlantis/Poseidon and such, where we have multiple “outsourced” buildings that you could build and produce the middle products (and maybe pay a delivery % fee), then it might have a use by taking away some of the cramping concerns…but it wouldn’t raise profits, otherwise the game becomes unbalanced.
It’s funny, when I started playing I, for some reason, thought I’d seen in one of the devblog vids that this was possible… so I belted my ingredients to an door… and then realised I had had a serious brain fart.
Would love to see this in the game… it’s a feature I remember from games like Capitalism, where you could export a product but have it for “internal export only” and you could then “buy” it from yourself to import it elsewhere… very handy in tight corners… but I agree it would need to be well balanced, possibly a high transfer cost, or a slow process time?
In one of the older vids I saw what you mentioned happen. This was before the cures/side effects were reworked from molecules to their current strength rating. I imagine he played around with allowing you to sell upgraded ingredients for a while, but then changed his mind/added in appropriate features to change this.