The manufacturing sector is proving troublesome to represent easily. You end up with things like, "Need the coal mining to feed the gasifier, the gasifier feeds the chemical plant, the chemical plant feed the workshop and the farms, the workshop feed the mine, the all need power." On top of this, the products from the factories/refineries/smelters all generate thing in either barrels, tons or just man-hours. Let's try a "simple" example.
There is a community with a coal mining operation to supply fuel and feedstocks. A portion of the coal goes to the power plant. The rest goes to the coal gasification plant (actually treated as a refinery space) and the outputs are barrels of fuels, tons of coke and coal tar and presumably syngas in cubic meters. The fuel can be used for vehicles directly, the coke used to generate additional power at the plant or used in the smelter and the coal tar and syngas can be supplied to a chemical plant to make fertilizer (ammonia), methanol, acetaminophen, and other chemicals in various units. Some of these are use by the workshop to make explosives and such to supply inputs to the mine, presumably only in labor units thankfully.
Any ideas on how this combination of intermixed inputs and output might be best represented for use?
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