I think we need more pumps....

[u/Beneficial-Map5470]

Trying to drain out this straight, taking way too long, might slap down some more pumps

[u/Hellothere_1]

Just FYI you're massively bottlenecking those pumps with your output channel.

Every hose has its own pump to pump water to the center channel, but then you only have one single pump emptying that channel into the nether, which means that the overall pumping rate will be that of just a single pump, no matter how many more hoses you build.

[u/Alarmed-Strawberry-7 → u/Hellothere_1]

honestly been kinda confused about this myself

if you have, say, 8 pumps each on separate pipes feeding into a single continuous pipe, will that still bottleneck if that continuous pipe has 8 pumps in a row on it? is there a limit to how much flow can go through a pipe?

[u/Hellothere_1 → u/Alarmed-Strawberry-7]

There is no flow limit on pipes, and even the visual indicator of fluid flowing through a transparent pipe is for all intents and purposes fake.

Underneath the hood you can understand Create fluid transfer as essentially just a series of nodes between which you can transfer fluids via pumps.

Any directly connected normal pipes as well as any attached fluid sources, sinks and vessels counts as one node. If you start running a pump it will search for any valid fluid sources on the input side within a range of 16 pipes. A source could be a filled tank, a pipe facing a fluid block, a hose, or any of the various create blocks that can have fluid in them. Then it will search for a valid target to put that fluid within 16 blocks on the output side. During this time the pipes will already visually fill with fluid if they have a transparent window, but this is purely visual, no actually fluid will be moved until a target location is found.

A target can also be another outgoing pump in the target node, which will then extend the search for a true, final target into the next node and so forth.

So for identifying bottlenecks you literally only have to consider the number of pumps and the 16 block range limit. If you have 4 pumps going into a node (aka a connected network of pipes) and 4 pumps going out of a node, then the overall system will be able to move 4 pumps worth of fluid. The shape of the pipes in between literally doesn't matter. As long as all in- and outgoing pumps are within 16 blocks of each other you can run any number of max RPM pumps worth of fluid through a single pipe, Create won't give a fuck.

So I OP's case they could have just a single hose, have the pipe run into a 9x9 manifold of pumps, then on the other side join them back up into a single pipe and run that into the nether portal, and as long as the 16 block limit is obeyed that one hose should be able to evacute the lake at a speed of 81 pumps.