0.17 Coal Liquefaction

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leadraven
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Re: 0.17 Coal Liquefaction

Post by leadraven »

What a messy discussion...
  • I did the math for 0.16 (viewtopic.php?t=64486), and Liquefaction was almost 2 times energy positive if you had at least some Light cracking to disable. In 0.17 its energy efficiency is unquestionable. And it's okay in terms of thermodynamics. That's how any fuel works : you invest some energy to get much more energy. It is the potential barrier.
  • In practice, using Liquefaction to produce solid fuel for burning is meaningless.
    • Did you ever had a lack of coal to burn, so you needed to increase its energy output?
    • Nuclear power becomes available before Liquefaction.
    • The only reason to do it is for fun. And it's totally okay, have fun! But it's not an argument.
  • Using Liquefaction with a shortage of crude oil... WHAT?! Map is infinite and you have trains! HOW can you have not enough oil deposits?! Especially since they don't deplete and you have speed modules. Use depleting coal instead of free oil?!
  • Personally for me, the only nice thing about Liquefaction were an option to produce Plastics ONLY from Coal ONLY. And in this terms increase of Heavy oil output means absolutely nothing. More Heavy cracking...

Hiladdar
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Re: 0.17 Coal Liquefaction

Post by Hiladdar »

This is actually a great change!

What no one mentioned is lube, which is in much higher demand late in the game in .17 then it was in .16. Especially, since we now need to make robot frames, which need electric engines, and which needs lube, and the only way to make lube is from heavy oil. This change solves the issue of running out of lube.

Once the science changes were announced, I played through .16 with a mod for .17 research, and my play through revealed this as an issue. But it was not until I have hit about large number rocket launches in that game that that issue came up and was trying to scale the research up to about 5k range.

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Re: 0.17 Coal Liquefaction

Post by Goose »

Hiladdar wrote:
Tue Mar 12, 2019 5:56 pm
This is actually a great change!

What no one mentioned is lube, which is in much higher demand late in the game in .17 then it was in .16. Especially, since we now need to make robot frames, which need electric engines, and which needs lube, and the only way to make lube is from heavy oil. This change solves the issue of running out of lube.

Once the science changes were announced, I played through .16 with a mod for .17 research, and my play through revealed this as an issue. But it was not until I have hit about large number rocket launches in that game that that issue came up and was trying to scale the research up to about 5k range.

Hiladdar
You actually need even less lube for science as you moved from electric engines in production to robot frames in utility science (7.5 lubricant per production pack to 5 per utility science pack)

The main benefit of coal liquification is a nice idea, but rarely ever a problem in base game; advanced oil processing simply gives you more of what you want for the exact oil same oil cost (extra light oil for rocket fuel or more petrol, more petrol) and less of what you don't need very much of (heavy). Unless you don't have circuit conditions set for oil or you are mass producing blue belts (beyond everything else in your factory), the heavy oil to petroleum consumption ratio will always be heavily weighted in favor of petroleum.

One of the only ways either basic oil processing or coal liquification could become strong alternatives is if advanced oil processing was extremely PG heavy and really weak in LO and HO. This would create a player driven balancing act between efficiency in petroleum usage and efficiency in oil/coal usage.

You could alternatively try and create the same effect by increasing the lube cost in robotic frames.

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Re: 0.17 Coal Liquefaction

Post by rhynex »

I just wanted to add some notes about new coal liquefaction, they are not regarding energy. sorry if they are mentioned above.

* heavy oil is abundant with CL so we can use it at flamethrowers quite easily. I designed my bases to use light oil in flamethrowers in 0.16 but now I am leaning towards heavy oil. it is gainable in very huge amount quite fast. I believe %5 damage loss is negligible

* similar to above, HO can be used to create solid fuel even though it is inefficient. main gain for this is balancing your output plus energy saving (even though it is minimal). if you cannot crack everything into petroleum then you need to get rid of HO and solid fuel is a good example for that. in a low water scenario (which is a decision made at map generation) it could be helpful to convert HO to solid fuel to get rid of the excess HO and burn it at boilers. also cracking that huge amount of HO to LO requires energy although it could be considered free with solar.

* with lubricant requirement in stuff, it makes designs simpler now. because you would not keep away HO from adv oil processing anymore and crack everything into petroleum while you can create HO from CL quite easily and in high volumes.

* CL became more mall-friendly now because most of the things you build in a mall uses lubricant. bots, blue belts require lubricant, flamethrower ammo requires HO and you can always convert the excess into solid fuel into boilers or cracking for other stuff (battery, laser turret etc).

* Coal is more abundant in game than oil because when oil depletes its output becomes very low and you are forced to find new oil resource while coal is not used that much and a big coal patch allows you to run game for a long time. when going towards bigger bases coal never becomes a problem but oil does.

* Any mod that adds recipes with HO (example asphalt roads) benefits from this change to create variance instead of LO for everything above. game is not only about vanilla rules and most of the people uses mods.

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Re: 0.17 Coal Liquefaction

Post by Ranger_Aurelien »

leadraven wrote:
Tue Mar 12, 2019 7:19 am

[*]Using Liquefaction with a shortage of crude oil... WHAT?! Map is infinite and you have trains! HOW can you have not enough oil deposits?! Especially since they don't deplete and you have speed modules. Use depleting coal instead of free oil?!
Islands or Death worlds notwithstanding where you can only go so far... :)
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Ranger Aurelien
"Knowledge Brings Fear" -- Motto of Mars University, Futurama

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Re: 0.17 Coal Liquefaction

Post by McDuff »

One of the iron laws of the internet is that people can have screaming, religious-fervor shouting matches over things that, to any outside observer, would not make any sense at all.

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