Optimized Steam Engine Setup

[BlakeMW]

That should be easy to test:

1) nuclear reactor with one heat exchanger and 2 turbines.
2) Same as 1 but water preheated with one or more boilers.

Which one gives more power?

The game is pretty good about conservation of energy so it should be completely identical whether you use a preheat setup, or consume the 165 degree steam in separate steam engines.

[Aeternus]

Not anymore... 15.10 broke the ability to preheat, and I doubt it'll be coming back.

But what's the advantage of a setup like this, over a separate nuclear power plant, and a power switch (or accumulator bridge) with the coal/oil power plant? I mean it's obviously cool, but doesn't seem like it's actually doing anything better than a completely separate boiler and nuclear power plant (with power switches and/or accumulator bridges to manage power flow)

Actually I don't think that there is a huge advantage of doing a hybrid powerplant instead of building two seperate ones and using power switches.

That said maybe there is a little advantage... I was too lazy to prepare another shore for the Nuclear Power plant... By making it a hybrid power plant I could use the existing shoreline and existing infrastructure/space. Before I made it a Hybrid power plant I actually had a 28:20 Steam Power plant there back from 0.14. So if you so want... you spare yourself the work of preparing another shore. I just replaced the 20 Steam Engines per row with the 4 Heat Exchangers and 10 Steam Turbines per row and left the Boilers be.

There's nothing wrong with doing it seperately of course...

You could still build a hybrid setup. Turbines will still take 165dgr steam. Just that the max power setup of piping the low power steam through the heat exchangers will no longer work. I'll likely have to modify my own design accordingly... if you've got the turbines, no reason not to use the lot. But you'll need more then 4 heat exchangers to satisfy the load of 10 steam turbines, or use less turbines per heat exchanger. Consider them 6MW for practicality - you can get a reasonable approximation with a 5:3 ratio on exchangers to boilers - for a switched reactor the overcapacity would mean you always get a steambuffer recharge that way. Probably a good idea to go under (or exactly on) capacity on the boilers so that the reactor can be switched on if the draw on the chemical boilers becomes too high. I'll play with it tonight and see what I can come up with. That array I made has some room for tinkering

[mrvn]

That should be easy to test:

1) nuclear reactor with one heat exchanger and 2 turbines.
2) Same as 1 but water preheated with one or more boilers.

Which one gives more power?

The game is pretty good about conservation of energy so it should be completely identical whether you use a preheat setup, or consume the 165 degree steam in separate steam engines.

But preheating could mean the 2 turbines run full power instead of 1.7.

[Patric20878]

Sup guys, been a while. Finally got the time to update this design (half a year later OTL), which I'm happy to say that I've worked out a way to double the steam engines per row, from the 2 rows of 30 to 2 rows of 60.

Two things holding my update back though:
1) Boilers can't even sustain 2 steam engines at max load! Try it, link boiler + 2 steam engines to 6 radars, set game speed to 100, and watch as the boiler slowly loses steam. What's up with that?

2) Red belts seem to be able to supply just short of 60 boilers worth of coal. Like if I were to estimate, something like 59.8 or something. Is this intentional? It'd seem like being able to supply 60 boilers would be a whole lot neater than just short of it.

Tested and reproduced these two in 15.33 and 15.37. The first issue would cause regular minor dips in production as opposed to a straight line, and the second would cause production to fluctuate constantly (though again, minor). Until these are fixed, I'm hesitant to release an update for 15.xx.

[impetus maximus]

1) Boilers can't even sustain 2 steam engines at max load! Try it, link boiler + 2 steam engines to 6 radars, set game speed to 100, and watch as the boiler slowly loses steam. What's up with that?

2) Red belts seem to be able to supply just short of 60 boilers worth of coal. Like if I were to estimate, something like 59.8 or something. Is this intentional? It'd seem like being able to supply 60 boilers would be a whole lot neater than just short of it.

• 1 if you use 100% of something, what are you left with?
• 2 solid fuel baby!

[BlakeMW]

Sup guys, been a while. Finally got the time to update this design (half a year later OTL), which I'm happy to say that I've worked out a way to double the steam engines per row, from the 2 rows of 30 to 2 rows of 60.

Two things holding my update back though:
1) Boilers can't even sustain 2 steam engines at max load! Try it, link boiler + 2 steam engines to 6 radars, set game speed to 100, and watch as the boiler slowly loses steam. What's up with that?

I would suspect it is floating point imprecision. The effect seems to be too slow to be explained by tick based phenomena.

[leitk]

For a while (before I set up a nuclear power plant) I was using coal powered lasers for defense.
And I was constantly getting brown-outs such that the turrets couldn't fire fast enough and were taking damage.

So I tried setting up boilers feeding 3 engines and a storage tank. When demand was low, they would charge the tanks, when the demand was high, it would draw from the tanks to feed the engines.

One problem is that the tanks stored way more steam than I really needed, and the reserve power wasn't enough. If I were to do it again, I'd probably do 4 engines per boiler and fewer tanks.

[BlakeMW]

One problem is that the tanks stored way more steam than I really needed, and the reserve power wasn't enough. If I were to do it again, I'd probably do 4 engines per boiler and fewer tanks.

One thing with the laser turret draw is that it only lasts a few seconds. Each steam engine (and the boiler) stores several seconds worth of steam and the first two steam engines per boiler wont consume their own stored steam because the boiler continuously provides enough steam for them.

3 steam engines per boiler can run full bore for 26.67s, 4 steam engines for 16.67s.

So if you only need about half a minute of burst power try going completely tankless for a cheaper and more compact setup (and even if you occasionally "need" longer burst power, you still have the basic output of the boilers).

Final thing to note though is this is similar performance to accumulators at a similar cost, an accumulator provides 16.67s of burst power and the cost per kW is only about twice that of steam engines (in contrast a kW of solar costs 47x as much as a kW of steam - so that's what I mean by "a similar cost"). If I'm not feeling any particular pinch with oil I normally just make accumulators so I can keep the baseline generation and spike capacity separate.

[Patric20878]

@impetus maximus:
100% what? A boiler can't keep up with 2 steam engines on max load. What are you talking about?
Keep up with the thread, one of the emphases of this design since v1.2 was compatibility with very early game tech. Solid fuel ain't one.

@BlakeMW:
Yeah, dunno. Using the 120 steam engine setup, it takes practically 25 minutes for a boiler and 2 steam engines attached to lose all steam and start dipping regularly (losing a few MW out of 108), so this is like 600 steam lost over 1500 seconds, or 1 steam lost every 2.5s. And that's assuming I manually feed it coal towards the end for it to last that long, otherwise the last 2 steam engines start fluctuating with coal outages around the 20 minute mark.

Can't be bothered to do the exact math on how many steam engines a boiler can actually supply with or the throughput of red belts, but for them to be tiny fractions short of 1:2 boiler:steam engines and 1:60 max red belt throughput:boiler really makes this seem unintended. What options are there to ask the devs about this? And as a side note, I also noticed yellow belts are no longer more than half as fast as red belts (a good thing, exactly half is neat) - I recall back in 11.xx, I had yellow belt throughput recorded as 20 electric furnaces worth, where red belts were 36 instead of 40.

[impetus maximus]

100% consumption of supply.

[Patric20878]

The entire point is that it doesn't supply what it should supply, quit rolling your eyes and at least try to read. ._.

[impetus maximus]

boiler 60 steam per second minus 2 boilers at 30 steam a second each = 0 steam. get it?
[edit]also if you want to run it at 100% load on coal, use two red belts.

[BlakeMW]

Yeah, dunno. Using the 120 steam engine setup, it takes practically 25 minutes for a boiler and 2 steam engines attached to lose all steam and start dipping regularly (losing a few MW out of 108), so this is like 600 steam lost over 1500 seconds, or 1 steam lost every 2.5s. And that's assuming I manually feed it coal towards the end for it to last that long, otherwise the last 2 steam engines start fluctuating with coal outages around the 20 minute mark.

That would be 1 steam every 9000 ticks per boiler, at around about 1/9000th of a steam per boiler cycle - it almost looks a little large for floating point imprecision, but maybe if there are several calculations (i.e. heat capacity etc) it could add up to that.

What options are there to ask the devs about this?

You could always make a bug report, that'll get some attention. The numbers say the ratio should be exactly 1:2 so the fact it isn't exactly that indicates some kind of bug and it seems to be easily reproduced.

[Patric20878]

@impetus
Sigh, boilers and steam engines *don't produce/consume exactly 60/30 steam per second*, half my post was literally about that *facepalm* If you'd actually *READ* the convo Blake and I are having, you'd get it...and kek, 2 red belts, to load 1.02x a red belt's throughput?

@Blake:
I'll post a bug report then. I hope the red belt speed is also a bug, or at least would be considered for a what, 2% buff in throughput, so that it may match 120 steam engines at full load. Until then, not sure if I should post my updated design. The fluctuations in production thanks to these 2 issues are really ugly, even if minor.

Edit: Posted at viewtopic.php?f=7&t=54093.

[Patric20878]

@BlakeMW:
Could you calculate exactly how much steam engine MW output a max red belt throughput of coal should theoretically support? Because red belts have a max throughput of 40 items/s right? With how everything's a round number, 40 item/s, 60 boilers, coal being 8MJ and such, I still have a difficult time believing red belts are really just *coincidentally* short by that little without hard math to prove so. It's as if the 60 boilers consuming 40 coal/s should be 1 boiler consuming .66666... coal/s, but it got rounded up to .67 coal/s or something. Instead of down, which would let the belt sustain the setup.

I think to make fixing this an arguable case, we better have some hard evidence for it, or making a suggestion to change it instead would be a total tossup.

[Koub]

@BlakeMW:
Because red belts have a max throughput of 40 items/s right?

No, that's blue belts. And it's not 40.000000 :
https://wiki.factorio.com/Transport_bel ... #results_3

[mrvn]

@BlakeMW:
Because red belts have a max throughput of 40 items/s right?

No, that's blue belts. And it's not 40.000000 :
https://wiki.factorio.com/Transport_bel ... #results_3

And here I though a transport belt would carry 13.333... == 40/3.

How do you get a density of 7.143? Sure it isn't 0.14285714285714285714... == 50 / 7. Still odd but not as odd.

[Bilka]

@BlakeMW:
Because red belts have a max throughput of 40 items/s right?

No, that's blue belts. And it's not 40.000000 :
https://wiki.factorio.com/Transport_bel ... #results_3

Did you look at the top of that page? The values are from 0.13 and have since then changed. I made the text bright red and bigger, so maybe the next person won't miss it. According to the in-game tooltip it's 40 items/s btw.

[Patric20878]

That and the page seems to be all measurements, rather than exact values.

Can BlakeMW or someone calculate exactly how much steam engine MW output a red belt of coal can sustain, based on the in-game tooltip of 26.67 items/s?

[leitk]

8MJ per lump of coal
/2 for boiler
/1800 for 2 engines at 900 kW each
* 26.67 (or really 40 * 2/3)

equals 59.26