foamy wrote: ↑Mon Oct 04, 2021 6:09 pm
I don't understand the resistance to adding some extra wires, particularly since you're taking other steps to ensure you have fuel cells. Why not monitor it so that you
know?
mrvn wrote: ↑Mon Oct 04, 2021 1:17 pm
Seriously, checking fuel means adding a few wires. Depending on your control logic you don't even need a single extra combinator. If you never run into a low fuel situation then checking for fuel or not is irrelevant. But at startup, right after you blueprinted the reactor and fuel starts coming in it is helpful. So why skip it?
Knowing that fuel is ready to be burn is nice, but if you design a fuel check that auto-prevent loading when it isn't, in some situations, like having only 1 extra-sized nuclear plant and nothing else to back it up, it could transform a "potential" spiraling brown-out to an instant unrecoverable black-out.
This could be caused by just 1 massive spike in energy consumption, like a new artillerie area, or the deconstruction of an unsually large forest. From a period of say 5 to 10 minutes you may be having a fuel shortage due to your self-regulated system consuming like crazy, and the production of your centrifuge that was "countperfect" being a little slowed due to the spike in electricity consumption. If you stop your system to wait for more fuel let say 1 second before the refuel should have happened you could be ruined.
It could feel like introducing a safety-mechanism, whose potential failure is the only hazard.
If it only tells you with an alarm it's different.
Or if you can automate an answer.
Khagan wrote: ↑Mon Oct 04, 2021 9:58 pm
Except of course that 'blueprint and forget' is actually
Place blueprint for power plant.
Place blueprint for rail station and connection to rail network.
Ensure work gang of construction bots is on site with roboport coverage.
Arrange delivery of raw materials to site.
Connect water supplies.
Manually inserting one fuel cell is trivial compared to any of the above.
i think that too, because
generally i build 1 or 2 maybe 3 nuclear plant, the starting one when i can, then a way larger one that i think will cover the need for the rest of the game ( i tend to have 200 250H hours games in average) then sometimes a 3rd one when the 2nd wasn't big enough. The time investment isn't much.
On the other hand, play a grid-like map, where you copy paste small nuclear plant like it's solar pannel, you design your thing so that when you paste it it fit the train station that is already there, covered by construction bots, all material already there and water supply aligned , or even coming by train ! Which nullify, i think in this particular case, all objections
foamy wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:30 am
Khagan wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:03 am
foamy wrote: ↑Mon Oct 04, 2021 11:44 pm
If you have no fuel cell available and the output inserter tries to trigger the input inserter, the input insertion
will fail and not recover until the player intervenes and manually handloads either a fresh or spent fuel cell into the reactor.
To get to that point, you need to leave the power station running steadily with no fuel being added to the belt for about two and a half hours.
If nothing else, the steady decline in power output should have been noticed long before then.
All it requires is a single gap, which can happen e.g. when expanding a reactor, or if you were using a bot delivery system and things got borked, or whatever.
True, true, also true .
foamy wrote: ↑Mon Oct 04, 2021 11:44 pm
You don't need a fuel check necessarily, but if you're using the output inserter as a memory-less clock it doesn't fail to an automatic load if, for whatever reason, fuel is interrupted. If you have no fuel cell available and the output inserter tries to trigger the input inserter, the input insertion
will fail and not recover until the player intervenes and manually handloads either a fresh or spent fuel cell into the reactor.
Autoload designs avoid this.
When i did the nuclear plant, with output inserter clocked at 200sec + X%, triggering the refuel, i used belt to deliver fuel, noticed the risk of gaps you mention, and made sure the belt was always loaded from some chest wired to an alarm to monitor the buffer. It's halfway between monitoring the fuel in chest and monitoring the U235 as Khagan says. The fact that the inserter where synced via clock meant that none of them could create a gap for another one on the belt.
The startup phase was me putting manually a fuel cell in each reactor, then putting power so they are all consumed at the same exact time. First cycle was also used to test the buffering capacity. Then 300 sec later, first ejection of all used fuel, and things were synced and stayed. Definitly not copy-paste and forget. I was looking at the whole process haha, checking each heat pipes , seeing the temperature, not willing to have any area reach 1000°.
It wasn't a MP game and it was heavily moded. I avoided messing around the nuclear reactor building after it was made, but i happily played with the slider to make it burn fuel faster and faster as the game progress, knowing that i would be told by my alarm if my different areas sending fuel couldn't meet the demand, the buffer of fuel giving me time to react manually, ie: making more centrifuges! And when i reached 200sec + 10% i knew i had to build a larger one
You need to be aware of energy consumption at all time which is often impossible on 24/24 server on which prefered designs are more robusts imo.