Thank you a lot for this mod !
I see that you've tried to rebalance power house / combustion mixture / combustion turbine.
Yeah, they were not worth it (at least in red/green science part of the game) in 0.16 already... (before even the 0.17 vanilla change that divided all pollution values by ~60 across the board !)
But I'm not sure that you succeeded : there are a lot of recipes, but I'm going to use the red science syngas (minimum 80 red science) as an example :
First, with a power house / combustion mixture / combustion turbine :
(minimum 110 red science, though you're going to want to also get :
- storage tanks for +70 red science to be able to easily mix the cold steam with hot steam to consume in a steam engine
- and/or cooling towers for +390 red science to turn cold steam back to water)
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The above is actually for 1 GW (helmod base time 1s) :
84% × [ (550-15)°C × 2235 L + (500-15)°C × 85.11 L ] × 1 kJ/L = 1039 MJ , remove the 39 MJ/s consumed by all the buildings.
Helmod says 1.5 GW because
it automatically assumes that the combustion turbine is consuming the highest temperature combustion mixture,
which is 750 °C for the mk1 one.
There's also an extra 9363 L of 60°C steam being produced, which after merging with >100 °C steam could be consumed by a steam engine to get back an extra 100 % × 9363 L × (60-15) °C × 200 J/L = 84.27 MJ, which is not negligible, but a PITA to balance so as to the steam engine doesn't get blocked by <100°C steam.
(I haven't bothered with inserter power or dealing with flue gas, should be negligible ?)
In comparison, if you were to just directly burn that coal in a boiler :
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[EDIT : Whoops, I messed up somewhere, and the coal value is only 96% of the previous one. Probably when scaling up to account for energy consumed by buildings. My bad.]
That's 100% × 92.83 kg × 4 MJ/kg = 371.32 MJ
(I have to do it by hand because Helmod gives a wrong power answer here too, with Py 500°C accepting steam engines.)
So for the same amount of coal that's 2.7 times less power [EDIT : 2.6 times with 1/96% more coal] for 4.4 times [EDIT : 4.2 times] less pollution.
So, depending how you get that coal, like in 0.16 the combustion turbine might *still* not be worth it !
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Let's compare it now with burning syngas (and extra coal gas) from the same amount of coal in a oil burner :
(Forget about burning the combustion mixture there, it's only 100 kJ/L.)
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That makes for an exact 2kL of syngas –
(wow, what are the chances ?!? is this *really* just a coincidence, or maybe comes from balancing ?)
– which can be directly burned for 100% × 2000 L × 400 kJ/L = 800 MJ,
but we now *also* get 55.7 kg of extra unused coke,
which can be burned for 100% × 55.7 kg × 5 MJ/kg = 278.5 MJ
In total : 800 + 278.5 - 42.2 = 1036.3 MJ,
which is only 1.04 times more [EDIT : 1.08 times more] energy than the combustion turbine recipe, but with only 62% [EDIT : 64%] of its pollution !
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P.S.: I then realized/remembered that it would be fairer to remove coal gas to combustion completely, and to account for the lack of coke with a negative energy and pollution, but the numbers should be roughly the same ?
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Now, the oil burner is quite a bit farther in the tech tree, requiring at the minimum 725 red science. (But it's only 270 red science away from rushing Iron Processing 1, which I assume pretty much everyone does, considering how *expensive* steel is ?)
But on top of that, using oil burners is much less of a brainer than combustion mixtures : liquid fuel comes in, 165°C steam comes out.
(Though I guess that they also need water, while a power house can work in a closed cycle, I guess might be an interesting option for outposts far away from water where you can just bring a few kL of water in barrels ? Basic syngas recipe needs water though.)
As for capex :
1.) Combustion turbine recipe comes at 102k basic plates (copper, iron, lead, aluminum)
2.) Boiler + Steam Engine comes at 14k basic plates (!) (for 2.7 times less power though).
3.) Oil Burner recipe (not forgetting steam engines and boilers for extra coke) comes at 340k basic plates (!!!). I guess there *is* some balance after all, to pay for that lower pollution...)
Well, with that capex, I guess that it's actually better balanced than I expected, despite the ravenous hunger for coke by power houses ! Nice job balancing it !
Still, IMHO it would be better, considering its setup complexity, if combustion mixture was rebalanced to be both better and more capex expensive than oil burners, but also moved later in the tech tree, say to green science ?