[REQUEST] UPS Friendly Nuclear Reactor

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mrudat
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Re: [REQUEST] UPS Friendly Nuclear Reactor

Post by mrudat »

So an actual nuclear reactor, just one that's the entire size of the nuclear setup, rather than having hundreds of fluid-box-connections you only need to have a small number.

so, a series of entities for each combination of 2*n reactors, and matching boiler/turbine setup.

a 2*n reactor, a 2*n boiler setup, a 2*n storage tank setup, a 2*n turbine setup, each of which has graphics assembled from the vanilla items, but is in reality a single large x with the combined capacity of the smaller ones, with a single connection to its neighbour entity.

I imagine you'd need each reactor to have a custom recipe that takes 2*n fuel cells for a period of 200s, to make fuel usage work the same as vanilla; it should be a drop-in replacement for a row of 2n adjacent reactors.

Building an entire nuclear power plant of the required size in one go would be simple enough with the above components, the tricky bit would be to either convert an existing power plant to the new entities in-place, or to upgrade an existing power plant to produce more power.

Perhaps have a 2-reactor setup item (costing the same a strip of 2n tileable reactor) that has an on-build event that checks for neighbouring entities until it finds the actual reactor, and causes it to be upgraded to the next tier up?

The downside of such a setup would be that you can't prevent a stack inserter from filling the input slot from a single chest, rather than having to build the appropriate logistics to distribute fuel to all of the reactors.

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Re: [REQUEST] UPS Friendly Nuclear Reactor

Post by mrvn »

eradicator wrote:
mrudat wrote:I suspect that a script run once every 200 seconds (per power plant) might be cheaper (at present, at least) than 3 fluid-box-connections per power-plant running constantly (pump->boiler, boiler->tank, tank->turbine), but I'm uncertain of the relative costs of 3 fluid box connections for 200s vs a script run once every 200s. Could be worth doing a benchmark?
The point i wanted to make is "how accurate do you want the simulation to be." My suggestion above simulates correctly on a per-tick basis (and can take in actual water if that part is desirable). And as i said, you can reduce the cost of any script-based solution by increasing the delay to arbitrarily high numbers. Script based solutions also don't get any animations, you just get a static "magic box" → less immersion. And also writing distributed on_tick scripts is far more error prone than just spawning a few entities from a coding perspective.

Feel free to do a benchmark...
The problem I see with a scripted solution is that putting a fuel cell into a reactor would take up to 200s to start burning fuel. Because that's how often the script checks for fuel.


I like the idea of building a reactor from parts but scale them up to minimize the number of entities and moving parts. There is a mod for merging chests placed next to each other into one large chest. Why not do the same for reactors? A 8x2 reactor array would become just one reactor entity. The 16 heat exchangers per reactor would also become just one entity. 20 Steam turbines in a row, again just one entity. Maybe that reduction would already be enough without having to resort to a complete custom reactor.

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eradicator
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Re: [REQUEST] UPS Friendly Nuclear Reactor

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mrvn wrote: The problem I see with a scripted solution is that putting a fuel cell into a reactor would take up to 200s to start burning fuel. Because that's how often the script checks for fuel.
If you have static scripting sure. I said above that a proper dynamic solution would have increased impact when out of fuel. What i meant with that is that a proper solution would check more often when out of fuel (i.e. once a second).
mrvn wrote:I like the idea of building a reactor from parts but scale them up to minimize the number of entities and moving parts. There is a mod for merging chests placed next to each other into one large chest. Why not do the same for reactors?
Because reactors aren't chests. You can't build a 5x5 block of each reactors, turbines, etcpp without it looking like an obvious fake reactor. And apart from the dynamic scale you're basically repeating what i initially proposed.
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Re: [REQUEST] UPS Friendly Nuclear Reactor

Post by mrvn »

eradicator wrote:
mrvn wrote: The problem I see with a scripted solution is that putting a fuel cell into a reactor would take up to 200s to start burning fuel. Because that's how often the script checks for fuel.
If you have static scripting sure. I said above that a proper dynamic solution would have increased impact when out of fuel. What i meant with that is that a proper solution would check more often when out of fuel (i.e. once a second).
mrvn wrote:I like the idea of building a reactor from parts but scale them up to minimize the number of entities and moving parts. There is a mod for merging chests placed next to each other into one large chest. Why not do the same for reactors?
Because reactors aren't chests. You can't build a 5x5 block of each reactors, turbines, etcpp without it looking like an obvious fake reactor. And apart from the dynamic scale you're basically repeating what i initially proposed.
How would it look fake? You would tile the entity sprites so the look should be the same.

The difference to the initial proposal would indeed be the dynamic scale. But also that you wouldn't build a special reactor. You would build a reactor just like now. Placing one entity next to the other. The magic would all be internally. It would certainly be more scripting wok to make this entity merge happen magically than having a single ready made reactor entity that just places the merges stuff internally. But I think it would be nicer to use.

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Re: [REQUEST] UPS Friendly Nuclear Reactor

Post by eradicator »

mrvn wrote: How would it look fake? You would tile the entity sprites so the look should be the same.
Because there wouldn't be any connecting heat/pipes, cables, etcpp. (which are easily added to a pre-made static block). Unless you want to allow arbitrary build patterns. Which isn't just "difficult". Because entities need to have their connections defined at startup. And trying to abstract arbitrary reactor layouts is "unfeasible" to say it nicely.

What you're proposing is basically at least a 50 fold increase in coding effort when it's doubtful that the end-result is possible/will work adequately at all. And as far as i can tell you're not volunteering to write that hypothetical construct yourself.
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Re: [REQUEST] UPS Friendly Nuclear Reactor

Post by mrudat »

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/modular-buildings looks like a pretty good start on at least part of the problem, and the component with the largest part-count of a large nuclear reactor setup (apart from pipes, which would be difficult to produce a general solution for).

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Re: [REQUEST] UPS Friendly Nuclear Reactor

Post by quyxkh »

28 reactors is what, 4GW, 4.32GW theoretical limit ? Here's a blueprint that gets 1GW from 8 reactors for ~250µs entity update on my 3570K DDR3-1333 box, switching from the rectangular layout to a windmill-blades layout, spreading the heat taps more evenly, gets it to the full 1.1GW output but it's not so compact that way and I'm willing to pay.

Fuel's so cheap it's not worth cycling the reactor for, I guess you could put a steam tank on a far turbine, if there's steam in there and it's not draining the reactor's building up heat so stop loading fuel.



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