Friday Facts #310 - Glowing Heat pipes

[Tomplus]

If they are glowing, maybe you can also make transparent, glass pipes?

ClearQuartzGlassTube.jpg (57.89 KiB) Viewed 7122 times

[Avezo]

If glow was animated, heated up pipes radiated a bit from super bright to less bright, I think their brightness wouldn't be much of a problem.

[BlueTemplar]

Oh god, looks like the pipes are going to melt you down.

Just my personal opinion: make the glow only happens on a small part of the pipe, like a heat indicator, a small lamp (like rail signal), or a small part of the pipe covered under glass (like the window of fluid pipe), rather than glowing the whole pipe.

Why? No, this looks awesome ! Can't wait to see it... next summer ?

Those heat pipes look nice and all but it just reminds me of how disappointed i am in the nuclear reactor system.
I was hoping for a more design oriented system where you had to find a balance between an efficient reactor and a safe reactor. Where all of Factorio comes together to make or break your base (or a significant part of it) as you fine tune everything and have safety circuits in place for when the reactor could literally melt down, produce a large volume of hydrogen gas and blow it's cover spreading radioactive waste all over the place...

But yeah, nice pipes.

On one hand, it may be a cool challenge... in a mod, or something. But for a normal gameplay it would be pretty obnoxious for people making their first steps in the nuclear energy field. And hardly realistic.
Also it would incentivize getting safe and tested nuclear power plant blueprints from other players that Wube seem to want to avoid.

How would it be "hardly realistic" ??
And the people that aren't interested in learning how to do nuclear power already use someone else's blueprints...

Also, mandatory reminder about the first FFF discussing nuclear power, meltdown, and cooling towers :
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-164

[chandlerj333]

To whoever was asking about the protagonist’s name, the campaign refers to them as “the engineer” or “an engineer;” specifically when the helper robot waits for the player to follow it to a specific position.

[DaveMcW]

Also im missing on both images red-shifted colors based on temperature: https://i.stack.imgur.com/uGB7l.jpg ...

I agree, as someone who knows about blackbody radiation, it is jarring to see something at 1000C glowing yellow. If varying colors is impossible, I would like you to make 1000C blackbody orange the default color.

[Adamo]

I agree, as someone who knows about blackbody radiation, it is jarring to see something at 1000C glowing yellow. If varying colors is impossible, I would like you to make 1000C blackbody orange the default color.

Agreed from a physicist. If no variation is possible, the best trade-off is probably to use the 1000C color with its brightest at 1000C and a drop to total darkness around 500C (not because this is physical but because this is where the thing turns on). Hell, I'd probably even go with the 950C color.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_heat# ... 300_C).svg

[luc]

Agreed as a computer scientist as well. We know screen colors in Kelvin, too.

I, too, think it's slightly too bright, but someone made a fair point that it needs to be visible during the day. Perhaps the brightness is okay, but I liked someone else's suggestion of making it less wide instead (just a viewing line instead of the whole pipe). That also makes more sense that you can step over it unharmed. (When I first tried walking over one, I was surprised that I could without damage, given all the exposed copper).

Which is not to say that I don't like the change. Between before and after, I'd take after

[Adamo]

Personally, I like that the entire pipe glows. I think it's probably prettier. Maybe dude just has thermally-protected shoes. No sleeping on the heat pipes!

I don't think it will be hard to make it visible during the day time. I've been experimenting with more-subdued lighting on the reactor for a while in my nuclear mod. Even with just a shine on the window, it's still pretty obvious during daytime. In fact, in some ways, it's more clear during daytime than nighttime. It'll work.

[Oktokolo]

No sleeping on the heat pipes!

I just realized that there is a severe lack of cats in the game...

[Shingen]

Those heat pipes look nice and all but it just reminds me of how disappointed i am in the nuclear reactor system.
I was hoping for a more design oriented system where you had to find a balance between an efficient reactor and a safe reactor. Where all of Factorio comes together to make or break your base (or a significant part of it) as you fine tune everything and have safety circuits in place for when the reactor could literally melt down, produce a large volume of hydrogen gas and blow it's cover spreading radioactive waste all over the place...

But yeah, nice pipes.

On one hand, it may be a cool challenge... in a mod, or something. But for a normal gameplay it would be pretty obnoxious for people making their first steps in the nuclear energy field. And hardly realistic.
Also it would incentivize getting safe and tested nuclear power plant blueprints from other players that Wube seem to want to avoid.

How would it be "hardly realistic" ??
And the people that aren't interested in learning how to do nuclear power already use someone else's blueprints...

normally.
idk what year it allegedly is in Factorio, but i don't think they're using 1960s soviet technology
modern nuclear reactors don't explode when heated up too much or something, they turn themselves off.
and i'm talking about people who DO want to learn to use nuclear power, but regret it the moment their first reactor nearly inescapably explodes and destroys half of their base... or who change their mind before they even try.

[Adamo]

Just for the record, I hate the idea of letting reactors explode, too, and I hate it precisely because I am trained in physics. If anything, a reactor overload should damage your machines within a certain vicinity (as it would fry the circuitry with primary and secondary electromagnetic energy), and require you to wear a protective suit within the area. Poison is OK, I guess, but this relies on the "breaths-air" flag rather than, I dunno, "has-internal-organs" flag, and of course in this game, as it stands, only aliens are set "breaths-air", not the engineer. Easily fixed, though.

That said, the factorio reactor is clearly not a typical reactor we see in real life, which are mostly light-water reactors. I think it's fair to say the closest analogy would be a liquid-metal-cooled fast reactor. These do require higher enrichment levels (I suggest the recipe should be changed to require 20% U-235), but this is still nowhere near what would be needed to make a bomb, which is closer to 90% U-235, as I understand it, although most bombs are made from plutonium, not uranium, because they require less enrichment, and other reasons.

If we had lava in the game, I'd suggest simply that a reactor that has gone to the extreme level of criticality should ooze lava onto the ground.

[BlueTemplar]

No sleeping on the heat pipes!

I just realized that there is a severe lack of cats in the game...

Mods have you covered !
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/catmod
(Warning, they might be cute, but...)

----

modern nuclear reactors don't explode when heated up too much or something, they turn themselves off.

Modern nuclear reactors, if no cooling sources are available, and the reactor melts down, let the melted corium flow down into a specially dedicated concrete receptacle.
The very thing that Fukushima lacked. Now we are forced to perpetually keep a wall of frozen ground around the corium so as that the ground water doesn't touch it...
(You can't "turn off" the residual nuclear reactions.)

And why do you think that our engineer is able to make the highest tech that he knows about, or that he isn't willing to take the risk if it can make him get out of Nauvis faster ?

[kitters]

Glowing heat pipes make me feeling smth wrong and willing to fix pipes wasting energy for glowing.

[Leviathan]

I rushed to comment on this thread after reading the fff for this week, but it turns out a few have already said what I needed to say.
But first I want to say, I LOVE the glowing heat pipes. I have a terrible habit of never lighting up my factories, so these will look beautiful at night. My only gripe is that, as mentioned by a few others, the heat pipes should glow from a dull red, to a brilliant yellow. I'm quite happy with the current colour of the glowing pipes, but it's a massive turn off when there is no colour shift. I know, I know, I'll only ever see it when heating up and cooling down the reactors, but still

Also, while using an oxy-acetylene torch to melt and weld metal, I noticed as the metal cools it slowly changes shade but once it gets to the temperature where it completely solidifies it stops radiating light very suddenly, rather than a gradual dulling as the screenshots would suggest.

Anyway, these look amazing, and I love the effort you guys have put into this game. I look forward to the day shaders are added to Factorio and we can see the heat shimmer coming off these new glowing heat pipes I hope

Keep up the good work!

[Cadde]

Just for the record, I hate the idea of letting reactors explode, too, and I hate it precisely because I am trained in physics. If anything, a reactor overload should damage your machines within a certain vicinity (as it would fry the circuitry with primary and secondary electromagnetic energy), and require you to wear a protective suit within the area. Poison is OK, I guess, but this relies on the "breaths-air" flag rather than, I dunno, "has-internal-organs" flag, and of course in this game, as it stands, only aliens are set "breaths-air", not the engineer. Easily fixed, though.

That said, the factorio reactor is clearly not a typical reactor we see in real life, which are mostly light-water reactors. I think it's fair to say the closest analogy would be a liquid-metal-cooled fast reactor. These do require higher enrichment levels (I suggest the recipe should be changed to require 20% U-235), but this is still nowhere near what would be needed to make a bomb, which is closer to 90% U-235, as I understand it, although most bombs are made from plutonium, not uranium, because they require less enrichment, and other reasons.

If we had lava in the game, I'd suggest simply that a reactor that has gone to the extreme level of criticality should ooze lava onto the ground.

Are you saying you can't make an explosion happen due to misuse of a modern reactor?
Hydrogen on a confined space WILL explode when ignited.

[BlueTemplar]

I believe that modern reactors have anti-hydrogen-accumulation measures ?
(Of course, very few currently operating reactors are "modern", the overwhelming majority of them having been built in the 70's...)

[steinio]

Are you saying you can't make an explosion happen due to misuse of a modern reactor?
Hydrogen on a confined space WILL explode when ignited.

Depends on the oxygen level.
To few and to much and it won't explode at all.

[ownlyme]

all the realism doesn't matter as long as its fun and looks good, realism is just a tiny bonus.
just download https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RealisticReactors and have fun.
if you have any ideas for it that make sense, leave a comment there.

[Oktokolo]

I just realized that there is a severe lack of cats in the game...

Mods have you covered !
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/catmod
(Warning, they might be cute, but...)

But biters are more like dogs than cats and Nauvis also lacks non-hostile land fauna in general...

[Rothron]

The glowing heat pipes look really sweet, but the glow intensity relative to the heat should ideally be shifted towards the red.

The color of a hot object correspond to it's temperature. It starts in the infrared and creeps into visible light as it gets hotter. This means that the colder pipes shouldn't just be a lower intensity orange, they should be redder.

The color you picked for the heat pipes looks like around 2000 degrees K.