[0.15.x] Bob's Mods: General Discussion

[bobingabout]

1 slight error. The boiler's use 1.8MJ, however, have an efficiency of 0.5, this means they only get HALF of the coal's fuel value, meaning the actual cost in fuel is 3.6MJ.

[nagapito]

1 slight error. The boiler's use 1.8MJ, however, have an efficiency of 0.5, this means they only get HALF of the coal's fuel value, meaning the actual cost in fuel is 3.6MJ.

I am just using the numbers they gave and fixing their math

Edit: Fuel cost goes from 3.6MJ at 0.5 efficiency and goes down to 2.25MJ with top tier boiler
There is also Mobius1 electric boiler, solar panels and all this becomes free

Edit2: Ohhh... And dont neglect nuclear power, the most efficient way of making steam, I think

[bobingabout]

Fuel cost goes from 3.6MJ at 0.5 efficiency and goes down to 2.25MJ with top tier boiler

Unfortunately, the efficiency actually goes down because it heats the water to a higher temperature. Although this is good for steam engines, it's wasted energy if you're just going to condense it again. The base boiler heats by 150 degrees, and each tier an extra 70 degrees so a MK2 heats it to 220 degrees. I do the maths somewhere, but needless to say 220/150 = 1.4666... or an extra 46% cost is greater than the 0.6/0.5 = 1.2 or an extra 20% fuel efficiency

There is also Mobius1 electric boiler, solar panels and all this becomes free

I did play with adding an electric powered boiler myself, but for some reason (at least in game versions up to 0.15.11) it refuses to connect to the electric grid.
(This was actually the same reason why you couldn't have a grid powered electric train. Unfortunately, the dynamic energy system was removed from trains in 0.15.0 and replaced with a new burner table instead, so a train will now only ever be burner powered. I was hoping they'd add the ability to have them grid powered, but, that's gone now.)
I'll wait until this is fixed before doing anything like that myself. As for solar panels, well, in theory if you're just using solar panels, the entire process (minus boiler running costs right now) becomes free, but these calculations are supposed to be more trying to show how the energy gain in the fuel compares to the energy it takes to create this gain, to see if it's actually worth doing it. (If coal can give more power than the fuel blocks you turn it into, why do it?) Nothing is actually free, even if the electricity doesn't come from burning fuel.

I mean, how often do people upgrade those fuel blocks to rocket fuel, just to burn it? I'm guessing that with a net loss (10 fuel blocks at 25MJ is 250MJ, and rocket fuel is only 225MJ, that's a 10% loss before you even look at production costs), very few people burn vanilla rocket fuel in their boilers.

[Recon777]

Your math gives you how much you gain compared with how much you invest, in common language, you are using the total value of sales without any expense compared to the total amount of expenses you will have.
That is a flawed methodology. You invest 100, received 120, gained 20. 120/100 = 1.2. You didnt had 120% of profit

Return of investment (ROI) is done by comparing the total profit (sells - expenses) against expenses. You spend 100, you make 120, you profited 20 and you have a return investment of 20/100 of 20%, that is, you gained 20% from what you had

That's what I'm doing though. It's not 163%. It's 63%. I realize you have to subtract the 100. If you read through my lengthy post, you'd see that included in the summary at the bottom.

[Recon777]

1 slight error. The boiler's use 1.8MJ, however, have an efficiency of 0.5, this means they only get HALF of the coal's fuel value, meaning the actual cost in fuel is 3.6MJ.

Oh my. This is even more serious then. With this information, the figures fall to only 31.3% gain by running your coal through this process.

The reason I probably didn't notice this 3.6MJ cost is because I never got the exact measurements down from testing the boiler / pure water setup. But yes, this is unacceptable to only have a 31.3% gain. It should be close to a 100% gain (2.0x).

This also means that the difference between NORMAL water and PURE water methods is 121% vs 31.3%. That means the pure water method only gives a FOURTH of the gains as the normal water method.

[lieblingsbesuch]

Is it possible to "renew" an existing savegame map with ores which have been added due to your updates, or do I have to start everytime from the very beginning when a new ore is being added?

[nagapito]

Bob, please read to the end. I finished the calculations for the solid fuel conversions and compared the figures WITH and WITHOUT the pure water requirement.

When coming up with the 1.69 gain, I think we've all screwed up on the math here.

You pointed out that this is from 989/584 right?
But 989 is the net gain and 584 was the original value of the coal.
It doesn't make sense to divide the net gain by the original value.
To determine your increase ratio over the process, you have to take the total end value and divide it by the total amount spent (what you give up to get the end product).

So in the previous example, that would be 1825/(584+252) = 2.18x
The TL;DR of this is that by requiring pure water, your NET GAINS are cut pretty much in half.

This is as far as I read! You gave me a TL:DR, so I would not read the wall of text
And at bold is what I retained from that and commented about. If you changed your math half way on the post, you cant really blame me

[Recon777]

This is as far as I read! You gave me a TL:DR, so I would not read the wall of text
And at bold is what I retained from that and commented about. If you changed your math half way on the post, you cant really blame me

Well, the distinction is between the use of x and the use of %.
I calculated (with pure water method) a 1.63x increase when pushing coal through the process. That's a 63% increase. Compared to without pure water, that's 2.21x or a 121% increase.
Then, 121% / 63% = roughly double the increase compared to using pure water, which halves the profits.

My recommendation is a straight doubling. You can get a 99% increase by reducing the hydrogen cost for the solid fuel recipe to 150, down from 250.

[bobingabout]

Is it possible to "renew" an existing savegame map with ores which have been added due to your updates, or do I have to start everytime from the very beginning when a new ore is being added?

You can either regenreate the entity

Code: Select all

/c game.regenerate_entity("<ore>")

I think, where <ore> is the code's name of the ore, in the latest case "thorium-ore".

Though, even if you don't do that, explore! the ore will turn up.
if it's enabled, Thorium isn't enabled by default, as it currently isn't even used yet.

[lieblingsbesuch]

Thank you very much!

Friends and I are playing a map w/ your mods since 30 h now and don't want to lose everything.

[bobingabout]

Revamp mod version 0.15.1 is released. This brings ... drum-roll ... Rocket fuel revamp!!! And probably breaking CMH mod and Angels mod.......

Anyway, here's some information:

N2 + 3H2 -> 2(NH3) ammonia (gas)(5 units nitrogen + 12 units hydrogen = 10 units ammonia)
4NH3 + 5O2 -> 4NO + 6H2O nitric-oxide (gas)(and water) (10 units ammonia + 12.5 units oxygen = 10 units nitric-oxide + 6 units pure-water)
2NO + O2 -> 2NO2 nitrogen-dioxide (gas) (10 units nitric-oxide + 5 units oxygen = 10 units nitrogen-dioxide)

H2 + O2 -> H2O2 hydrogen-peroxide (Liquid) (8 units hydrogen + 10 units oxygen = 10 units hydrogen-peroxide)

2NH3 + H2O2 -> N2H4 + 2H2O hydrazine (Liquid) (and water) (10 units ammonia + 5 units hydrogen-peroxide = 4 units hydrazine and 2 units pure-water)
2NO2 -> N2O4 dinitrogen-tetroxide (Liquid) (10 units nitrogen dioxide = 4 units dinitrogen-tetroxide)(Should actually be 2, but I don't want it too expensive)

Rocket fuel costs 80 units of Hydrazine and 40 units of dinitrogen tetroxide

Note, Pure water can be enabled in MCI mod, if it isn't enabled, the recipes will just give normal water... either way it should be fed back to the input of the electrolysers.

ammonia is now used in Greenhouse mod's fertilizer if it exists. (This change was actually in the last greenhouse update)
Ammonia and nitric-oxide are unlocked by Nitrogen processing (Because the changes to Nitrogen Dioxide now requires it)
New hydrazine research added, which unlocks hydrazine and hydrogen-peroxide(needed to make hydrazine). Prerequisite is Nitrogen processing
New Rocket Fuel research, which unlocks dinitrogen tetroxide and rocket fuel. Prerequisites are hydrazine and rocketry
Rocket Silo research now has Rocket Fuel as a prerequisite, and no longer unlocks rocket fuel.


Let me know what you think! (and if it breaks anything)

[nagapito]

For angels/CMH players the good news is that the new update doesnt break it.

The bad news is that CMH still overwriting the rocket fuel recipe so nothing changes


Edit: Scratch that. Fertilizer broke with the new ingredients, now it has 3 and requires Angels chemical plant since it has nitric acid, ammonia and urea
And since Angel overwrites nitrogen processing technology, is not even possible to research bobs ammonia

Revert...

[Recon777]

Wow, Bob, that's a lot of pretty cool sounding stuff. It'll be very interesting to test that out.

Have you thought over my calculation results for the solid fuel conversion? What do you think of the idea of reducing hydrogen to 100x per solid fuel recipe?
If you reduce it to 100x and the boilers have a 50% efficiency requiring 3.6MJ per 60 steam (ouch) then that will produce 96.55% gains.

Or alternatively, you could tune it for Boiler Mk2's which are available around the same time. What is the efficiency factor for those?

[nagapito]

2NO2 -> N2O4 dinitrogen-tetroxide (Liquid) (10 units nitrogen dioxide = 4 units dinitrogen-tetroxide)(Should actually be 2, but I don't want it too expensive)

This recipe... I understand that it might be a real world thing but... I kinda deslike chemical recipes that are like, one input-> one output.
Gives me the feeling that if nitrogen dioxide can be converted directly to dinitrogen-tetroxide without anything else then I should actually be able to do nitrogen dioxide with nitric-oxide and oxygen....

I know it doesnt work that way but, looking at a factory chemical plant with one to one is, strange! Feels like the chemical plant should be able to transform it directly into the final product since there arent any external ingridients

[nagapito]

Wow, Bob, that's a lot of pretty cool sounding stuff. It'll be very interesting to test that out.

Have you thought over my calculation results for the solid fuel conversion? What do you think of the idea of reducing hydrogen to 100x per solid fuel recipe?
If you reduce it to 100x and the boilers have a 50% efficiency requiring 3.6MJ per 60 steam (ouch) then that will produce 96.55% gains.

Or alternatively, you could tune it for Boiler Mk2's which are available around the same time. What is the efficiency factor for those?

Just found a good balancing metric for the solid fuel recipe (or an horrible justification for a nerf of solid fuel/boost to liquid fuel).

Liquid fuel canister gives 150MJ for 50 liquid fuel.
That is 3MJ per drop of liquid fuel. 1 Liquid fuel is 1 light oil
Coal liquification gives 15 light oil for 10 coal, so 1.5 light oil per coal unit or 4.5MJ (And it costs a canister so it can be useful!)

Now do the rest of the math

Or, on the other hand, liquid fuel actually needs a boost to be even more OP!!!

[Mobius1]

2NO2 -> N2O4 dinitrogen-tetroxide (Liquid) (10 units nitrogen dioxide = 4 units dinitrogen-tetroxide)(Should actually be 2, but I don't want it too expensive)

This recipe... I understand that it might be a real world thing but... I kinda deslike chemical recipes that are like, one input-> one output.
Gives me the feeling that if nitrogen dioxide can be converted directly to dinitrogen-tetroxide without anything else then I should actually be able to do nitrogen dioxide with nitric-oxide and oxygen....

I know it doesnt work that way but, looking at a factory chemical plant with one to one is, strange! Feels like the chemical plant should be able to transform it directly into the final product since there arent any external ingridients

That's because bob isn't using H2O2 as catalyst for that reaction, or UV light which are the most common ways to accelerate reactions like that.
Besides, a common thing on real world process that takes 1 input and outputs 1 product would be Hydrogen weighting, where you input Hydrogen gas, liquifies it, then shoot some gamma particles on it producing Deuterium, you redo that process to make Tritium, if we were to put that process in factorio would be "Hydrogen gas -> Deuterium" which is a 1-1 production chain.
The reason why a chem plant that makes N2O4 can't output directly the final product is that the plant that makes N2O4 don't have the resources to do the next step, so you would require another chem plant specialized on that next step.

[bobingabout]

I also just realised that there's no barrelling for any of these new fluids (Nitrogen Dioxide does have bottling, because that's MCI), so I'll need to fix that. The problem is what is a fluid, and what is a gas? and should things like Hydrazine be barrellable in the first place?
Ammonia:Gas, Hydrazane:fluid, hydrogen peroxide:fluid, Nitric-oxide:gas. But what about dinitrogen-tetroxide? Boiling point is 21C, should that be a fluid or a gas? I'm thinking fluid, so barrels.

For angels/CMH players the good news is that the new update doesnt break it.

The bad news is that CMH still overwriting the rocket fuel recipe so nothing changes


Edit: Scratch that. Fertilizer broke with the new ingredients, now it has 3 and requires Angels chemical plant since it has nitric acid, ammonia and urea
And since Angel overwrites nitrogen processing technology, is not even possible to research bobs ammonia

Revert...

I'll need to co-ordinate with the two of them to help figure something out.

CMH could be done quite easilly, if he checks to see if bobrevamp is installed (Sure the first version doesn't have this, but, it's the only one that doesn't) and only do his change to rocket fuel if it's not there. He can do that by adding a line

Code: Select all

if not (bobsmods and bobsmods.revamp) then

at least, I think that variable exists at the top of revamp mod. anyway, if he added that so that he doesn't replace it if it exists, problem solved. Angels would require much more thought.

Wow, Bob, that's a lot of pretty cool sounding stuff. It'll be very interesting to test that out.

Have you thought over my calculation results for the solid fuel conversion? What do you think of the idea of reducing hydrogen to 100x per solid fuel recipe?
If you reduce it to 100x and the boilers have a 50% efficiency requiring 3.6MJ per 60 steam (ouch) then that will produce 96.55% gains.

Or alternatively, you could tune it for Boiler Mk2's which are available around the same time. What is the efficiency factor for those?

Boiler MK2, although the efficiency is 0.6, the water is heated to a much higher temperature, which liniarly takes more energy, so instead of getting a 20% efficiency boost, that is offset by heating the water an extra 47%, so it's a net loss for a better boiler, at least when used for this purpose.

I'm just thinking of moving away from condensing steam in the first place, and performing some sort of descrete Water to Pure water conversion recipe directly.

2NO2 -> N2O4 dinitrogen-tetroxide (Liquid) (10 units nitrogen dioxide = 4 units dinitrogen-tetroxide)(Should actually be 2, but I don't want it too expensive)

This recipe... I understand that it might be a real world thing but... I kinda deslike chemical recipes that are like, one input-> one output.
Gives me the feeling that if nitrogen dioxide can be converted directly to dinitrogen-tetroxide without anything else then I should actually be able to do nitrogen dioxide with nitric-oxide and oxygen....

I know it doesnt work that way but, looking at a factory chemical plant with one to one is, strange! Feels like the chemical plant should be able to transform it directly into the final product since there arent any external ingridients

It might sound like there's an extra step than required, but also consider that the Nitrogen Dioxide that goes in is actually an existing gas that is used to make Nitric Acid, and other recipes too. I think it's in the T3 battery recipe.

Furthermore, Dinitrogen Tetroxide naturally decays into Nitrogen Dioxide with heat. In fact the chemical formula I was looking at for creating Dinitrogen Tetroxide lists the two as 2NO2 <-> N2O4, as if they're interchangable.

[nagapito]

Ammonia:Gas, Hydrazane:fluid, hydrogen peroxide:fluid, Nitric-oxide:gas. But what about dinitrogen-tetroxide? Boiling point is 21C, should that be a fluid or a gas? I'm thinking fluid, so barrels.

Well... During day maybe a gas and at night a liquid? On deserts always a gas and... if alien biomes are installed, snowy biomes its a liquid?

[bobingabout]

Ammonia:Gas, Hydrazane:fluid, hydrogen peroxide:fluid, Nitric-oxide:gas. But what about dinitrogen-tetroxide? Boiling point is 21C, should that be a fluid or a gas? I'm thinking fluid, so barrels.

Well... During day maybe a gas and at night a liquid? On deserts always a gas and... if alien biomes are installed, snowy biomes its a liquid?

It's hard to decide because water has a default temperature of 15C, but all other fluids (Except steam, which defaults to 100C), have a default temperature of 25C.

I'm tempted to go Barrels anyway.

As for the the Hydrazine, I was considering adding a new fuel item instead of a barrel, which would put it on par with steam, as being one of very few fluids not barrellable. I'm thinking I should add the tag to stop barrelling to nitroglycerin too.

In the world of universal barrelling, that does seem strange, but consider that nitroglycerin is explosive, and potentially too dangerous for transport, Hydrazine would purely be because I would want a fuel item instead of a barrel, rather than making a barrel with a fuel value. I'm also considering removing the fuel status from liquid fuel barrel (But keeping the barrel) and adding a new fuel item from liquid fuel.

[nagapito]

Ammonia:Gas, Hydrazane:fluid, hydrogen peroxide:fluid, Nitric-oxide:gas. But what about dinitrogen-tetroxide? Boiling point is 21C, should that be a fluid or a gas? I'm thinking fluid, so barrels.

Well... During day maybe a gas and at night a liquid? On deserts always a gas and... if alien biomes are installed, snowy biomes its a liquid?

It's hard to decide because water has a default temperature of 15C, but all other fluids (Except steam, which defaults to 100C), have a default temperature of 25C.

I'm tempted to go Barrels anyway.

As for the the Hydrazine, I was considering adding a new fuel item instead of a barrel, which would put it on par with steam, as being one of very few fluids not barrellable. I'm thinking I should add the tag to stop barrelling to nitroglycerin too.

I am against disable barreling. Make it use canisters, gas tanks, even a cardbox, whatever but dont force us to rely on pipes fluid mechanics, specially over moderate distances!
I also dont care if nitroglycerin is higly unstable and might explode when moved.... I will take the risk!

On a more serious note, I even think that not being able to barrel steam is a dumb thing. Yes, doesnt make sense but so doesnt make any sense having a car inside my pocket! We played for years with poor fluid handling mechanics, now they give us barrelling but they also say, steam... you cant barrel. You will have to keep suffering from our buggy pipes fluid mechanics with at least one thing... Not only is dumb, is bad for game performance since fluid mechanics are not that UPS friendly but its also something that is against user usability (which, Factorio devs might be great devs but seem to lack a lot of user usability skills).
Standardization of mechanics is one of the golden rules in games like this. special cases usually bring confusion and frustration.
New player starts playing, here is how to use fluids, you have pipes, you have barrels, wagons, go have fun. You found a bug? cant barrel steam? you spent the last 2 hours fighting against steam because you had to use a more limited system for steam. Ohh, I am sorry, we made steam a 'special case'. Sorry for your loss of hair!