A unique take on a windmill/turbine

[Fortanono]

I understand that there are mods and suggestions galore regarding this; however, I think I have something new to bring to the table. I respect anyone who posts a mod for this; however, it's the mechanics I'm proposing, not the general concept of a wind turbine. Keep that in mind before posting something like KS Power.

Anyway, onto the actual suggestion: Starting off, you make a Wind Turbine with 10 Steel and 3 Turbine Blades (4 Plastic each). This will consistently produce 15 KW of power all day consistently. So... basically the idea I mentioned first except consistent. However, I have a way of changing it. If you click on the GUI of the Turbine, you can insert more Turbine Blades into a slot on the Turbine. Blades only stack to five, so 8 blades is the maximum shown visually. But what does this do? Just make it produce more?

Well, yes, but it requires Lubricant to function with any more blades than what it comes with normally.

So, a 3-blade wind turbine will work like a Solar Panel around the clock, but an 8-blade one produces a bit more than a steam engines but consumes so much lubricant that the Chemical Plants and Refineries required would be more pollution than the boilers for a steam plant. Efficiency modules would be almost needed to offset the amount of pollution.

What do you think?

[Rysith]

Boilers have a pollution value of 6, compared to the chem plant 1.8 and oil refinery 3.6[1]. That means that (based on your 'so much lubricant that it produces more pollution than boilers') comment that you would be looking at on the order of 2 lubricant per second per MW [2]. Not only is that an absurd amount of oil, at that point you'd be better off turning that heavy oil into 1.5 solid fuel per second and burning it (in boilers!) for 18.75 MW of power. If your new power system is strictly worse (more space, more resource consumption, more pollution) than an existing one, it's just not going to be used.

[1] And the pumpjack's 9, but pumpjacks are rarely the limiting factor on oil production and if they are you aren't going to be spending it on lubricant.
[2] 14 boilers / 5MW = 84 pollution-units, a chem plant can handle two-ish oil refineries of output so a lubricant unit is 9 pollution, and so you'd need 9 of those to match the pollution of a boiler line. That's 9 lubricant per second, or 1.8 lubricant per MW.

[OdinYggd]

I like the idea of wind power, but I think we can do better than a fixed output at a cost.

The game implements a day/night cycle already. Perhaps we could tap into this in-game time to generate a random number every few hours. The resulting number is then averaged over time to create a wind speed value for that biome. Then not only could we use this wind speed factor to make the output of the wind turbine variable in a way that the player cannot control just like the real turbines, but it also can be used to alter pollution distribution and make it actually consider effects like air movement in distributing smoke and pollutants to the surrounding area.

As for the costs, I don't think having it consume oil of any sort would be a good idea due to the logistics nightmare that would create and make this unusable. Like the solar panels, it probably should just last forever to avoid annoying the player. Trying to make it need a consumable after manufacture would just create headaches, while having it break down in the field will be effortlessly solved by the player only deploying them within range of a roboport to serve up repair bots to correct it.

[Rysith]

I like the idea of wind power, but I think we can do better than a fixed output at a cost.

What if rather than generating a wind speed, a random wind direction was generated. Turbines facing toward or away from the wind would produce full power, turbines facing perpendicular to the wind would produce no power. Add a 'wind direction sensor', and allow it to (via the circuit network[1]) adjust turbine facing, and you get something that is automatable and provides a reasonable and obvious introduction to using circuits to control things. I'd probably say that un-automated turbines should be less energy-per-area than solar, but that automated turbines should provide better energy-per-area to reflect the higher initial setup complexity compared to solar farms.

[1] Possibly with a second tier requiring an electric engine

[Koub]

The more you add blades, the more torque you have to start the turbine with low wind power, but the power produced depends solely on the specific speed, which is the speed of the tip of the blade. And adding more blades adds more turbulances and more weight to displace, which lowers the overall efficiency of the turbine.

Therefore high number blades on a windmill/turbine are useful only on situations where the winds are very weak and irregular. On most other cases, 3 blades is optimal.

And whatever you do, the maximum you'll get from a given wind is around 60% of it's energy. So adding always more blades won't give you more peak power in general

[ssilk]

Well, that is a nice suggestion.
But objectively measured I think compared to other ideas with windmills this one is much more complex.

My opinion about a windmill is this: the viewtopic.php?f=93&t=16734 Wind Turbine
is just what this game needs: A second "random" natural energy.
I think the wind needs to behave like real weather (no change withing minutes, but change by days), it should also be dependent on the location/biome-type and then this would be a real useful thing.

And the only reason, why this isn't already added to the game is in my current opinion, that it currently uses too much CPU to just add it, cause - unlike the Solar Panels - the wind is not constant per map (and solar should in my opinion also not be constant per map, cause we have clouds etc.)...