Nuclear power. Why go fission when we have fusion?

[KaneToth]

Given how the powered armor can operate off of either solar or fusion, with some assistance from some batteries, wouldn't it make sense to skip fission entirely? It would avoid needing to add a whole new resource to the map. Instead all you would need is a new building to process water into deuterium and tritium. You would store this in the current fluid storage tanks to be used by the fusion reactor.

Just seems to make sense to me.

[BeCurieUs]

Or it makes a more logical transition from fission to fusion, as fission can be used to breed fusion fuel (tritium doesn't occur very much in nature, you usually breed it by neutron degeneration of lithium 6, which is a rareish isotope of lithium, which would introduce a new ore). The one exception could be something like a spallation neutron source (particle accelerator) breeding tritium constantly, but fission seems like fun anyway

[KaneToth]

Can't disagree that it wouldn't be fun, but it'd be one hell of a headache to model and wouldn't make any sense to go from fission to fusion when we already have micro fusion reactors powering our armor... If that wasn't in the game already, yeah sure. Fission power lets do this! But it breaks suspension of disbelief a bit when I'm looking at the horribly inefficient nuclear reactor and find myself wondering why not fusion? I already have this sort of issue in the base game staring at my fields upon fields of solar platforms and accumulators and wondering but why not fusion?

To address the whole thing of creating tritium, assume the particle accelerator is in the initial building which is turning the water source you have it connected to into deuterium and tritium. Just give it a high power cost to operate to model the particle accelerator running and bombarding the water to make tritium.

[BeCurieUs]

Just think it is 6 in one half dozen in the other at that point. Lot of stuff for fission could be easily done, already got sulfuric acid to do mining, could add in depleted uranium bullets, maybe even create some interesting transmutation to complement the crazy hard blue science ramp? Donno, seems like a good intermediate step. And that doesn't mean late, late game can't use some fusion, either! It is just fusion isn't that much more energy dense than fission, so might be redundant, not sure.

[BlakeMW]

Thing is the micro fusion reactor isn't attempting to be a plausible energy source. They may as well call it the Free Energy Device.

With nuclear power, I'd like to see Atomic Battery equipment - could be an RTG, a mini-reactor, or unspecified. I actually like this idea so much I made my own (unpublished) Atomic Battery mod on top of Nucular mod. My Atomic Battery = 1x4 (allowing it to fit inside a Power Armor) and 150kW (80% the power density of the fusion reactor).

Once nuclear power is in the game, the portable fusion reactor should probably simply be replaced by a portable fission reactor. And even if fusion power makes it into the game, fission would still be a more plausible portable power source, we know devices using plutonium scale down quite well, but fusion reactions involve much higher temperatures, much higher pressures and much faster neutrons making a portable fusion reactor rather implausible on the grounds of shielding and confinement requirements.

[KaneToth]

Fair enough. If they went that route I'd be fine with it. Though in all honesty for me if I need to mine and refine yet another ore I'm probably not going to bother with nuclear as a main option. I prefer more reusable options personally. I kinda of wish they would implement the dirty ore idea first before moving onto nuclear power. That would make a bit more sense to go in that order. It would add a refinery for ore and would keep mines functional.

[person3triple0]

(tritium doesn't occur very much in nature, you usually breed it by neutron degeneration of lithium 6, which is a rareish isotope of lithium, which would introduce a new ore

I agree with this, I think Lithium should be added as a new ore. However, I also think we should add Uranium to the game.
The tech tree could be reworked so that first, at midgame, maybe as a 100 or 200 RGB research, you get fission and you can work into the fission plants. (Details for that are another topic)

Later on, getting purple science up (which should require more ingredients than just alien artifacts, but that's another topic), you can research fusion reactors. Now, fusion reactors are going to be small, but they'll cost a lot of processing units and alien artifacts since you're creating a large building (scaleable with how the portables cost right now?) which can produce something like 200 MW assuming it's supplied with a continuous stream of the Helium isotopes.

After that, THEN you could research the portable one (something akin to researching lasers, THEN portable laser defense).

With nuclear power, I'd like to see Atomic Battery equipment - could be an RTG, a mini-reactor, or unspecified

I think this could also be useful? Maybe you could power the modular armor with a smallish fission reactor that requires depleted Uranium cores (one use for all that nuclear waste).
You'd have to research this before you could research the portable fusion reactor too.