Nuclear, Coal, and Wood Suggestions

[Necros]

Wood should be able to be made into coal and coal into oil. This is inline with existing technology, though it can be very polluting.

Nuclear, fission, power comes in two forms: boil water or just provide a heat source to directly generate electricity.

A lot of space exploration (as also recently shown in the the movie The Martian) relies on the latter. So one easy solution would be to use the fission material (U or Th) to make a heat source to generate electricity directly. This would be helpful for remote outposts with small electrical demands like a radar dish or an oil pump.

Using fission as a source of normal power that is not just heat generation requires water. The best way to handle this would be to just use the existing steam engines.

For game balancing, I suggest making the nuclear reactors not very powerful by themselves but they gain more power output as they are put next to each other.

Nuclear power is non-polluting. Trying to make nuclear make the aliens become mutants is science fiction ridiculousness. With as much REAL science is put into the game it would be a shame to pander to a false nuclear stereotype.

The fissionable material should either be an accidental random byproduct of mining or should be extracted from coal/stone.

The downfall of using nuclear is that it takes a while to amass enough of it to be the only source of power.

[ssilk]

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3394 Read this OR be ignored!
-> Too many quite different suggestions in one, cannot be discussed in a useful manner.
You can split your suggestions for example into current energy-production- (oil, wood, coal), nuclear- and balancing-suggestions.