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Idea is to split up steam generators into steam engines and generators. Output of the steam engine would be a spinning axle which could be used to drive a generator or other things such as conveyor belts.

When rivers are added, hydro/dams could also be a source of rotational energy.

This could lead to other things such as assemblers which don't need electricity and run off rotational energy alone to manufacture things, which could lead to more interesting factory designs where a single axle could drive many axles using gears which then drive multiple assemblers and conveyor belts.

Machines that do not require electricity would be actually a step back to the XIX-th century, then factories were being powered by one or two powerful steam engines and machines were powered be them via complex schemes of kinematic transmissions with lots of pulleys, gears and so on.
Electricity made rooms bright and clean as they were freed of all that kinematic stuff.

But the idea of separate generators and spinning sources is really nice. I wish it to be implemented some day

I know there are lot of suggestions of making belts and water pumps to demand electricity in order to work. And there are many discussions about pros and contras of that. I would like to share my minds with you.

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 64&p=15134
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =33&t=7875
These threads gave me an idea to add in game another from of energy - mechanical. Imagine the windmill (or another sort of device, for example coal engine) which rotate and produce a small brown field around it in a manner of blue electric field. You can connect a pump or a belt directly to it or use shafts to transmit that energy to recievers. In the case of conveyor belts, they can transmit this energy to the neighboring belts (or even to coal inserters and coal drills which could be renamed into mechanical ones?) so every piece is powered up until the first piece recieves energy. Of course every reciever consume that energy so this give us a natural way to limit the lenght of belts. This could not only solve the problem of perpetuum mobile, but also enrich the gameplay of early "coal stage" of the game. In the next stages you can convert (with losses) mechanical energy form into electric form and vise versa, so that you can store it in accumulators and power up belts with electricity using motors (consume electricity, produce mechanical energy).

Also this could be perfectly combined with the ropeway
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=7977

ssilk wrote:Merged, cause equal topic

Thank you, but any thoughts?

Don't mind the ssilkbot, he's just passing through,

Honestly it would be cool, but if it wasn't a mod I'd be mad, the higher post about generators would be cool if I was doing a theme game, or a mechanical challenge run

But belts needing power is a thing I wouldn't want... if you getting it working out would be nifty

Yeah, it does kind of make a bit more sense with the idea of splitting the steam engines with a kinnetic power link between does sound like a good idea.

Part of the reason why the off-shore water pump doesn't require power, is because it is the first step in producing power, if there was a very cheap and easy way to get power(not specifically electric) without the pump, then sure, the pump could be changed to require power, and things still work. I personally wouldn't mind if I needed an extra burner powered thing to kickstart my electricity production, I'd probably replace it with an electric powered version once things are working anyway.

belts, its another one of those things you start using when all you have is burner power, so would only work if you could have a burner powered engine, and later an electric motor or something that you link into the belt system. for it to work effectively though, each belt peice would need to be able to transmit the mechanical energy to the next belt in the chain, it would be a nightmare trying to get them all working together if you needed to figure out a power source for each peice of belt manually.

I feel like we had ideas like that before...

This could be a whole new low tier. Everything would be powered by these spinning axles. However, after researching electricity you would have to tear your whole layout down, because the difference between a kinetic transmission network and a power grid would be just too big.

Just to seperate the turbine from the generator... well. It would make sense if there are several types of turbines and generators, but why should there? You could add wind turbines, but they have their generator integrated. It would look ridiculous to have a spinning axle connect them to a separate generator on ground level. And there is no running water for water turbines.

But I would love to see nuclear reactors as a late-game replacement for the coal burners.