Factorio Forums

Finally finished this after 3 days. This was mostly just for fun, but it also works as a backup power supply if for some reason solar fails, and now i finally have somewhere to dump my coal.

It was too big to fit it all in a screenshot so gonna do a tour-thing with screenshots instead. I did however screencap the map of the power plant, which looks like this:



The solid blocks in the middle are just clumps of engines with pipes running along above and below to feed the central columns of engine blocks.The dotted lines stretching out are pipes to the pumps and at the top i have a bunch of accumulators for transferring power to my main powergrid.

Here's the coal delivery, not very interesting just the train running in with coal, it gets unloaded then the drones haul it to the two clusters, each with their own drone network for distributing it further. I didn't want the whole plant to be under the same drone network because drones become less and less efficient the further they have to travel, so i used these little exchange points to swap coal from one net to another.
First thing i built was the boilers on the left side of the plant, which is why the layout isn't very good, there's way too much pipe spaghetti and i even forgot to link one of the engine rows and had to run a separate pipe through the middle of the west block It also made it hard to tell what connected where since nothing was really grouped, and i didn't have enough space for all the boilers, which is why some of the boilers got moved at the top...
...so for the eastern setup i tried to group things up better; part of the problem was having the boilers all in a big impassable column so i broke it down to only have half the boilers arranged in the column while the boilers connecting the central engines were placed on the pipes running above and below the engine blocks to save space.
And a picture of the central area with most of the engines in it so you can see how the pipes were laid out. The left train track is meant to redistribute coal to other stations for train kibble, but i don't have any stations set up to use it yet The middle track is a service track i used to move in engines, pipes and other stuff i made elsewhere, and later to move out ore and stone i had mines where the power plant was to be built.
And finally i want to show how the power grid is laid out for the station. Since i didn't want the plant to run at all times due to how much coal it gobbles up the station is split into two grids, one for the engines and one for all the inserters, drones and lamps throughout the plant.
This is done to prevent the steam engines from attempting to power their own coal supply; if they did without access to solar power the plant would deadlock if it ever ran out of power for any reason. If the entire plant was connected to solar power i wouldn't be able to run my factory from accumulated solar power, as the engines would just take over as soon as night hits. The last part is the accumulators used to connect buffer the engines from the main powergrid. They're setup so the accumulators are placed simultaneously in both subnets; that way the engines recharge them and the main net discharge them when solar power drops. The plant still outputs a small amount of energy, but nowhere near full strength unless all outside capacitors are depleted; then it will go up to full power.

As for general stats, the station has a peak production of 540kW, during which it eats ~67 coal per second.

I forgot to keep track of how many materials were used to build it unfortunately Hope you liked tho.

This is really crazy like hell. Do you plan to offer some savegame?

I need bigger screen.

Next milestone 1MW power plant?

Do you plan to offer some savegame?

Sure, here you go

http://www.mediafire.com/download/gpfou ... trains.rar

If you want to have the powerplant running just put down a power line to connect the miners where you're standing to the powerline with the lights, that should give it something to do

Next milestone 1MW power plant?

I wanted to make it 1.21 gigawatts at first so i could time travel, but very quickly realized that would be a terrible idea, 2000 times larger than this and i'd be dead before finishing I then went for 1.21 megawatts but forgot i divided by 2 and it only made it to about half But there is room to expand south of it with nearby lakes so maaaaybe?

Balthazar wrote:I wanted to make it 1.21 gigawatts at first so i could time travel, but very quickly realized that would be a terrible idea, 2000 times larger than this and i'd be dead before finishing I then went for 1.21 megawatts but forgot i divided by 2 and it only made it to about half But there is room to expand south of it with nearby lakes so maaaaybe?

Just build 1210000000 / 300 = 4033334 accumulators, charge them full and you'll get that power for more than 15 seconds

600W is a bit low for a steam engine anyways, should be 600kW instead, so you can think of 4034 accumulators

(ok realistic values for small engines are about 10kW, late steam locomotives had an incredible power of up to 4500kW)

Time for blueprints...

.... clink for upper left edge... half an hour later walking click on right lower edge ... make blueprint-copy... a minute later (when saved) taking car, drive to other place ... paste... CPU working for a minute or so and then the construction robots begin to place all ...

As long as coal is an finite source this is VERY interresting to see, but will be never build by myself, even with blueprints

BurnHard wrote:As long as coal is an finite source this is VERY interresting to see, but will be never build by myself, even with blueprints

Just because its finite in vicinity doesnt mean it would suddenly disappear. My coal storage could probably fuel my boiler station for a week of real time before I will notice any shortage.

*gg* when I take the above mentionend 50 coal/second, one day (24 hours) of full load would need 50*60*60*24 = roughly 4,320,000 coal. Yes, a bit high, but manageable if you really, really want to do it

Balthazar wrote:I wanted to make it 1.21 gigawatts at first so i could time travel, but very quickly realized that would be a terrible idea, 2000 times larger than this and i'd be dead before finishing I then went for 1.21 megawatts but forgot i divided by 2 and it only made it to about half But there is room to expand south of it with nearby lakes so maaaaybe?

I don't think you screwed up with math. Your base isn't posible to fully utilize your steam engines (only 544.8 kW of power consumption).
I suggest building lots of radars to increase power consumption and see full utilization

SilverWarior wrote:I don't think you screwed up with math. Your base isn't posible to fully utilize your steam engines (only 544.8 kW of power consumption).
I suggest building lots of radars to increase power consumption and see full utilization

He built 1100 steam engines, his max power output would be 600*1100 = 660kW, right?

He built 1100 steam engines, his max power output would be 600*1100 = 660kW, right?

I keep getting this wrong too but steam engines only produce 510 watt, not 600. Also, they're each in a row of 9 and the last engine never gets to run at full power so there is a dropoff.

I don't think you screwed up with math. Your base isn't posible to fully utilize your steam engines (only 544.8 kW of power consumption).
I suggest building lots of radars to increase power consumption and see full utilization

I already tested this when the plant was built by not connecting the capacitors to anything else, even though they were charged after 17 seconds, for those 17 seconds it first peaks at around 580 kW, then as steam is consumed the final engines in the row of 9 drops in performance and it stabilizes at about 545kW. To reach 1.21 mW the plant would have to double in size.

Yes, you are right, 510W, no idea why I always thought 600.

But I've tested just now: You can fully utilize 10 steam engines per row/pump, you need 14 steam boilers for that. In your picture I only see 12 each line.