Electric energy

[Smarty]

... Ok, I didn't just double the output, I made it 5-10 times larger. In that case the ramp-up time also increases (of course). In the end it's a matter of balancing. But that idea as whole makes sense, cause it is a good reason to use more circuits and power switching, but doesn't force the player to do anything.[/quote]

[GoldenPorkchop80]

(you'd need the extra rare 235 uranium isotope to make nukes, making them hard to get and justify the ingame power they have)

uh, pretty sure nukes are made out of Plutonium-239, not Uranium-235...

[GoldenPorkchop80]

Don't forget about alien power source technology! Alien bases should be able to expand into "factories" like the players.

Then maybe the player could steal the alien technology when they drop their alien science packs.

I second this motion.

I third this motion.

[kinnom]

(you'd need the extra rare 235 uranium isotope to make nukes, making them hard to get and justify the ingame power they have)

uh, pretty sure nukes are made out of Plutonium-239, not Uranium-235...

they're made out of both

[joe_da_cro]

based on the real world and seemingly how it works in this game. Fueled Energy generation comes from boiling water then the steam turning the steam engines. This of course discounts solar energy.

When you have a system like Solar in the game, coupled with accumulators there is really less importance on the Steam engine. basically why invest in the infrastructure on uranium ore (for a new Power type) when you can build a solar array with accumulators which do the same job albeit with a larger amount of space used. Although if like coal there is more than one purpose for the uranium like suggested nuclear weaponry would make implementing it just for the added industry for the weapons alone.

what i would like to see as suggested where Fueled energy generation is slow to react to changing power demands. I think the best way to handle this would be to have the water boilers ( coal, wood, solid fuel, {new fuel source}) take longer to heat up water that passes through it. then use internal logic to determine the power state of the generators when demands drops slowing it down until it reaches the current state (this would determine reheat times of the water). This makes accumulators have value in a fueled power source factory. Although I will suggest that fueled power should have a end game purpose. one could be a new steam engine (or complete power plant) which take water and generates alot of power with a smaller footprint.

Ultimately i would love to see pollution tied to the fuel used. Meaning you can tie any new fuel source to the energy sector by just using boilers. As in the real world coal, oil and nuclear power plants are just one big water boiler. Also if the fuel types can have attributes attached to them you can also edit thinks like production speed on furnaces for example.

[Align]

I feel like what's needed most is another source of infinite energy, but one that pollutes, so you're choosing between green power or cheap power.

There's oil, but you need that for so much other stuff, and it still uses boilers+steam engines, which are better than solar panels but still not very compact.

Maybe geothermal?

[joe_da_cro]

I feel like what's needed most is another source of infinite energy, but one that pollutes, so you're choosing between green power or cheap power.

There's oil, but you need that for so much other stuff, and it still uses boilers+steam engines, which are better than solar panels but still not very compact.

Maybe geothermal?

geothermal is a clean energy source also. although your initial comment got me thinking about what you said and in combination to what others have said. if a new boiler type was created with a new ore type of uranium. it would obviously create new weapons and industry but also a new power source coupled with the new nuclear boiler. where the pollution comes from is not the boilers but the dumping ground for the waste from the nuclear industry.

[stowed4sea]

based on the real world and seemingly how it works in this game. Fueled Energy generation comes from boiling water then the steam turning the steam engines. This of course discounts solar energy.

When you have a system like Solar in the game, coupled with accumulators there is really less importance on the Steam engine. basically why invest in the infrastructure on uranium ore (for a new Power type) when you can build a solar array with accumulators which do the same job albeit with a larger amount of space used. Although if like coal there is more than one purpose for the uranium like suggested nuclear weaponry would make implementing it just for the added industry for the weapons alone.

Space is the largest consideration. Back when I was a Field Engineer for GE, I worked on one of the largest solar farms in the world. Over 500 MW of generation takes up a ridiculous amount of space. Around 8 square miles if I remember correctly. I haven't taken the time to do the math if it is modeled correctly in the game or not, but it seems right.

Imagine when building a new base, far away from your home base power grid, to be able to take a few pieces of uranium to fuel a reactor that could output 100 MW of clean energy. That is the impact that a nuclear reactor could have. Granted this wouldn't matter if playing in peaceful mode, but when trying to keep those external bases small and defensible, having a near endless source of energy could be wonderful.

I'm only about 40 hours new to factorio, and haven't played with the mods to see how accurate Nuclear energy is in those, but as a prior nuclear operator in our Navy on a submarine, I would love to see nuclear make the vanilla game. We had a 165 MW reactor and that size would be just about perfect for most bases.

Those reactors were built to last 15 years without needing to refuel. I'm not sure if they would want that exact same realism in the game. Either way, I'd love to see it as a clean energy source with no pollution, as it is in real life. Sure, a nuclear reactor does have some radioactive waste involved with its routine operation, but instead of just keeping it there at the site, you could output it in cubes or something that the train could take back to your main base for processing and burial in a concrete bunker that gives off maybe small level of pollution for the bugs to hone in on.

A nuclear reactor is a pain to operate in real life, with many support systems that could be added for realism. Or they could make the actual building of the reactor similar to the refining process instead of being just a block building. The game already has piping and pumps and tanks. A nuclear reactor is just a hot rock that makes steam inside an enclosed loop with a heat exchanger to transfer heat to the secondary side without the water mixing. From there, that hot water just makes turbine generators go spinny spinny. I guess the game could use the same steam engines it already uses, but I'd love to see some more modern, powerful turbine generators.

That could be a lot for them to do though, and I know that there are already some good mods that make nuclear power.

I currently operate part of the power grid in real life, and the transmission lines bother me. In real life, you must pay careful attention to loading so that you don't exceed capacity of the line. I wonder how difficult it would be for them to implement something like that in game. I'm not talking about monitoring frequency, amperage, real and reactive power, but just something simple like loading. The game already knows the power loading for each machine that uses power. Just put some logic in there to trace it all back to the source by using some simple math.

Actually, it isn't simple at all when you get into multiple lines connected together in a grid. Determining how much power flows on each line could cause major programming headaches, and I wouldn't want that. Anyway, those are my thoughts. I love the game and will be happy with any improvements.

[Align]

While a pollution-free nuclear reactor makes sense from a realism perspective, I don't think it fits that late-game energy generation is unavoidably green. Like, it should be an option, but not the best option unless you're specifically going for low pollution, and currently solar is the best for everything because it's infinite and scales up easily (whereas steam not only requires more logistics but is further restricted by needing water and therefore messy piping). The one-time cost in resources for building and clearing out nests is negligible compared to the advantages.

Which is why I want an infinite but polluting source of energy. In the main FFF thread, someone mentioned the thermal boreholes from Alpha Centauri, and I love that idea. Basically a controlled volcano, right? With all these horrible gases to upset the biters.

[MalcolmCooks]

Space is the largest consideration. Back when I was a Field Engineer for GE, I worked on one of the largest solar farms in the world. Over 500 MW of generation takes up a ridiculous amount of space. Around 8 square miles if I remember correctly. I haven't taken the time to do the math if it is modeled correctly in the game or not, but it seems right.

If one tile is assumed to be 1 square meter (this is how speed of vehicles is calculated anyway), then solar panels in game have a max output of 6.67 kW/m^2. The sunshine that hits earth on a sunny day is between 1 and 1.2 kW/m^2, so if the Factorio planet is earthlike solar panels are over 600% efficient I believe the planet has a brighter sunshine compared to earth though, but exactly how bright I can't say. I think 6 times brighter would probably be deadly to humans, though.

[starholme]

Space is the largest consideration. Back when I was a Field Engineer for GE, I worked on one of the largest solar farms in the world. Over 500 MW of generation takes up a ridiculous amount of space. Around 8 square miles if I remember correctly. I haven't taken the time to do the math if it is modeled correctly in the game or not, but it seems right.

If one tile is assumed to be 1 square meter (this is how speed of vehicles is calculated anyway), then solar panels in game have a max output of 6.67 kW/m^2. The sunshine that hits earth on a sunny day is between 1 and 1.2 kW/m^2, so if the Factorio planet is earthlike solar panels are over 600% efficient I believe the planet has a brighter sunshine compared to earth though, but exactly how bright I can't say. I think 6 times brighter would probably be deadly to humans, though.

Grab your pack. We are going to a new world. Bring sunglasses.

[stowed4sea]

While a pollution-free nuclear reactor makes sense from a realism perspective, I don't think it fits that late-game energy generation is unavoidably green. Like, it should be an option, but not the best option unless you're specifically going for low pollution, and currently solar is the best for everything because it's infinite and scales up easily (whereas steam not only requires more logistics but is further restricted by needing water and therefore messy piping). The one-time cost in resources for building and clearing out nests is negligible compared to the advantages.

Which is why I want an infinite but polluting source of energy. In the main FFF thread, someone mentioned the thermal boreholes from Alpha Centauri, and I love that idea. Basically a controlled volcano, right? With all these horrible gases to upset the biters.

A reactor needs a large source of water and has lots and lots of piping to support it. I'm not sure how realistic the mods like Uranium Power are(I'm going to play with it right now), but a reactor unit would have a huge network of piping between the reactor, steam generator(the name for a heat exchanger), reactor coolant pumps and then piping to the pressurizer(assuming a pressurized water reactor) on the primary side (radioactive), and on the secondary(non-radioactive steam) there is piping from the steam generator, to the turbines, then to the condenser (a heat sink) so it can condense back to water, then piping to more pumps to pump the water back into the steam generator which would take more pipes. Then you would need to pump in water to the condenser which would require more pumps and water. So if you are worried about a maze of piping and pumps, well you have it. I think it would be incredibly fun to lay out your own setup of a reactor.

Regarding the pollution factor, I was thinking that the actual power generation could be clean, but still have a concept of radioactive waste, which a reactor does put out. While realistically, it isn't really going to pollute and attract bugs, they could say the bugs are super-sensitive to radioactive waste or something. I think this would be a neat idea because you could truck( or train) the waste somewhere else to try and trick the bugs, or say, keep the waste on your main base or put it in a storage facility somewhere far away, but it would generate a concept of maintenance. While the power would be nearly in-exhaustible, once built, you would still have to maintain it.

Oh, and another interesting concept is say you ever tripped the grid all the way off....well, nuclear units require a fairly large amount of power when shut down to keep the reactor cooled off. So say you weren't paying attention and collapsed the system. You would have to restore power to the reactor coolant pumps in X amount of time before the reactor did melt down. And THEN the bugs would relentlessly attack the source of radiation released.

Just an idea. It seems like a lot for the devs to add and I know mods already do a lot of the above, but it would be awesome to see in the vanilla game.

Space is the largest consideration. Back when I was a Field Engineer for GE, I worked on one of the largest solar farms in the world. Over 500 MW of generation takes up a ridiculous amount of space. Around 8 square miles if I remember correctly. I haven't taken the time to do the math if it is modeled correctly in the game or not, but it seems right.

If one tile is assumed to be 1 square meter (this is how speed of vehicles is calculated anyway), then solar panels in game have a max output of 6.67 kW/m^2. The sunshine that hits earth on a sunny day is between 1 and 1.2 kW/m^2, so if the Factorio planet is earthlike solar panels are over 600% efficient I believe the planet has a brighter sunshine compared to earth though, but exactly how bright I can't say. I think 6 times brighter would probably be deadly to humans, though.

Thanks for doing the math for me. I assumed it was something similar to that based on the output, but I had no idea about the scaling.

It doesn't bother me too much though, because I think it hits the feeling correctly. Solar panels do take up a quite a bit of room, and I know not everything can be perfectly true to life. I don't really like the accumulators, however. I know it is partially science fiction, so it is easy to assume that accumulators by that day in age would be able to work like in the game.

The reality today is that energy produced is consumed almost instantly. It is one of the fun challenges of operating the power grid in real life. Sure solar and wind are great, but for every MW that is produced real time by renewable sources, we must have enough MW in reserve to be able to take over. Wind and solar power generation have come a long way, but they are no where as clean (talking about the 60 Hz sine wave) as a turbine generator and are not nearly as stable. Without a huge network of generation (spinning reserves) ready to pick up the extra generation required, breakers would trip and the grid would go into low voltage collapse. Companies are desperately trying to come up with with a way to store energy, but the tech just doesn't exist today.

[vulstar]

Would love to see electric fence as a new wall type that zaps enemies with electric damage or somth, damage would be low and energy consumption high, and late game you could have research that increases the fence zapp range and damage, but also power consumption of the electric fence. (and maybe the fence would hit the player and logistic robots also if they stay close for to long? )

[JoneKone]

While a pollution-free nuclear reactor makes sense from a realism perspective, I don't think it fits that late-game energy generation is unavoidably green. Like, it should be an option, but not the best option unless you're specifically going for low pollution, and currently solar is the best for everything because it's infinite and scales up easily (whereas steam not only requires more logistics but is further restricted by needing water and therefore messy piping). The one-time cost in resources for building and clearing out nests is negligible compared to the advantages.

Which is why I want an infinite but polluting source of energy. In the main FFF thread, someone mentioned the thermal boreholes from Alpha Centauri, and I love that idea. Basically a controlled volcano, right? With all these horrible gases to upset the biters.

A reactor needs a large source of water and has lots and lots of piping to support it. I'm not sure how realistic the mods like Uranium Power are(I'm going to play with it right now), but a reactor unit would have a huge network of piping between the reactor, steam generator(the name for a heat exchanger), reactor coolant pumps and then piping to the pressurizer(assuming a pressurized water reactor) on the primary side (radioactive), and on the secondary(non-radioactive steam) there is piping from the steam generator, to the turbines, then to the condenser (a heat sink) so it can condense back to water, then piping to more pumps to pump the water back into the steam generator which would take more pipes. Then you would need to pump in water to the condenser which would require more pumps and water. So if you are worried about a maze of piping and pumps, well you have it. I think it would be incredibly fun to lay out your own setup of a reactor.

Regarding the pollution factor, I was thinking that the actual power generation could be clean, but still have a concept of radioactive waste, which a reactor does put out. While realistically, it isn't really going to pollute and attract bugs, they could say the bugs are super-sensitive to radioactive waste or something. I think this would be a neat idea because you could truck( or train) the waste somewhere else to try and trick the bugs, or say, keep the waste on your main base or put it in a storage facility somewhere far away, but it would generate a concept of maintenance. While the power would be nearly in-exhaustible, once built, you would still have to maintain it.

Oh, and another interesting concept is say you ever tripped the grid all the way off....well, nuclear units require a fairly large amount of power when shut down to keep the reactor cooled off. So say you weren't paying attention and collapsed the system. You would have to restore power to the reactor coolant pumps in X amount of time before the reactor did melt down. And THEN the bugs would relentlessly attack the source of radiation released.

Just an idea. It seems like a lot for the devs to add and I know mods already do a lot of the above, but it would be awesome to see in the vanilla game.

Space is the largest consideration. Back when I was a Field Engineer for GE, I worked on one of the largest solar farms in the world. Over 500 MW of generation takes up a ridiculous amount of space. Around 8 square miles if I remember correctly. I haven't taken the time to do the math if it is modeled correctly in the game or not, but it seems right.

If one tile is assumed to be 1 square meter (this is how speed of vehicles is calculated anyway), then solar panels in game have a max output of 6.67 kW/m^2. The sunshine that hits earth on a sunny day is between 1 and 1.2 kW/m^2, so if the Factorio planet is earthlike solar panels are over 600% efficient I believe the planet has a brighter sunshine compared to earth though, but exactly how bright I can't say. I think 6 times brighter would probably be deadly to humans, though.

Thanks for doing the math for me. I assumed it was something similar to that based on the output, but I had no idea about the scaling.

It doesn't bother me too much though, because I think it hits the feeling correctly. Solar panels do take up a quite a bit of room, and I know not everything can be perfectly true to life. I don't really like the accumulators, however. I know it is partially science fiction, so it is easy to assume that accumulators by that day in age would be able to work like in the game.

The reality today is that energy produced is consumed almost instantly. It is one of the fun challenges of operating the power grid in real life. Sure solar and wind are great, but for every MW that is produced real time by renewable sources, we must have enough MW in reserve to be able to take over. Wind and solar power generation have come a long way, but they are no where as clean (talking about the 60 Hz sine wave) as a turbine generator and are not nearly as stable. Without a huge network of generation (spinning reserves) ready to pick up the extra generation required, breakers would trip and the grid would go into low voltage collapse. Companies are desperately trying to come up with with a way to store energy, but the tech just doesn't exist today.

Hi, "Uranium power mod" currently 0.63 version is broken, and I think it is broken due to the fact that you can pump any kind of liquid to a steam engine "Uranium slurry heated to 350C" for example..

Yes solar power is OP atm (end game item). there is now drawback except darkness and once you have enoufgfhg batteries you can over come that. Like I once suggested Solar panels should get dirty and start dropping their energy output, to combat this you have robots that clean the panels. (for example a robot goes to a nearest water source and take's a water droplet and drops it to the solar panel)

One of the dev said, there they would love to make the electric network more like a real thing, a stop cap measure for this could be that Electric poles take energy (example wood pole 100w, steel medium pole 50w and a Big steel metal pole 150w)

[aka13]

While a pollution-free nuclear reactor makes sense from a realism perspective, I don't think it fits that late-game energy generation is unavoidably green. Like, it should be an option, but not the best option unless you're specifically going for low pollution, and currently solar is the best for everything because it's infinite and scales up easily (whereas steam not only requires more logistics but is further restricted by needing water and therefore messy piping). The one-time cost in resources for building and clearing out nests is negligible compared to the advantages.

Which is why I want an infinite but polluting source of energy. In the main FFF thread, someone mentioned the thermal boreholes from Alpha Centauri, and I love that idea. Basically a controlled volcano, right? With all these horrible gases to upset the biters.

A reactor needs a large source of water and has lots and lots of piping to support it. I'm not sure how realistic the mods like Uranium Power are(I'm going to play with it right now), but a reactor unit would have a huge network of piping between the reactor, steam generator(the name for a heat exchanger), reactor coolant pumps and then piping to the pressurizer(assuming a pressurized water reactor) on the primary side (radioactive), and on the secondary(non-radioactive steam) there is piping from the steam generator, to the turbines, then to the condenser (a heat sink) so it can condense back to water, then piping to more pumps to pump the water back into the steam generator which would take more pipes. Then you would need to pump in water to the condenser which would require more pumps and water. So if you are worried about a maze of piping and pumps, well you have it. I think it would be incredibly fun to lay out your own setup of a reactor.

Regarding the pollution factor, I was thinking that the actual power generation could be clean, but still have a concept of radioactive waste, which a reactor does put out. While realistically, it isn't really going to pollute and attract bugs, they could say the bugs are super-sensitive to radioactive waste or something. I think this would be a neat idea because you could truck( or train) the waste somewhere else to try and trick the bugs, or say, keep the waste on your main base or put it in a storage facility somewhere far away, but it would generate a concept of maintenance. While the power would be nearly in-exhaustible, once built, you would still have to maintain it.

Oh, and another interesting concept is say you ever tripped the grid all the way off....well, nuclear units require a fairly large amount of power when shut down to keep the reactor cooled off. So say you weren't paying attention and collapsed the system. You would have to restore power to the reactor coolant pumps in X amount of time before the reactor did melt down. And THEN the bugs would relentlessly attack the source of radiation released.

Just an idea. It seems like a lot for the devs to add and I know mods already do a lot of the above, but it would be awesome to see in the vanilla game.

Space is the largest consideration. Back when I was a Field Engineer for GE, I worked on one of the largest solar farms in the world. Over 500 MW of generation takes up a ridiculous amount of space. Around 8 square miles if I remember correctly. I haven't taken the time to do the math if it is modeled correctly in the game or not, but it seems right.

If one tile is assumed to be 1 square meter (this is how speed of vehicles is calculated anyway), then solar panels in game have a max output of 6.67 kW/m^2. The sunshine that hits earth on a sunny day is between 1 and 1.2 kW/m^2, so if the Factorio planet is earthlike solar panels are over 600% efficient I believe the planet has a brighter sunshine compared to earth though, but exactly how bright I can't say. I think 6 times brighter would probably be deadly to humans, though.

Thanks for doing the math for me. I assumed it was something similar to that based on the output, but I had no idea about the scaling.

It doesn't bother me too much though, because I think it hits the feeling correctly. Solar panels do take up a quite a bit of room, and I know not everything can be perfectly true to life. I don't really like the accumulators, however. I know it is partially science fiction, so it is easy to assume that accumulators by that day in age would be able to work like in the game.

The reality today is that energy produced is consumed almost instantly. It is one of the fun challenges of operating the power grid in real life. Sure solar and wind are great, but for every MW that is produced real time by renewable sources, we must have enough MW in reserve to be able to take over. Wind and solar power generation have come a long way, but they are no where as clean (talking about the 60 Hz sine wave) as a turbine generator and are not nearly as stable. Without a huge network of generation (spinning reserves) ready to pick up the extra generation required, breakers would trip and the grid would go into low voltage collapse. Companies are desperately trying to come up with with a way to store energy, but the tech just doesn't exist today.

Hi, "Uranium power mod" currently 0.63 version is broken, and I think it is broken due to the fact that you can pump any kind of liquid to a steam engine "Uranium slurry heated to 350C" for example..

Yes solar power is OP atm (end game item). there is now drawback except darkness and once you have enoufgfhg batteries you can over come that. Like I once suggested Solar panels should get dirty and start dropping their energy output, to combat this you have robots that clean the panels. (for example a robot goes to a nearest water source and take's a water droplet and drops it to the solar panel)

One of the dev said, there they would love to make the electric network more like a real thing, a stop cap measure for this could be that Electric poles take energy (example wood pole 100w, steel medium pole 50w and a Big steel metal pole 150w)

There will never be passive power loss and/or consumption by poles. Has been stated multiple times

[Align]

Yes solar power is OP atm (end game item). there is now drawback except darkness and once you have enoufgfhg batteries you can over come that. Like I once suggested Solar panels should get dirty and start dropping their energy output, to combat this you have robots that clean the panels. (for example a robot goes to a nearest water source and take's a water droplet and drops it to the solar panel)

One of the dev said, there they would love to make the electric network more like a real thing, a stop cap measure for this could be that Electric poles take energy (example wood pole 100w, steel medium pole 50w and a Big steel metal pole 150w)

But what problems exactly would these changes address? More maintenance and power doesn't really eliminate the fundamental issue of infinite power with minimal drawbacks.

[JoneKone]

Yes solar power is OP atm (end game item). there is now drawback except darkness and once you have enoufgfhg batteries you can over come that. Like I once suggested Solar panels should get dirty and start dropping their energy output, to combat this you have robots that clean the panels. (for example a robot goes to a nearest water source and take's a water droplet and drops it to the solar panel)

One of the dev said, there they would love to make the electric network more like a real thing, a stop cap measure for this could be that Electric poles take energy (example wood pole 100w, steel medium pole 50w and a Big steel metal pole 150w)

But what problems exactly would these changes address? More maintenance and power doesn't really eliminate the fundamental issue of infinite power with minimal drawbacks.

The power pole usage is a stop cap measure, until the new power network is made..

Infinite power I have a nice craphics from a person who has gone off grid in USA as you can clearly see in real life solar power is not a constant.

The fact =D in real life 2 is that every power supply should be like in factorio and our Power needs would be solved.. Solar is infinite.. Now the WAY you get there should be in the game the expense in both pollution, maintenance, attacks from aliens and play time should be there.. I love Factorio, it's a make a Factory game.. Currently it's "too easy"

http://wk057.solar/

[opencircut74]

Actually the idea of an electric pole taking energy is not far off from real life. In real life, there are two kinds of electric current. Alternating Current (AC) and Direct Current (DC). Assuming that the steam engine puts out Direct Current, I can safely say that everything in the base is run off of (roughly) an 120 volt DC power supply. Now, Direct Current is continuous and loses current (amps) fairly quickly when is used to power something that is not right next to it. This would mean that the farther something is away from the source, the more current it takes to give the required amount of power to whatever it is you want to power. The amount of power an electric pole would lose would increase by the amount of things it has to power and the distance from the source. Also, Direct Current is very inefficient with the amount of electricity you can put through a certain size wire without losing too much energy in heat.

To get past this, we can use Alternating Current. Alternating Current takes the negative and positive and flips them back in forth on the same wire around 60 times per second. Alternating Current can travel a very long distance without losing many amps. It can also travel with a relatively thin cable. But the main downsides are that Alternating Current puts out thousands of volts on any power line until you use a step-down transformer to lower it to a safe level, and almost every appliance in your home runs on a DC power supply. To get a DC power supply from an AC power supply, and the same flipped around, you need an inverter. Also, if you put too much power through a small cable (small electric pole) you will lose a great amount of energy because the wire will melt off the insulation and then will melt itself, which would lead to a power outage to whatever was using it's power.

The downside about an inverter is that unless you have a very efficient one, you lose power converting it. This is not a problem in compact bases, because steam generators and solar panels put out Direct Current, and you can use that to power your assembling machines, roboports, inserters, etc.

The point is that power lines do suck up power through heat loss and the heat loss is greater if you use direct current. Inverters should be needed to transport electricity a long way away because the heat loss is too great to make the power line effective, and the more power you use the thicker the cable has to be to prevent heat loss. Everything in your factory is using Direct Current and the game acts like it is Alternating Current. Also, machines do not only suck down amps. They also suck down volts, so there has to be a high-voltage in the power line and a step-down transformer to bring it to machines. Although, this would make the game too confusing and might make power lines bigger, so the transformers should be left out of the picture.

Thanks!

opencircut74,

Circuit Designer and Factorio Player

[BlakeMW]

Actually the idea of an electric pole taking energy is not far off from real life. In real life, there are two kinds of electric current. Alternating Current (AC) and Direct Current (DC). Assuming that the steam engine puts out Direct Current, I can safely say that everything in the base is run off of (roughly) an 120 volt DC power supply. Now, Direct Current is continuous and loses current (amps) fairly quickly when is used to power something that is not right next to it. This would mean that the farther something is away from the source, the more current it takes to give the required amount of power to whatever it is you want to power. The amount of power an electric pole would lose would increase by the amount of things it has to power and the distance from the source. Also, Direct Current is very inefficient with the amount of electricity you can put through a certain size wire without losing too much energy in heat.

I'm afraid this description is a little off. There is no great difference in transmission losses between DC and AC at the same voltage (altough DC definitely has the advantage at higher voltages and greater distances - refer to HVDC). The primary distinction and where this common misconception comes from is that AC power is easily transformed to a higher/lower voltage, it can be easily transformed up and transmitted with low losses over a long distance, then easily transformed back down to a safe/useful voltage. But it's only a matter of easiness and efficiency at small scale - strictly speaking DC is generally superior for transmission.

For the scale of factorio, I'd be somewhat torn between DC or AC being the "logical" choice. It's small enough for DC to be viable without a whole lot of voltage conversion for transmission, and it's certainly not large enough for DC to have an advantage over AC for transmission. I imagine it'd be a DC network just because of solar panels and accumulators and stuff means he's not going to get away with a simple AC system (i.e. he needs fancy converters anyway, no simple transformers are going to cut it), also DC carries a lower electrocution hazard - not that factorio guy has the greatest survival instinct - but it doesn't hurt to make your own machines less likely to kill you.

[opencircut74]

I'm afraid this description is a little off. There is no great difference in transmission losses between DC and AC at the same voltage (although DC definitely has the advantage at higher voltages and greater distances - refer to HVDC). The primary distinction and where this common misconception comes from is that AC power is easily transformed to a higher/lower voltage, it can be easily transformed up and transmitted with low losses over a long distance, then easily transformed back down to a safe/useful voltage. But it's only a matter of easiness and efficiency at small scale - strictly speaking DC is generally superior for transmission.

I was saying that because normally Direct Current is used at lower voltages- from 1 to 150 volts, while AC is primarily 115V+. Also, HVDC is much more difficult to set up than a traditional AC system.