Friday facts #151 - The plans for 0.14

[mattj256]

it seems clear to me that an inserter won't affect anything three tiles away.

2 tiles away in one direction and 2 away in the other when we're talking long handed inserters so a total span of 5 tiles

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant more than two tiles from the center of the inserter. Yes, the total span is five tiles.

[mattj256]

Perhaps the issue is I have no idea how inserters actually work game-logic wise

Grid above is in chunks aka 32x32 tiles each....
Since there are at least 2 chunks between them...

Here's the quote from the FFF:

Our planned strategy is to divide the chunks (32X32 tiles of map) into 3X3 grids and number these from 1 to 9

This is how I interpret this: the top-left tile of each chunk is labeled 1. The tile immediately to the right is labeled two. The next tile is labeled three. The next tile is labeled one. And so on.

In Options -> Graphics one of the options is "show chunk boundaries". Using this option you can see tiles (thin lines) and chunks (thick lines). A tile is a square on the map that's large enough to hold a transport belt. Some items (like assemblers or furnaces) span multiple tiles.

[steinio]

it seems clear to me that an inserter won't affect anything three tiles away.

2 tiles away in one direction and 2 away in the other when we're talking long handed inserters so a total span of 5 tiles

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant more than two tiles from the center of the inserter. Yes, the total span is five tiles.

What's with modded inserters like Bob's long long inserter?
It can reach 3 tiles in every direction.

Greetings steinio

[Requia]

Don't know if anyone mentioned it already, but if we are indeed going nuclear, i would like large stationary RTG's, which would be pretty simple, a entity like any other that generates a X amount of power for Y time, considerably less efficient than a full reactor and if possible with power output decay as time passes, to use in outposts and such, and give-me the high resolution pack... i didn't know it was even being discussed, but after seeing the difference... i simple can't take it of my head, i need it. And to RobertTerwilliger, going direct to a pool type molten sodium reactors isn't a little bit overkill? starting with a simpler BWR or PWR is a little easier don't you think?

RTGs produce very little power, even fairly large samples of Pu-238 only produce hundreds of watts, Po-210 is better (140W-thermal per gram) but has a short half-life (138 days) preventing large amounts from being accumulated. There's a reason pretty much only space agencies and pacemakers ever mess around with the things.

[Ordergear]

YES! I was waiting for long for a new way of generating electricity, specificially nuclear.
Allright, here are the things i personally believe that should be included in order for this system to work.

FIRST OF ALL
It has to be hard to build, and require tons of concrete, steel, and other components for everything regarding reactors, centrifugues etc, to compensate for the ludicrous amount of energy produced. Secondly, it should'nt be as simple as mining uranium then trhowing it in a reactor and BOOM, energy. It must require a nice production line with different stages.

DETAILS

allright, we have Uranium mines, which means, it has to be refined. I have almost no idea whatsoever regarding how uranium is refined, but the refinement should be a process that either consumes more time or resources than the average production. After the refinement, we should have to build the reactors, which will consume a lot of water, along with huge cooling towers. It would be nice to have steam clouds coming out of the towers, as a sign they are working preperly.

CONSEQUENCES

Nuclear energy in the game should be unstable, which means that, without proper cooling, it should overheat nad explode. Let's suppose that the reactor is Automatically built with a containment layer included, just like Chernobyl, so the explosion wouldn't destroy everything in a radius, only the reactor itself, and liberate massive amounts of radiation in the area. Also, even if the Power Plant works well, it hsould generate toxic waste, which is inveitably radioactive, and likely would require a train to transport it to another area, since it would slowly kill the player to carry the waste in his inventory. Nuclear waste should be contained in barrels, which when containing such materials, are automatically labeled with the radioactive symbol.

RADIATION

the adverse effects of radiation are up to you ( as everything else ). I don't have many suggestions as to how it would affect the player, but i do regarding the aliens. radiation would make them evolve even faster than pollution, and also, would lure aliens in a wider range to the source of radiation.
Also, it would be nice if players had access to some form of protection from radiation. either a Radiation protection suit, or a device that would repel radiation arround the user, when connected to the power armor. But still, toxic waste cant be carried even using one of those.

Another nice crafting option, a Geiger Counter., if a player doesn't have one of those, he won't realise the radiation arround him until all of his orifices are bleeding and his skin starts falling off.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

The fun thing about factorio and most crafting games, is that most basic resources have a lot of different applications. Iron can be mass produced and redirected into a lot assemblies to be turned into something else. It would be nice if Uranium or whatever radioactive material used in the game could be used for other purposes. I could only think of two. One is a Pesonal Nuclear Reactor, that would be inserted into power armor, generating much more energy than portable solar panels. There would be slots inside the PNR to insert Uranium tablets. The generation of rdiation should be minimal, and not even considerated, maybe.
The second applicatoin i could think of is the most obvious ever: FUCKING NUCLEAR BOMBS. YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH
It should cost a sizeable amount of refined uranium, and there should be a separate, costly research for the making of those. The explosion radius shouldnt be too great, but almost everything in it should be obliterated. Massive amounts of radiation are liberated, as a drawback, luring insane amounts of aliens. I don't see the reason to use one of those right now, only in pvp. But it should be nice at some point in the development.
I was going to suggest how it could be launched. Maybe it would take time to activate once placed, and it would lure aliens in the process, or it could be dropped by an airplane, which is another whole ball of wax to be worked on, soooo, lets leave that away for the moment.
Thanks for the consideration, if there was any

[brunzenstein]

I love the idea of nuclear but I think it shouldn't manage itself. It should be a requirement to use a basic circuit to manage it. Like managing control rod position and water/steam flow. If you've played the big reactors mod in minecraft I really think that's the right way to do it. If you could separate the components like the reactors and turbines and then connect them with pipes etc I think it would make for a very interesting design problem that would be enjoyable to solve and scale.

You could even just use the turbines in place of steam engines in a simple boiler->steam engine build, make them able to handle a higher flow or higher temperatures than the steam engines it would allow for the basic steam setup to be more scalable while also introducing nuclear which would replace the boilers in later game.

I think this is a good chance to make something really interesting, a single building with dumb input and output would be a waste.

+1 excellent idea indeed

[Fatmice]

YES! I was waiting for long for a new way of generating electricity, specificially nuclear.
Allright, here are the things i personally believe that should be included in order for this system to work.

FIRST OF ALL
It has to be hard to build, and require tons of concrete, steel, and other components for everything regarding reactors, centrifugues etc, to compensate for the ludicrous amount of energy produced. Secondly, it should'nt be as simple as mining uranium then trhowing it in a reactor and BOOM, energy. It must require a nice production line with different stages.

DETAILS

allright, we have Uranium mines, which means, it has to be refined. I have almost no idea whatsoever regarding how uranium is refined, but the refinement should be a process that either consumes more time or resources than the average production. After the refinement, we should have to build the reactors, which will consume a lot of water, along with huge cooling towers. It would be nice to have steam clouds coming out of the towers, as a sign they are working preperly.

CONSEQUENCES

Nuclear energy in the game should be unstable, which means that, without proper cooling, it should overheat nad explode. Let's suppose that the reactor is Automatically built with a containment layer included, just like Chernobyl, so the explosion wouldn't destroy everything in a radius, only the reactor itself, and liberate massive amounts of radiation in the area. Also, even if the Power Plant works well, it hsould generate toxic waste, which is inveitably radioactive, and likely would require a train to transport it to another area, since it would slowly kill the player to carry the waste in his inventory. Nuclear waste should be contained in barrels, which when containing such materials, are automatically labeled with the radioactive symbol.

Calm yourself. Nuclear reactors do not explode, even the unsafe ones. There's not enough fissile material in the reactor to achieve supercriticality, the sort of runaway chain reaction for a boom. All reactors are designed to be subcritical so even in the event of major failures, the most they will do is fizzle and expel radioactive gases. This won't fry you to a crisp immediately but will cause terrible lingering environmental hazards for a long time. This sort of misunderstanding about what a nuclear reactor does and how it behaves during failure needs to be stamped out.

RADIATION

the adverse effects of radiation are up to you ( as everything else ). I don't have many suggestions as to how it would affect the player, but i do regarding the aliens. radiation would make them evolve even faster than pollution, and also, would lure aliens in a wider range to the source of radiation.
Also, it would be nice if players had access to some form of protection from radiation. either a Radiation protection suit, or a device that would repel radiation arround the user, when connected to the power armor. But still, toxic waste cant be carried even using one of those.

Another nice crafting option, a Geiger Counter., if a player doesn't have one of those, he won't realise the radiation arround him until all of his orifices are bleeding and his skin starts falling off.

Not really. The more dangerous radiation is gamma radiation. You can't differentiate radiation type with a Geiger counter. The high end armor with shield is more than sufficient to block alpha and beta particles. Heck, it blocks biters' physical and chemical attacks so the shield must be robust enough to block both alpha and beta particles. Gamma and X-rays will be a different matter. The shield might be able to mitigate them not by absorbing but by reflecting the incident rays. The armor it self might be made of very porous nano-material that give rise to a metamaterial that can absorb gamma and x-rays and emit either infrared or visible light at a lower frequency. I haven't even talk about neutron shielding...this is actually quite tricky as proper shielding should deflect the neutron away from you and not allow any to stick as doing so will likely make you radioactive in the process.

Your understand of radiation and its affect is clearly muddle by popular movies. If your skin is falling off or you're bleeding from your nose, then a geiger counter wouldn't even save you. You've received a fatal dose and will die...In fact, the geiger counter would give you a false sense of security since it will be under-reporting the actual amount of radiation around you in this instance.

Radiation doesn't make anything evolve faster...not in the way you are thinking. This is another popular movie induced misunderstanding. Evolution isn't like a race where participants' velocity can be measured. What radiation does is cause random DNA strand nicking or base-base dimerization that interferes with transcription or translation. Depending on where the random damage is and whether it was repaired/restored in time before a message is made that could propagate the error, the damage might have long lasting or no effect. The effect themselves are unpredictable and most often undesirable. More importantly, while the amount of mutation can be quantified relative to the amount of radiation, the rate of evolution, given as a number of propagated base change per generation vs ancestor does not correlate with the amount of radiation. Furthermore, if an organism is routinely subjected to radiation and somehow managed to thrive, then that organism would be very weak without radiation. So if radiation causes a mutation in the biters and those biters thrive, then it would give rise to a special type of biters that are attracted to radiation and be stronger around radiation.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

The fun thing about factorio and most crafting games, is that most basic resources have a lot of different applications. Iron can be mass produced and redirected into a lot assemblies to be turned into something else. It would be nice if Uranium or whatever radioactive material used in the game could be used for other purposes. I could only think of two. One is a Pesonal Nuclear Reactor, that would be inserted into power armor, generating much more energy than portable solar panels. There would be slots inside the PNR to insert Uranium tablets. The generation of rdiation should be minimal, and not even considerated, maybe.
The second applicatoin i could think of is the most obvious ever: FUCKING NUCLEAR BOMBS. YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH
It should cost a sizeable amount of refined uranium, and there should be a separate, costly research for the making of those. The explosion radius shouldnt be too great, but almost everything in it should be obliterated. Massive amounts of radiation are liberated, as a drawback, luring insane amounts of aliens. I don't see the reason to use one of those right now, only in pvp. But it should be nice at some point in the development.
I was going to suggest how it could be launched. Maybe it would take time to activate once placed, and it would lure aliens in the process, or it could be dropped by an airplane, which is another whole ball of wax to be worked on, soooo, lets leave that away for the moment.
Thanks for the consideration, if there was any

Clearly, a bomb is not something anyone want you to have. You would launch it willy nilly. The amount of grief on a server would be enormous from all of that radiation fallout.

[Enkal]

When it comes to nuclear I just got an idea from real life that could work well for Factorio: Nuclear batteries.

These are essentially self contained, walk away safe mini nuclear plants (30 MW thermal or so) that has an output of steam (or hot water if you do not want new mechanics). They last about 30 years before you send them back to the factory for refueling so basically a one off thing like solar panel + accumulator.

To build one you would need U/Th-ore processed in a chem plant to U/Th-metal (with new resources: U/Th metal + flouride to make the fuel salt), steel, concrete, green or red circuits, amounts of each would be down to balancing. Input water, output hot water/steam. Hot water to be sent to steam engines or if you want to tier this: some sort of high temperature steam turbine. On the resource side I see it a bit as a smaller version of the rocket silo. It would be an accomplishment to build but as a mid game milestone.

Pros: Zero pollution, compact, high power
Cons: expensive

All the talk in these forums about nuclear fallout and such should know that even the Chernobyl area has been fully inhabitable since early 1987 and that the other reactors in the cluster next to the disaster reactor were in full production until 1994. Radiation and nuclear disasters are not even a fraction as dangerous as media/environmentalists wants you to believe. Coal power on the other hand...

[afk2minute]

not only armour protects you from radiation, but also your space suit (you crashed in spaceship, remember?), and it should have some protection from space radiation

maybe make everything need containers, so even ore goes in containers, special warehouse for them, so they dont pollute, special train wagon. Belting hazardous materials without containers feels silly.

[hitzu]

RTGs produce very little power, even fairly large samples of Pu-238 only produce hundreds of watts, Po-210 is better (140W-thermal per gram) but has a short half-life (138 days) preventing large amounts from being accumulated. There's a reason pretty much only space agencies and pacemakers ever mess around with the things.

Even though Portable RTG is more realistic then portable fusion reactor

I love the idea of nuclear but I think it shouldn't manage itself. It should be a requirement to use a basic circuit to manage it. Like managing control rod position and water/steam flow. If you've played the big reactors mod in minecraft I really think that's the right way to do it. If you could separate the components like the reactors and turbines and then connect them with pipes etc I think it would make for a very interesting design problem that would be enjoyable to solve and scale.

You could even just use the turbines in place of steam engines in a simple boiler->steam engine build, make them able to handle a higher flow or higher temperatures than the steam engines it would allow for the basic steam setup to be more scalable while also introducing nuclear which would replace the boilers in later game.

I think this is a good chance to make something really interesting, a single building with dumb input and output would be a waste.

I fully agree!
The whole setup should be:

a) Scalable. You have to decide how much power you want and how efficient it would be by choosing the amount of reaction chambers, the size of the heat output and the heat exchange setup.

b) Circuit-controlled. Without it the reaction can become uncontrollable, leading to ejection of radioactive steam and possibly to meltdown. Basic circuit network should control rods, pumps and valves.

c) Not ideal. There shouldn't be an ideal one size feats all setup. Different approaches would exist for different purposes.

[HanziQ]

This is how I interpret this: the top-left tile of each chunk is labeled 1. The tile immediately to the right is labeled two. The next tile is labeled three. The next tile is labeled one. And so on.

Chunks are numbered, not tiles.

[Zeblote]

This is how I interpret this: the top-left tile of each chunk is labeled 1. The tile immediately to the right is labeled two. The next tile is labeled three. The next tile is labeled one. And so on.

Chunks are numbered, not tiles.

That makes a lot more sense. The blog post said you want to divide the chunks into 3x3 grids so it's kind of confusing...

[katanatan]

I myself think that the nuclear power plant should be actually quite big. It should consist of multiple buildings of wichi some are to produce the uranium / enrich it and then the reactor itself and several engines connected to it.
The first question would be if it uses the same "hot water pipe steam engine" system like the "boiler steamengine system", if it should use larger and more efficient pipes and or engines or if the waterflow (hot water) should even be considered in nuclear powerplants.
I myself would like to have stronger power plants with boilers (or nuclear reactors) producing more heat and pipes with more thoughput and steam engines with more power.

So i suggest using a reactor heating huge watertanks with bigger pipes for more throughput leading into 1 or several huge steamengines.
The switching of the power production should be no problem for the npp (nuclear powerplant) for they can just pull out the radioactive sticks.
I have no suggestion wether you should invent a new ressource to drill, or a side product of other drills or as suggest in earlier post you should be able to crack stone and coal.

Nuclear waste and mutations sounds very interesting and somewhat romantic industrial flair.

So much to the nuclear power plant.


Now for lategame weapons you should be able to make heavy water (tritium) and enrich to 238 or even find plutonium to create nukes. I play with mods for more weapons because the tank and the nowaday fighting system is unsadisfying.
it is mainly a "turret creeping", moving laser turret walls tile for tile. and the new flamesthrowers are not that effective on highest settings and against behemoths.

We need nukes to waste those aliens. I dont care wether with a bomber or with rockets (smaller rockets than the satellite rocket ofc) but the game really needs a late game weapon.

PS. Sorry for the english, i was in a hurry.

[Fortanono]

I want an alternative coolant besides water, but none of the other materials match that, and adding two new ores would just be clutter. So I suggest using Lead as a byproduct of depleted uranium, and then using that lead as an alternative coolant for reactors in the form of molten lead. Molten lead would be a more powerful but more dangerous alternative to water. In addition, it could be used in processing units instead of Sulfuric Acid so it spaces out the tiers of circuit a bit more.

[EvilMushroom]

reactor is not a nuclear bomb.
It will not 'explode killing everything around', like you want to imagine.

I know that, but as I said "I don’t think it would be much fun to realistically irradiate the area", so I thought in the fictional world of Factorio, why not make it act like a bomb for gameplay purposes.

[EvilMushroom]

you should read more into nuclear power plants then, because there are literally hundreds of fail-safe mechanisms to prevent a meltdown. It takes extreme conditions for it to happen, not just a simple power outage, but a series of unexpected events.

But no passive failsafes. It requires active effort to prevent a nuclear power plant from melting down. You can't just shut the thing off.

[m44v]

Any word in adding a few more resources besides whatever is used for nuclear fuel? such as sand and aluminium as discussed here?

[Enkal]

you should read more into nuclear power plants then, because there are literally hundreds of fail-safe mechanisms to prevent a meltdown. It takes extreme conditions for it to happen, not just a simple power outage, but a series of unexpected events.

But no passive failsafes. It requires active effort to prevent a nuclear power plant from melting down. You can't just shut the thing off.

Most Generation 4 nuclear power plant designs in real life are walk away safe. Many of them are fast neutron reactors that are self regulating.

[afk2minute]

I dont see any gameplay improvements from explosions.
Some penalties (drop in power, additional fuel consumed, just like with steam engines) is enough.

[JC1223]

For nuclear power I think you need to mine it and then send it to an ore washer thing and then a nuclear refinery and then it is ready to go in a reactor which would need cooling.
Also I think something to have by 1.0 is map version compatibility so we don't always have to start over every time the game updates to have the new content.