Friday Facts #167 - Reactors Operational

[miturion]

That desert looks amazing, looks a lot better than current terrain. Great work.

[vipm23]

factorio_powerplant_suggestion.pdf

my suggestion and how the circulating water could make sense.
please correct if I am wrong with anything

Nice idea, I like most of it.
On the lower left I think you changed the conections on the boiler

Personally prefer the furnace-heat pipe-boiler idea from earlier, but that could work too.

[MalcolmCooks]

I prefer the way the devs have it set up now

[RubyRhod]

I don't get why you cannot add the new boiler and change the old one accordingly --> 2 boilers. the 1x1 wouldn't allow for complex structures or compact design and the 6x6 should be more expensive than 6 of the 1x1. solved. I really don't get why you always have to change everything instead of improving the old game.
To me it really makes no sense why we would have 3 types of belts, factories, foundries but only one type of energy source (boiler - and many many other examples).

[Gertibrumm]

Thats why we have to reduce the unintuitive things to simple mechanics but add variety. this is done by changing things from how they were
I personally liked the old boiler.
Its the same with the new pump, why increase size?? can somebody please explain?

[Nilaus]

I have a bit mixed feeling about the nuclear technology they are creating; I love the 3x2 boiler and the concept of nuclear power, but it seems a bit too simple now that it is simply an extra step between the boiler and the steam engine. They should take a look at the brilliant Uranium Power mod by Fatmice: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Fatmice/UraniumPower. This is beautiful, complex and does the job pretty damn well.

[Ohz]

Wait.

A nuclear reactor can connect to only 6 boilers? Ok maybe heat pipes around and then more boilers...

Is it REALLY more efficient than 10k of solar panel that cost no GPU ?

Nuclear power is for GIGANTIC factory, and should worth a tons of solar panel. It should be ridiculously small, stupidly expensive and unstable, and what make it bigger would be all the stabilizer devices (cooling tower, pipes, no clue). Steam engines should be not related to the nuclear reactor. Nuclear Reactor is a Steam Engine itself, worth 10 by is own, and multipliate with his neighbors (2 nuclear = 10x10= 100 steam engines, 3 nuclear = 10^3= 1000 steam engines, but very unstable, ect).

If you need to reach nuclear power, is because you are tired of your 100k solar panel + 10k steam engines and want 1 electric generator super killer by his look and the smart thoughts you put into it to make it stable.

(Edit: And why Nuclear reactor is smaller than 10 or 4 are smaller than 1k steam engine, just technology. Remember, Steam Engines are from Industrial Revolution times, feed by coal, and Nuclear is a way more advanced tech (therefore more compact and efficient, less loss))

Red canyon and HD work is absolutly astonishing.

[DaemosDaen]

I don't mind the changed to Boilers as long as they produce more steam and more efficiently. Also costing more as they are bigger and better. Keep in mind that they are one of the first things you make though, so you have to wait that much longer to get to electric, which is an important step due to needing to research to get to military. Maybe slow down the biter expansion due to time (leaving pollution alone). Also steam engines power output needs to be optimized to be on par with the CPU efficiency of Solar.

[Drury]

Is it REALLY more efficient than 10k of solar panel that cost no GPU ?

I trust they aren't doing compute shader magic on the GPU with the reactors

(Edit: And why Nuclear reactor is smaller than 10 or 4 are smaller than 1k steam engine, just technology. Remember, Steam Engines are from Industrial Revolution times, feed by coal, and Nuclear is a way more advanced tech (therefore more compact and efficient, less loss))

First of all, it's a game, second of all... Nuclear reactors aren't really that large, not even IRL. The core is about the size of a car and with all necessary shielding you could still fit it inside a house. With Factorio scale taken into account (refinery the size of a small boat), it's just about right.

[Sigma1]

I have a bit mixed feeling about the nuclear technology they are creating; I love the 3x2 boiler and the concept of nuclear power, but it seems a bit too simple now that it is simply an extra step between the boiler and the steam engine. They should take a look at the brilliant Uranium Power mod by Fatmice: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Fatmice/UraniumPower. This is beautiful, complex and does the job pretty damn well.

I totally agree with this, I also think the proposed mechanics are a bit too simple as it is some very advance technology after all.

[Mendel]

But is it just for power or for weapons too?

[ssilk]

Completly different subject: Has someone noticed the radius of the (broken) rails? It looks about doubled...

[BDA81]

I´m so looking Forward for 0.15 but i must assist Nilaus,

I have a bit mixed feeling about the nuclear technology they are creating; I love the 3x2 boiler and the concept of nuclear power, but it seems a bit too simple now that it is simply an extra step between the boiler and the steam engine. They should take a look at the brilliant Uranium Power mod by Fatmice: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Fatmice/UraniumPower. This is beautiful, complex and does the job pretty damn well.

because just a boiler doesn´t fits nuclear power.

[jo2k]

Yeah, I like it.

But I also think that the electrical network itself needs some rework. Currently you can power your multiple GW consuming base through a single cable. That's easy, but not really good. The electrical network should be more complicated (like the fluid system). The maximum throughput of a cable must be limited to some more realistic value. If you need to send more power over a single cable you need transformer stations and use high voltages on that particular cable or something like this. If a cable is used above it's limit it must get hotter and hotter until it blows out like a fuse. That would be great.

[indjev99]

Okay my first conclusion is... make the Reactors 6x6 and with 2 heat connections on each side, like so:

Nuclear Power 1.png

Allows for much better patterns when placing the Nuclear Reactors next to one another. Also allows for two 2x3 Boilers on each reactor side.


5x5 is really bad when combining several of them, I tried it and it becomes extremely inefficient because the connections don't align anymore.


Either that or make the entire edge of the reactor snap to another reactor/boiler because otherwise it might be frustrating to find patterns that allow for "puzzling" around.

I second that.

[3trip]

Nice, but where do I extract the depleted uranium for improved ammunition?

[MeduSalem]

Well I said I would look into the matter a little bit and this what I came up with:

(though I posted it also in this thread already: viewtopic.php?p=228975#p228975)


Like I said on the first page of the thread here a 6x6 footprint of the Nuclear Reactor would be much better:

Heat Exchanger Nuclear.png (16.97 KiB) Viewed 9256 times

It allows a much better arrangement of Heat Exchangers around the Nuclear Reactor.

With the Heat-Exchanger only being 1x3 you can use Long-Handed Inserters for fuel input and exhausted fuel output. I made the Boiler-Heat-Exchanger thingy 1x3 on purpose... because 2x3 really sucks, especially if you want to use it in tight locations, like in between of Beacons Setups etc. 1x3 is still big enough to fit a Water-Input, a Rest-Water-Output and the Steam-Output boxes.

Also the 6x6 footprint allows for better patterns placing multiple Nuclear Reactors next to each other to profit from the increased Heat Exchange between reactors, as already mentioned earlier:

Patterns

Nuclear Power 1.png (25.2 KiB) Viewed 9256 times

More patterns are possible, that's just a few I came up with for testing the Heat-Exchange connectivity.

That said I'm not entirely happy of just turning the old boiler into a Boiler-Heat-Exchanger-Hybrid. So what I would do additionally is give anything that creates thermal radiation also a Heat-Connection like Nuclear Reactors are going to have. So Furnaces/Assemblers/ChemPlants/Refineries/etc all have heat connections too... and you can place Heat-Exchangers next to them to profit from their thermal radiation that would otherwise be wasted. It would at least improve the efficiency of how energy is used/re-used.

With that idea you could use your initial furnaces as an additional way to produce energy as a byproduct of the smetling process when they are smelting, something like so:

Heat Exchanger.png (35.56 KiB) Viewed 9256 times

[Gertibrumm]

Since FFF 167 is in a way the same thread, ill synchronize:

factorio_exchanger_suggestion.jpg (846.58 KiB) Viewed 9254 times

[tk0421]

is terrain segmentation on map generation ever coming back?

every map i make is ALWAYS covered with about 80% or more forests.
it really makes the early game unbearable with all the manual chopping to clear room for every single item i want to place

[Moo Rhy]

I don't see why boilers should produce hot water. There's no use for it, so leave it away. Boilers should convert all of the water to steam. Similar to the current boiler we get something like this:



The boiler consumes water and fuel and produces steam. Several small boilers feed one steam engine. You could think about a big boiler that exactly feeds one steam engine and is more efficient then the small ones. Another argument for the big boiler might be that it can burn every kind of fuel while the small one only burns wood, coal and solid fuel. Better fuels allow higher steam temperatures. For example wood is only good enough for steam at 250°C, coal 400°C, oil, gas and solid fuel 600°C. Higher temperatures mean more electric power.

The next advancement is the steam turbine which is much more efficient than the steam engine. Let's say something about 5x more energy from the same steam resource. The turbine consumes hot steam and produces "cold" steam. It produces more eletric power the hotter the incoming steam is. Also the released steam is hotter. That means that it is possible to build several turbines in series but of course every following turbine has less and less power. For example the first one gets steam at 600°C, the second one gets 300°C and the exhaled steam has just 150°C which can't really be used anymore. This steam is now cooled down in a cooling tower and becomes water again. This water can be fed into the boiler to create a closed cycle, that only needs water for the cooling tower which is much less than it would need when the cold steam is released into the enviroment.



The next step is the gas turbine. This is similar to the aviation engines on modern planes. It can run solely on fuel (oil or gas) and produces electric power. Now the thing is, it also creates a lot of heat that can be used. Connect a water pipe to it and it produces steam that can be used in a steam engine. The overall fuel to electricity efficiency is increased against the those of the boilers.



I like the some aspects of the previous reactor designs. The reactors needs very low amounts of fuel. Instead of current designs this reactors uses molten salt (or any other futuristic design) inside which makes it more reliable and more efficient. It consumes water and produces steam at 1000°C, hotter than any boiler can, and Is also big enough to feed several lines of turbines. The reactor itself doesn't emit any pollution. You could think about a reprocessing cycle for the nuclear waste that reduces the amount of used ore. These are the pro nuclear aspects. But there are also some cons:
1. The production of a single amount of fuel is very expensive.
2. The reactor needs a long time to change it's power. That means it always needs some additional power plants or accumulators.
3. If the cooling fails the reactor explodes and creates a ruin that creates a ton of pollution forever. The radiation destroys everything that comes too close. The player, cars, robots. Which means the ruin can't be erased. The same happens if the reacotr is destroyed during an attack.
4. Once the reactor is filled with fuel it can only be torn down by robots and it needs a very long time to do so.