Friday Facts #173 - Nuclear stuff is almost done

[IronCartographer]

Some parts of the planned stuff like cooling towers and closed water cycle were dropped.

I'm kinda disappointed to see the closed water loop being dropped, was very much looking forward to using that with the old boiler/steam engine setup.
Those I still find a pain in the ass to setup since the water pumps have to either be placed manually (haven't seen any coast straight enough for more than a couple lines) or require filling half a see to create a long, straight coast. Would have been nice to blueprint a closed system I could put anywhere, fill with water, done.

I hadn't even considered how much a closed or nearly-closed loop system would simplify the construction of steam power layouts. That's a huge reason to include cooling towers.

With water reuse, steam power in the desert fed by water in rail tankers would go from a joke to something far more reasonable.

This would be especially desirable if it unlocked before nuclear power, as a way to make coal power more efficient and begin learning about proper thermal management.

All it would take is adding two simple entities: The turbine, and the cooling tower. Would mods be able to add those efficiently?

Something to consider from a marketing perspective: Think about how much better it would look to have an iconic cooling tower in the trailer while showing off the nuclear power!

[Linosaurus]

I hope that heat pipes still lose efficiency with distance as was mentioned in FF #164.

Alternative idea to meltdown.
- Reactors have a ramp up time, they only reach 100% power after maybe three minutes.
- If you don't use all the heat, a little bar fills on the reactor.
- When it is full, the safety systems shuts the reactor down and the ramp up time starts over. With a big steam cloud and a bunch of pollution.

Thus if your only power source is a big reactor that is not properly controlled or cooled, you'll have severe power issues for a few minutes every once in a while. Which gives a nice sense of excitement when your lasers suddenly don't work for a minute or two, but not as crippling as the other source of major power failure: a brownout in a steam powered base.

Overheating shouldn't happen to a single reactor, in order to keep nuclear power accessible.

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If the mining upgrade really does take forever and a half to pay off, then it'll not actually be profitable in most games. It will still give people a reason to keep their science factory running forever which is nice. But I think I would prefer if the first levels where worth it for all bases, but the latter levels only worth it for mega bases or really long term projects.

[Proply]

Depleted uranium bullets/tank rounds would be nice late-game U238 sinks to go with this update.

[MrGrim]

At risk of Flame - I think the complexity of Nuclear Power is perfect for Vanilla

In Short:
Nuclear Power is/will be the most complex power setup a player can have
Let a mod-er make it more complex / realistic

In Long:
Looking at everything, it is by Far the most Complex Power Setup in the Game.

Steam Power is pretty easy to make...but requires a steady supply of coal, but that coal is easy to make...logicticaly speaking, does't real get that complex, and expansion is pretty easy.
Solar Power & Accums, more complex to make, but don't really require maintenance, and they are pretty much just build and forget.

Nuclear power ... Needs Refinements, a supply line, etc... Additionally if you want more power, it takes a lot more thought into expansion, You have to not only consider The design of adding another reactor, but how much you need to expand your refinement capabilities by, and you raw intake.

I think they (the devs) should just make sure its open enough for mod-ers to make it more complex.

This solutions is ok for people who play modded games. Not everybody does.

It doesn't even really add any more complexity on top of coal. Plopping a few assemblers down to turn ore into fuel isn't a challenge. If an update came out tomorrow that required me to run my coal through an assembler to get fuel for my boilers it would take seconds to do. The fuel processing setup looks barely more complex than a red science setup.

For an end game power source there sure is a disappointing lack of end game features required to use it efficiently and effectively. Even the heat removal aspect is simplistic as depicted. I'll probably just stick with solar unless accumulators stop being infinitely reusable (I still think batteries should be a consumable there).

I'm still optimistic for 0.15 for all of the other polish added to it as 0.14 is already a fantastic game, but I've never been disappointed in a FFF before. This one stings a bit.

[The Eriksonn]

I want to know what combinator capabilities this reactor has, I remember in my minecraft modpacks how i used computers to calculate exactly how many reactors and turbines was neccecary to be on to power the base without waste... good times. Will it be possible with these reactors?

Also, the minecraft turbines had a quite long "spin up time" so that you had to take that into the calculations, will that be here as well? Would be fun

Edit: can you put electric pumps on heat pipes?

[Yoshifizzle]

I had the same thought about what to do with the excess U238 after making the nuclear fuel...depleted uranium bullets/shells. It might give a reason for bullets/tanks to be used in the late game if they are effective against behemoths.

[IronCartographer]

Edit: can you put electric pumps on heat pipes?

Heat pipes will be more like electrical conductors than fluid flows, with similar simplification of the simulation for gameplay and performance reasons.

[vipm23]

Sam

By the time you reach endgame, you have basically endless free power from solar farms. Turbines would help fill the gap between coal power plant running out of space for expansion and mass production of panels and accumulators, which in turn would provide a need for greater fuel efficiency solved by researching and utilizing cooling towers.

IMO it's the reactors which should be postponed. At the very least they need to be available around the same time as solar panels, because otherwise they're superfluous.

Same here. At the very least add the closed water cycle in the update immediately after.

[hoho]

good news.. but... wait.. no iconic cooling towers

I skimmed over some of the replies so this may have already been proposed but why not just integrate the cooling towers into whatever the graphics for the reactors would end up being?

It probably wouldn't be as impressive as a separate huge building but it'd be a nice to see nonetheless. For future developments you could just say that the 0.15 version is a small-ish nuclear battery-type thingy and "real" nuclear plants with separate cooling towers are in future versions.

[OBXandos]

My opinion is that this is the proper kind of complexity. I never saw the supply chains very complex in this game. What was complex was setting up 50 supply chains. This seems like the same thing. Having one reactor and four boilers is easy, but two reactors and 8 boilers steps it up. You double the amount of your reactors and quadruple the amount of your boilers. I see the complexity in having to plan the system around your existing factory footprint.

Some places for complexity could come from things like uneven power generation or inability to react to power changes quickly(like lots of laser turrets going off at once). This would make you rely on accumulators or coal/steam to handle the spikes. Another place could be slow ramp up and ramp down times with risks of boiler/reactor explosions if the steam is not stored or utilized.

I like someone else's idea about U238 tank rounds. We could also convert the Uranium into Plutonium for use in satellites that need to be launched or an advanced fuel for the nuclear reactors.

[Commander Gizmo]

I am also very disappointed. This design seems less interesting and useful than the current nuclear power plant mods, such as my personal favorite: Reactor. I think if this gets added, I will prefer to just keep using the mod and ignore the in game implementation. At least that mod offers an annoying penalty for a poor design when your reactors automatically shutdown for a time. It also offers depleted uranium bullets and shells as well as a much, much, smaller footprint for each GJ of power generated. You even have the choice between a breeder reactor to produce more highly enriched fuel, but with less fuel efficiency, or a standard reactor that is highly efficient but requires enriched fuel.

The suggested concept only offers a new way to generate heat, but does nothing to minimize the massive space needed to build hundreds of the current 'steam engine' to make power. It also offers very little in the idea of complexity at all. The fact that you need to figure out the most efficient use of space to attach enough 'boilers' to the reactors is at most a one time issue. Once you blueprint the most efficient layout you're done. Without a severe penalty for a poor design (meltdown isn't the only one, even in real life) to balance against, it really isn't much of a challenge.

I also agree that the boilers are misnamed. In real life they are called Steam Generators, and they take the hot reactor coolant and use it in a set of heat exchangers to boil non-contaminated water into steam. That steam is then run through a Turbine, which is a very large, very long, and somewhat dangerous device that converts the steam energy into rotational force to spin a generator.

Here's a few suggestions for possible penalties for not regulating the reactors properly:

• 1) Meltdown - obvious option
  2) Emergency Shutdown - In the future, reactors have control systems that just shut them down if the risk is too high. You have to wait for the heat to fully dissipate and a safety delay to expire. This means your reactor is down for an extended period and not generating power.
  3) Pollution Release - If the reactor isn't running efficiently (maybe heat is over threshold) it starts outputting a much, much higher level of pollution per minute. This would have to be enough to alter the evolution rate of the biters to be a real penalty.
  4) Efficiency - Your fuel usage rate per MJ is based on the temperature being in a nominal range. Too low or too high will still work, but you'll need a lot more ore and a much larger refinement facility to keep up. Players can still use nuclear without building a combinator control system, but it is highly encouraged to get the most out of your reactor.
  5) Byproducts - Your reactor has a chance to produce certain useful byproducts, but only at certain temperature ranges. Thus, you can produce the product you want by changing the temperature that you run your reactor at.

Seriously, I really encourage the devs to take a look at the Reactor and Nuclear mods for some ideas on what we, the players, have found as a starting balance for reactors.

[Ranakastrasz]

Heh. The placeholder images are clearly from Industrial-craft II. I was going to say gregtech, but apparent Industrial-craft updated since last I played.

[DaveMcW]

The radiation symbol is an international standard, of course it looks similar to Industrial-craft. But it's not identical.

[Uxi]

The images show one pump per reactor. Can a reactor only power 10 steam engines?

[Ranakastrasz]

The radiation symbol is an international standard, of course it looks similar to Industrial-craft. But it's not identical.

No no, I meant the Fuel rod and Uranium icons for the items.

http://wiki.industrial-craft.net/index. ... ranium-238
http://wiki.industrial-craft.net/index. ... _(Uranium)

Sure, it is pretty zoomed out, but one glance made me think Industrialcraft. The icons are either from there or from the same third party source.

Or they just coincidentally look really, really similar.
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Mechanic wise, to a mild extent too. As in, if you wern't already familer with IC2 nuclear mechanics, you would miss it. In IC2 Reactors, adjacent fuel cells double power output without increasing fuel use, at the cost of a serious cooling issue. Its wierd ofc given that it produces raw power and heat is just waste, instead of the heat being the end itself, used to heat water to steam to power turbines.... Like it is here.

Not complaining, just pointing it out.

[Ranakastrasz]

O_O.

Productvity research. I hope that is applicable to anything, not just mining drills. (And able to support any processing entity having an intrinsic productivity amount). Making the Science lab upgrades a productivity bonus instead of a speed bonus would be awesome.

[3trip]

Kovarex, will we be able to utilize the depleted uranium 238 in ammunition?

[thereaverofdarkness]

I don't see a problem with having leftover U-238. It would be a useful material for ammunition.

[Drury]

O_O.

Productvity research. I hope that is applicable to anything, not just mining drills. (And able to support any processing entity having an intrinsic productivity amount). Making the Science lab upgrades a productivity bonus instead of a speed bonus would be awesome.

That would actually be pretty terrible.

Labs requirements wouldn't change at all and the challenge of supplying enough science for high-tier research would greatly diminish.

[ohmusama]

I'd like to see a smelting option using heat pipes