Friday Facts #173 - Nuclear stuff is almost done

[kinnom]

First Steps is the first part of the story, and what you can play in the demo.
New Hope is the secong part of the story, unlocked by buying the game.
Transport belt madness and Tight spot are challenges.

[Deadly-Bagel]

First Steps and New Hope are okay but more a tutorial than a campaign.

I'm talking about freeplay, honestly I haven't read the message at the start in ages but it's something along the lines of "Your goal is to launch a satellite into space". No explanation, no motive, just an abstract target so it's not very fulfilling when you accomplish it.

[FasterJump]

I very dislike the heat pipes.
Here is what i'd like for nuclear power in factorio:

v2.3.png (2.28 MiB) Viewed 7154 times

This diagragram represents my comprehension of nuclear power in real life, and is close to the factorio screenshot (with vertical symetry)

diagram_irl.png (73.98 KiB) Viewed 7154 times

Maybe I should make a dedicated thread for discussion?

[Ranakastrasz]

That actually looks really good. I personally hate the idea of heat pipes as well.

[Linosaurus]

So on one hand that looks cool. On the other hand, it's going to be tough to explain to the player why exactly there should be three separate pipes with hot water in them instead of, say, one.

A new player might do cold water -> nuclear plant -> turbine ( -> steam engine to get rid of the water). This should still work without a great downside I feel. Even if it seems like it should give gigantic amounts of extra pollution. So maybe this works, but doing it properly as you described gives you five times more power.

[IronCartographer]

Too much realism can be detrimental to gameplay. If a steam power setup requires manually filling closed loops with an initial amount of fluid, it breaks the idea of being able to blueprint and recreate whatever creative solution the player had built before (even if nuclear power incentivizes building *bigger* rather than blueprinting, it should still be feasible).

[Exasperation]

I very dislike the heat pipes.
Here is what i'd like for nuclear power in factorio:

Or maybe we could say that Factorio is set more than 20 years in the future*, and is using a Generation IV design which replaces the high-pressure contaminated water loop with heat pipes carrying a low pressure thermal transfer medium (such as molten salts). That way we could replace the contaminated water pipes with heat transfer pipes while still preserving realism. As an added bonus, we would be able to do away with the risk of the reactor exploding!

*Gen IV reactors are expected to be available for commercial construction by the 2030s

[Gertibrumm]

I am not going to rant about the drop of closed water cycle even though I would love to,
anyway..

An open water cycle is a totally fine thing to do,
it should reward the player with less efficiency, more pollution (as a replacement for radioactive vapor), limit in poweroutput.

A closed water cycle could be buildt once pumps are researched, it is still the players choice to use the more efficient and compact closed system.
Only requirement: coolingtower (IronCartographers images of the cooling tower look really nice)

Oh and a real mid to endgame powerplant needs a turbine, not bluish engines, no contradictions

Also heatpipes to other heat-devices is a must! (for coal firing, pls no coal burning inside boilers)

[Cabanur]

Plase make a nuclear catastrophe possible. Something like being over its max temperature damages (removes HP) the entity, thus sounding the alarm and inmediately alerting the player. The nuclear plant has a very high amount of HP so there's time, but if it gets to 0, it sets on fire everything in a very big radious. Since currently there's no way to extinguish fires, this may be close enough to a radiation effect that lasts maybe one hour of real time.

This could be quite hard on newbies, but the game has an autosave feautre which is on by default so they'd just be able to load a game in time to fix it.

[Anthlon]

I was looking forward to take care about whole nuclear system in game, a bit more than around other stuff because we are talking "nuclear".
I know that the simplicity is the goal. I think that there is simple, but yet a little bendy way to do that.

One idea can be controlling the power/throttle of reactor - gaining power output
Other idea providing fuel for that situation
Other is handling the water/steam in lower temperatures

Possible thoughts i was wandering about
Controlling power
possible modes
-OFF- (reactor dead, cold, safe to dismantle system) You can switch only from this to idle,
-Idle- Reactor running for almost nothing, need system to live but you can quickly reconnect or change some components around,you can switch modes from this point anywhere.
-Normal- Reactor running, need system to live and keep it safe, power output normal
-Full- Reactor running on full power output, it has to be carefully managed, providing cooling, when it runs out of fuel it will stop (causing you to insert again a more for switch it on)

Providing Fuel
-Start of reactor could need a lot more than usual ammount of fuel, so you have to consider when you will turn it on.
-Idle is running reactor with extremly low consumption and almost none electric/steam production
-normal is a bit more consuming
-full is the most but still running on full is considerably cheaper than starting it each minute
when reactor don't get a fuel it will stop forcing you to insert a lot more fuel once more (possibly adding a starting element item..)

Handling water
-On off no water consumed.
-If you run reactor on idle water is consumed slowly and over heat is far away, if needed can be used with two tanks first with water other empty to collect low pressure steam to give you a lot time to construct whatever around or rewire pipes while still running.
-Normal power produces typical values of steam enabling serious ammount of electricity
-Full power mode is sensitive to water providing and steam dispatching away does not matter if it is used for electricity or whatever

Any delaying with steam dispatch increase system (reactor) temperature which in final could damage building (standard way), when not handled well final blow will happen. Lets not talk about a way how it explode, and just for thinking about idea lets talk it will be destroyed usual way.
Mode can be controlled directly from building menu or wired to anything else reacting on anything possible.

What do you think? I am also for the cooling towers return, because without that is no nuclear, just another boiler for another coal..and that is sad..

[burner]

Well target is to get off from that planet so why to save nature? Probably it will work that you can just replace your coal boilers with nuclear boiler. Then you can use normal steam engine or upgrade it to steam turbine what need also output pipe. That output pipe can go back to lake. It is simple but not too realistic. Also If we want cooling towers how about you can replace that output to lake with it and it will boost off shore pump? So that if you do not use cooling towers it will need ridiculous amount of pumps to pump water from lake.
I like that nuclear system anyway. I think each player wants it little bit different way so best is that you just make it how you feel it is best

ps. Probably it is good to try add some extra goals after satellite launch. Maybe possibility to build nuke and shoot aliens or co players with it. Then it give possibility to play game as arms race.

[Gertibrumm]

Actually cooling towers are not necessary if we could use cold sea water to condense the steam after turbines/fancy-new-blue-engines though that would require the possibility to dump hot water in lakes and sea
Ill be waiting for liquid dumping anyway -> swamps anyone?

[stm]

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but anyway:
Considering this proposed/implemented incarnation, what is supposed to be the advantage of nuclear power? Except that it does not use Carbon based fuel and maybe has reduced pollution I do not see any upside in comparison with "normal" steam power?!
And Is the Fuel supply for boilers really an issue? Usually even "dry" oilwells can be used as an ample supply for solid fuel to power the base, or so I've heard.
So loocking at different aspects of power generation even disregarding solar power for the moment

• Footprint: Even neglecting the generation of reactor fuel (which will cover space, but so do refineries etc.) nuclear power loses to burning, since the reactor has to be attached as an additional element to the boilers, which instead could directly be supplied with fuel (Ok, this also takes space, but loocking at the samples I'd say coal isn't worse and does scale better)
• Waterusage: Since in both cases the same buildings are used to produce energy, and I sounds like the even the boilers are the same, the waterusage should be equivalent
• Fuel: Both versions require fuel, and even if you propably need less nuclear fuel than carbon based, is this an issue (except for certain maps)? This gets even worse considering that nuclear fuel seems to be spend independently of it's need (otherwise the remark about the efficiency does not really make sense), where as carbon based fuel propably will still only be burned if the steam is used.
  Additionally carbon based has the advantage of beeng able to burn different kinds of fuel so you are less likely to run out.
• Pollution: Nuclear will propably have less polution than carbon, but how big an issue is this, and if it is an issue, wouldn't you already be in solar mode when you research nuclear?
• Cost: Since You start with carbon based power and have to research nuclear and then have to complicately fabricate reactor fuel from mining uranium carbon based wins here since you just need a few cheap belts and inserters more

I might have missunderstood something in the posts, and I'm definately not against adding nuclear power as a third option, but at the moment I don't see any reason to use it. Outposts will still have to be powered by solar if one does not run power poles everywhere, and anyway it does not make a huge difference which kind of fuel you carry around. By the way some people even use the locomotive of the train as dedicated fuel carrier. Even if you need less nuclear fuel, for gameplay reasons you still will have to transport relevant ammounts.
For me it certainly looks like nuclear is combining the disadvantages of solar and carbon based steam power with no real advantage. Now I might be wrong with my interpretations here since we don't have the ability to playtest the theories, and everybody will propably build a reactor at least once (And propably more often since I think it is most likely that the reactor will get additional usage (e.g. as source of weapon grade material) at some point) but as a powersource it looks kind of useless to me t the moment.
It would be easy to fix though: Either enable some kind of water reclamaition which is only available for nuclear power, or at least enable us to build compact reactor setups (which meens you would e.g. only need one boiler per reactor which then would generate an amount of steam which is a factor of X higher then when using carbon fuel inside of them). This would drop one of the design challanges from the game, but give nuclear a clear advantage over both competitors.
I hope everything is understandable
Stm
P.S.: I too think the U235 content of the ore should be a map parameter. This would make it even more fun, since would not be able to give clear production ratios for your setup independent of the percentage.