[0.16.x] Bob's Mods: General Discussion

[bobingabout]

Doesn't hydrogen have a low fuel value in reality too because it isn't dense? There simply isn't that much hydrogen in a liter or hydrogen.

On the other hand converting 100 liter of water into 60 liter of hydrogen would mean it is under extreme pressure (maybe even liquid?). Releasing that pressure in the boiler would cool it down a lot and eat into the gain from burning it, right? So a low fuel value seems right.

true it's not dense, which is sort of why it works, but all the values are taken to be energy per kilo... or per 100g because of the "multiplied all fluids by 10" thing a while back, or per 50g in 0.17 because of the "halved all fuel values"
Hydrogen has more energy per kilo than any other fluid in the game.
by comparison, in 50g of hydrogen you should have 7MJ of energy (rounding) where most oils would only have 2MJ, but I'm using 45kJ instead. (it's 90kJ in 0.16)

[mrvn]

Doesn't hydrogen have a low fuel value in reality too because it isn't dense? There simply isn't that much hydrogen in a liter or hydrogen.

On the other hand converting 100 liter of water into 60 liter of hydrogen would mean it is under extreme pressure (maybe even liquid?). Releasing that pressure in the boiler would cool it down a lot and eat into the gain from burning it, right? So a low fuel value seems right.

true it's not dense, which is sort of why it works, but all the values are taken to be energy per kilo... or per 100g because of the "multiplied all fluids by 10" thing a while back, or per 50g in 0.17 because of the "halved all fuel values"
Hydrogen has more energy per kilo than any other fluid in the game.
by comparison, in 50g of hydrogen you should have 7MJ of energy (rounding) where most oils would only have 2MJ, but I'm using 45kJ instead. (it's 90kJ in 0.16)

Does the game anywhere say it's units of mass? I'm thinking in units of volume because it makes little sense for storage tanks to hold 25 tons of any liquid or gas while 25000 liters makes sense.

[GrumpyJoe]

A tank (or simply any storage) volume is simply something to tell how much internal volume it has. That may sound a bit patronizing, but its the best explanaition i have.
Afterall, you could always store a liquid in it, even if its "gas" in its liquid form.

On the other hand, its common to measure "gases" (in the common sense that we think of O and N as gas) in mass, cos storing it in gas form (and measuring that in volume) makes no sense, since it would expand by a faxor of X (where X is a large number, depending on the chemical formula) when released. Therefor when stored (in liquid form) we can actually make some sense when talking about it in mass. A truck delivering 20t of liquid N makes much more sense than xx m³. You can deliever N in its gas form, but to make that efficient, you gotta have it compressed alot (N bottles to test pressurize cooling pipes come in 200-300bar), making the truck trailer itself very expensive. So its cooled down, liquified and delivered that way.

My technical english is not good enough to give a better explanation, but i have worked as cooling engineer (HFKWs are quite heavy gases, you dont ever talk in volume when talking about cooling "gases") and my best friend is working at a gas extraction plant, extracting N/O/He etc from air. They all talk mass when talking liquids

So much for realismn, no idea if Bob´s math makes sense

[bobingabout]

Yeah, nothing in the game says it's volume or mass, but when I buy gasses IRL, I buy them in Kilos. a 19kg canister of FLT Propane for example. Propane has about 45MJ per kg, which works out at 855MJ for the cylinder.

[Termak]

So, oil burners is not more ecological?

It's more of opening up options to the player. don't forget that I also wrote into the game emissions multipliers. different fuels will pollute more than others. If you burn Hydrogen for example, it produces very little pollution.

Burning hydrogen? Don’t you mean hydrazine? For effectively burning hydrogen, you will need something similar to tokamak reactor, getting it to plasma state, then taking out heat.

Liquid hydrogen has been used loads as fuel, space shuttle for example and theres even some cars running on hydrogen.

[mrvn]

Yeah, nothing in the game says it's volume or mass, but when I buy gasses IRL, I buy them in Kilos. a 19kg canister of FLT Propane for example. Propane has about 45MJ per kg, which works out at 855MJ for the cylinder.

Except a tank holds 25000 units and it's inconceivable that water and oil have the same density in the game so a mass of 25000 units would fill the volume of a tank. Can you even compress them to the same density? Makes much more sense that the unit is volume at standard pressure. Gases could probably be measured as volume in liquid form. Because there is no way you would transport hydrogen in gas form at standard pressure. IRL you go by mass because that means you can fill a tank with gas till it has a certain weight instead of calculating the volume and measuring pressure.

[bobingabout]

Yeah, nothing in the game says it's volume or mass, but when I buy gasses IRL, I buy them in Kilos. a 19kg canister of FLT Propane for example. Propane has about 45MJ per kg, which works out at 855MJ for the cylinder.

Except a tank holds 25000 units and it's inconceivable that water and oil have the same density in the game so a mass of 25000 units would fill the volume of a tank. Can you even compress them to the same density? Makes much more sense that the unit is volume at standard pressure. Gases could probably be measured as volume in liquid form. Because there is no way you would transport hydrogen in gas form at standard pressure. IRL you go by mass because that means you can fill a tank with gas till it has a certain weight instead of calculating the volume and measuring pressure.

there is actually a density factor on gasses in my mod, with the exception of Petroleum Gas... anyway, Hydrogen has a multiplier factor of 2, most other gasses a factor of 2.5. it is something I could revisit, to make hydrogen even less compressed but it's not really a priority.

[zero318]

Where is this density value in the prototypes? I'd be interested in using that for a mod I've been working on, but I can't seem to find any reference to a property like that.

[bobingabout]

Where is this density value in the prototypes? I'd be interested in using that for a mod I've been working on, but I can't seem to find any reference to a property like that.

There isn't one. It's just something I did on paper (well, text files) when calculating my recipes. "This is a gas, it should use 2.5 times what the formula says. That is hydrogen, it should give double what you'd expect" etc.

Though if you're doing things in the data phase of the game... add one. All data is just table data, that's it. so you can add whatever tags you need, and it will stay in data to be read from elsewhere in data.
However, the game only actually uses and stores data that it actually wants to use, so once the data phase is over (game has loaded into the main menu), you can no longer access it. Scripting within the game's running state uses a different interface that is pretty much hard locked to only read actual values. But again you could write your own look up table in code.

[GrumpyJoe]

Except a tank holds 25000 units and it's inconceivable that water and oil have the same density in the game so a mass of 25000 units would fill the volume of a tank. Can you even compress them to the same density?

you cant compress liquids, at least in RL.
how the game handles it, i have no idea. is there a distinction between gases and liquids? or even volume vs. mass?

[bobingabout]

how the game handles it, i have no idea. is there a distinction between gases and liquids? or even volume vs. mass?

No, just Quantity.

[anorganicbear]

I'd like to revisit the excess production of sodium hydroxide (NaOH). I was thinking of approaching this from a different angle. Instead of looking for ways to get rid of the excess NaOH, what if there were an alternative production method for producing chlorine gas that didn't result in sodium hydroxide as a byproduct?

I did some quick research, and a process of mixing common salt (NaCl) and sulfuric acid (H2SO4) produces hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sodium sulfate (Na2SO4).

2NaCl + H2SO4 -> HCl + Na2SO4

First let's address the byproduct Na2SO4. This has a number of industrial uses, one of which is involved in the production of glass. This gives us a potential use in a metal mixing furnace with silicon ore to yield 2x glass instead of 1x glass from just silicon ore. Since glass is consumed in fiberglass boards, this byproduct is usable in a satisfactory manner without piling up the same way that the NaOH does in the current chlorine production. You could feed the two processes against each other, ramping up this process when glass production needs to increase, and ramping up the current production chain when aluminum is in short supply.

The next step in generating Cl2 would involve adding a process to convert HCl to Cl2. This can be done in an electrolyser, yielding Cl2 and hydrogen gas (H2).

Another option is to provide an alternative recipe for making plastics. Ethylene (C2H4) could be made by combining carbon or petroleum gas with hydrogen inside of a chemical plant. In actual ethylene production, ethane is used as the feedstock, which can be produced by separating it from petroleum gas. However, there is no real need to produce an intermediary product for the mod here, since it would just feed directly to the plastic production regardless. This would alleviate the need to pump out tons of NaOH just to maintain a satisfying plastic production chain.

I think these two improvements combined would generally solve this problem. As far as implementation, you could still have these locked behind high-tech science so that players have to deal with NaOH excess for a while if that is the intended experience. I personally find it a bit tedious to have to come up with a way to siphon off tons of NaOH, but maybe part of the fun is figuring out a nice storage buffer system to hold it until it's actually useful. However, with chlorine being such a vital component in all science production at tier 3 and beyond, and the main use of NaOH kicking in after all other research is complete (building rocket parts), it seems excessive.

To summarize:

New process: 2 NaCl + (some amount) H2SO4 -> Chemical plant -> (some amount) HCl + 1 Na2SO4
New recipe: 1 Na2SO4 + 1 silicon ore -> Metal mixing furnace -> 2 glass
New process: (some amount) HCl -> Electrolyser -> (some amount) H2 + (some amount) Cl2
New recipe: (some amount) carbon or petroleum gas + hydrogen -> Chemical plant or chemical furnace -> plastic

[bobingabout]

To summarize:

New process: 2 NaCl + (some amount) H2SO4 -> Chemical plant -> (some amount) HCl + 1 Na2SO4
New recipe: 1 Na2SO4 + 1 silicon ore -> Metal mixing furnace -> 2 glass
New process: (some amount) HCl -> Electrolyser -> (some amount) H2 + (some amount) Cl2
New recipe: (some amount) carbon or petroleum gas + hydrogen -> Chemical plant or chemical furnace -> plastic

Well, to start with I'm not keen on adding another material unless I know what I'm going to be using it for. but putting the Na2SO4 to one side for a moment...

One of the uses (and since it's for electronics, I'd argue a bit use for it) is to make HCl to make Ferric Chloride, the etching fluid.
Putting that to one side again to look at making Chlorine for those uses where you would need it (like Gold smelting), well, you make 2HCl from H2 and Cl2, your sugestion is the reverse of this. HCl is a gas, not a liquid, so you can't just electrolyse it. You can however make Hydrochloric acid by bubbling it through water and then electrolysing that, you do get Hydrogen and Chlorine produced and are left with water, which electrolyses into Hydrogen and Oxygen, so you end up with Chlorine and Oxygen coming out of the same pipe, not a method I would trust.

Alternatively there is another method where you add Oxygen, and use a copper catalyst. 4HCl + O2 -> Cl + 2H2O. Other processes that uses a catalyst, I just don't include in the recipe, it's reusable and technically infinite. I've pushed for Catalyst support in recipes, but the devs don't seem too keen on it. The game already has a catalyst system in the game, which is calculated where if an item is on an input and an output, then the recipe doesn't apply productivity bonuses to that portion of the recipe... that's it, that's the catalyst system, it still moves from input to output where you have to manually remove it from the output and put it back in the input. see the Korvarex process. what I would like personally is another slot in the GUI where you place catalyst materials, and they stay there so you don't have to constantly take them out and put them back in again. And since you'd basically make 1 item and stick it in the input and leave it there, the devs don't see that as enough of a "puzzle" to be worth it. what about molds, huh? I've seen mods that "Stamp" gears using a mold, you have to keep moving it from output back to input, how much sense does that make?

I guess I'm ranting a bit here now. but yeah, I'm not against a HCl -> Cl process, but I don't really want to add a new material (Na2SO4) unless I had a use for it.

I'm thinking that the solution is just to use Sodium Hydroxide in a science pack. then we'll end up being back to the complaint that you don't get enough of it from the recipe. It would go well on the new chemical science pack in 0.17 (Science pack 3), or if I go with my new science packs model, one of the tiers of resource science pack.

[GrumpyJoe]

......

about your catalyst rant:

thats exactly what i tought, when thinking about making mining abit more complex but more rewarding later
I´d want some item that needs to be put into that lategame "mining machine"
Call it maintainance, where you would need to put gears in.
Or those catalysts.
Or milling drums like in Angel´s ferrous/cupric chains

The problem is, that its always "at least 1 per cycle"
The easiest solution to this was the need of adding acid to uranium mining in vanilla. Why easiest? Whats easier to use than 5x(add any fluid here), fluid numbers are massive anyway.
Since you are pretty close to the devs (thats what I said, concluding from your 0.17 updates post) you shouldn´t stop pushing that idea. At least as a mod interface, if they dont want in the base game.
I´d like the base game a bit more complex, but im ok with modding. Some are not, but thats just too bad for them

[GrumpyJoe]

OH!!!!

The mechanic you are talking about, that the devs think its not worth the time. Its already in game!

Think of Science packs, labs etc....
Make a machine that uses items with the same property as a science pack. They have %used, regardless of research cycle complete or not, they stay in the lab until they reach 0% (or passed onto the next machine, with their %used intact)

"Only" need some fancy hacks
machine needs to run without research active, it needs to look up if the items for the actual craft are in the machine. The rest should be only balancing

[bobingabout]

OH!!!!

The mechanic you are talking about, that the devs think its not worth the time. Its already in game!

Think of Science packs, labs etc....
Make a machine that uses items with the same property as a science pack. They have %used, regardless of research cycle complete or not, they stay in the lab until they reach 0% (or passed onto the next machine, with their %used intact)

"Only" need some fancy hacks
machine needs to run without research active, it needs to look up if the items for the actual craft are in the machine. The rest should be only balancing

That's the Durability mechanic (originally on repair tools, in fact science packs are item type tool) the problem is that recipes themselves do not support it, ingredient items must have a whole number for their amount... unless they're a fluid, but outputs can have a bit more flexibility with a probability of getting this line, and a random amount between 2 defined values.

[GrumpyJoe]

That's the Durability mechanic (originally on repair tools, in fact science packs are item type tool) the problem is that recipes themselves do not support it, ingredient items must have a whole number for their amount... unless they're a fluid, but outputs can have a bit more flexibility with a probability of getting this line, and a random amount between 2 defined values.

Well, i kinda knew about the "tool" thing (not the technical term tho) and definatly about the output probability, afterall thats in the base game (uranium ore processing)
But with that in place, wouldnt it be easy to implement reciepes support "tools"?
Edit: im not a programmer, but wouldn´t a naive but working approach to the game code be "have technology at 0%HP and repair it with science repair packs through labs"
Your request shouldn´t be THAT hard to implement

My first thought, that lead me to that post, was to just make mining more "complex" (note: naive first approach) by damaging the miner while its running, so you have a 2nd thing to worry about in logistics (bots and repairpacks), not only acid to uranium. Mind you, thats for my lategame mining thoughts.
But essentially its the same. Bring a "tool" of some sort to some machine where you enhance some process. In my case its maintainance/enhance in mining. For your desired catalysts its, well, catalysts.

Just wanna feed you with arguments
or i might as well just get the technical data from you, while you were only telling the story of "well, its not likely they´ll implement it" but already thought about all that

[anorganicbear]

I'm thinking that the solution is just to use Sodium Hydroxide in a science pack. then we'll end up being back to the complaint that you don't get enough of it from the recipe. It would go well on the new chemical science pack in 0.17 (Science pack 3), or if I go with my new science packs model, one of the tiers of resource science pack.

I'm actually not against this at all. I feel like, regardless any issues related to realism, it's good design to use up any necessary byproduct as part of the next science tier, unless there's an alternative process for making it useful (i.e. slag slurry in angel's mods). Mass producing sodium hydroxide isn't a problem either, since you can basically synthesize an infinite amount just by voiding the chlorine and hydrogen. IMO It's a better problem to not have enough and need to manufacture more than it is to have to figure out where to store millions of materials you won't use, but will need eventually.

Not sure if it's worth continuing the discussion about chlorine electrolysation, but when I was researching last night I came across this paper: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijce/2016/8194674/

It seems with an anionic exchange membrane you can electrolyse chlorine from HCl without risk of contamination while keeping 98% of the product.

[RocketManChronicles]

I'm thinking that the solution is just to use Sodium Hydroxide in a science pack. then we'll end up being back to the complaint that you don't get enough of it from the recipe. It would go well on the new chemical science pack in 0.17 (Science pack 3), or if I go with my new science packs model, one of the tiers of resource science pack.

Didn't you halve that output a while back in the production somewhere? Putting it in a science pack may make it interesting... A balance between aluminum and SCIENCE(!) could be a good problem to solve.

[bobingabout]

Well, i kinda knew about the "tool" thing (not the technical term tho) and definatly about the output probability, afterall thats in the base game (uranium ore processing)
But with that in place, wouldnt it be easy to implement reciepes support "tools"?

To a recipe, all items are just items, no matter what their type, so a recipe doesn't know if an item has durability or not, and therefore can't effect it. the game just doesn't support it. to change it would require changing the game's source code, which although I have access to read, needs to go through an approval process before it can get added to the game, and to do that needs a justification. playing with how recipes work is unlikely to change because it happens thousands of times per tick, and is one of those "needs to be as streamlined as possible" things. This is why I've mentioned that the devs are very hesitant to add a catalyst system as I've described previously.

My first thought, that lead me to that post, was to just make mining more "complex" (note: naive first approach) by damaging the miner while its running, so you have a 2nd thing to worry about in logistics (bots and repairpacks), not only acid to uranium. Mind you, thats for my lategame mining thoughts.
But essentially its the same. Bring a "tool" of some sort to some machine where you enhance some process. In my case its maintainance/enhance in mining. For your desired catalysts its, well, catalysts.

Again, mining has no input item support at all, I know we have the fluids thing, and I agree it would be nice to have a requirement to drill, but don't forget they've just removed mining tools from the player, so adding them in a mining drill would be like going backwards... so, unlikely.

I'm thinking that the solution is just to use Sodium Hydroxide in a science pack. then we'll end up being back to the complaint that you don't get enough of it from the recipe. It would go well on the new chemical science pack in 0.17 (Science pack 3), or if I go with my new science packs model, one of the tiers of resource science pack.

Didn't you halve that output a while back in the production somewhere? Putting it in a science pack may make it interesting... A balance between aluminum and SCIENCE(!) could be a good problem to solve.

I halved it recently, I also halved it not quite so recently, so you get a quarter of what I initially intended.