Kovarex Energy Price

[Tekillaa]

Hi,

Feels like im about to shoot my foot but let's go!

Kovarex and nuke is a good way to have access to all high energy cost way to do in the late game, but i was askin to me if the kovarex process itself can have a high cost in electric energy needed (like 2 or 3 a normal factory). And Kovarex himself seems spend a lot of energy for the greater good :p

so that's it, I love nuke power, but have like a "solar need" step for the kovarex process can be good to polish the path thru the late game.

[leadraven]

It will change absolutely nothing. Nobody will even notice.

[BlueTemplar]

Well, depends how steep we're talking about...

[leadraven]

Well, depends how steep we're talking about...

Ok, power cost is tuned with crafting time. 1 U235 ~ 10 power cells ~ 80GJ. With x4 reactor it is 320GJ.
Centrifuge consumes ~360 kW. How much time centrifuge must work so that energy costs become significant? 100 hours?
320,000,000/360/60/60 ~ 250 hours.

[BlueTemplar]

Yes, and what if you were to increase Kovarex recipe time a thousandfold ?

[leadraven]

Yes, and what if you were to increase Kovarex recipe time a thousandfold ?

Players will have to build thousends of centrifuges. It's becomes almost like solar panels...
But initial cost of 40 U235 limits expansion speed. Actually, it sounds better then I expected.
It will limit nuclear power usage for a long time. It's a very bad balance, but still better then now.

[pleegwat]

The initial start-up cost of Kovarex, combined with its huge benefit, just incentivizes not using your U235 at all until you have Kovarex set up.

[nafira]

We already discussed a lot on the matter, and here is some of my ideas : viewtopic.php?f=16&t=64575&start=20#p396566

This is still far from making it fair, but it's doing something.

[Xeorm]

Why? Nuclear's not even that good compared to solar anyway. No need to make it even worse. Doesn't make sense either. Centrifuges aren't energy intensive buildings.

[nafira]

Why? Nuclear's not even that good compared to solar anyway. No need to make it even worse. Doesn't make sense either. Centrifuges aren't energy intensive buildings.

I think it's more complicated than that :
- at start it's full Steam
- then mix a bit of solar (but it's costly) until you have a need of more than 80MW with both steam/solar/accus
- switch to nuclear (2 cores) from 80 to 160 MW all combined
- switch to nuclear (4 cores) to 480MW, but stop solar @1k solar panel
- finish replacing with solar later in the game (80hours+) but keep at least 4 cores of nuclear

[bobucles]

Nuclear's not even that good compared to solar anyway.

Is it? A 4 core reactor pumps out 480MW. A solar panel gives averages out 42kw. One quad-reactor gives enough energy to replace over 11000 solar panels. 11k solar panels (not even including accumulators) is no joke. There's absolutely good reason to try using nuclear power.

[Xeorm]

Is it? A 4 core reactor pumps out 480MW. A solar panel gives averages out 42kw. One quad-reactor gives enough energy to replace over 11000 solar panels. 11k solar panels (not even including accumulators) is no joke. There's absolutely good reason to try using nuclear power.

I'd think so? I'll crunch some numbers. Accumulators add ~15% to the cost of solar panels. So you're looking at ~13,000 solar panels compared to the similar nuclear output. Comparably the cost for the nuclear reactors is worth the same as ~2,000 panels. You're up 11,000 panels in resources. That's nice. Centrifuges are around 500 panels. Less if you have Kovarex, though you'll likely need that anyway for uranium ore. 10,500 free solar panels.

Assuming you do take research the Kovarex process, that alone takes ~6000 panels worth of resources to research. Nuclear power itself is ~1000 panels. That itself is pretty significant. But still positive, yes.

Cons from there:

1. It's much more all or nothing. You need those 4 power plants to get a significant upgrade due to the adjacency effect. Until then you're building a lot of power generation and not getting much, compared to the gradual construction of more solar. Especially important if you're including the cost of technology into things. Nuclear tech + 1 reactor is roughly the same cost as 1500 solar panels or ~55 MW worth after accumulators. There's no benefit unless you're building at least 2 reactors.
2. You're still burning fuel and all that implies. The new system requires fuel constantly. It's something you can run out of or fail to deliver enough of in time, similar to coal.
3. Much more expensive in terms of UPS compared to solar.
4. Takes a lot of thinking to develop a system that works. (Assuming you're not copying and pasting someone else's design). Important as material costs might not matter quite as much as thinking time.

[BlueTemplar]

How did you determine that cost ? Specifically the oil part of it...

[Xeorm]

How did you determine that cost ? Specifically the oil part of it...

Ignored it mostly. It usually takes awhile before I'm limited by oil costs compared to iron and copper. So talking about the initial cost of 480 MW compared to nuclear I didn't worry about oil.

[Hannu]

Cons from there:

1. It's much more all or nothing. You need those 4 power plants to get a significant upgrade due to the adjacency effect. Until then you're building a lot of power generation and not getting much, compared to the gradual construction of more solar. Especially important if you're including the cost of technology into things.

If you make powerplant for large base, it is good to use neighbor bonus, but practically running of nuclear reactors are free. I made once a railworld which used small nuclear powerplants to energize factories and outposts without global electric network. It worked very well and small fuel refinery could easily produce enough fuel cells and one service train transported them to outposts and factories. Only thing is that you just do not care about optimal energy utilization. Costs are negligible. Actually, that was the game I choosed poor and infrequent uranium patches and had to find once several hours to next patch.

[*]You're still burning fuel and all that implies. The new system requires fuel constantly. It's something you can run out of or fail to deliver enough of in time, similar to coal.

It is easy to produce large numbers of fuel cells and store them for hours. Also, one wagonload of cells feed one reactor almost forever. One small train as enough to feed fuel for whatever sized base.

[*]Takes a lot of thinking to develop a system that works. (Assuming you're not copying and pasting someone else's design). Important as material costs might not matter quite as much as thinking time.[/list]

Thinking makes Factorio so entertaining. And honestly you can not say that nuclear powerplant or anything in vanilla factorio needs much hard thinking. Factorio's production tree is very straightforward tree-like structure. Even kids (thos who not hate thinking) can handle it.

It is why I think that things which need thinking and complex production chains should give more reward. Like nuclear powerplants or combat bots (which are joke now). In my opinion solar cells are OK, but they should nerf accumulators so that it would be practically impossible to feed base overnight. Player would need coal or nuclear power but could use solar cells to reduce costs and pollution (especially with coal) to about 1/4. Accumulators could be like capacitors which feed high power peaks to lasers but have relatively low charge.

[BlueTemplar]

Accumulators are already very expensive compared to (fuel) chests and (steam) tanks...

The main issue with nuclear seems to be that uranium is overabundant...
And you're already rewarded by building bigger reactors (and correctly sizing the various components depending on your needs) as the adjacency bonus scales dramatically the energy you get from each fuel cell.

[Hannu]

Accumulators are already very expensive compared to (fuel) chests and (steam) tanks...

It depends how do you calculate. Accumulators may be more expensive by great factor, but both are very cheap compared to resources science production needs. And accumulators make it possible to make trivial solar energy solution (in normal settings with practically free area and abundant resources).

The main issue with nuclear seems to be that uranium is overabundant...

Nuclear power is intended to be final solution to even largest energy needs. It does not fail because too cheap uranium but because CPU can not handle big enough nuclear powerplant to feed most massive megabases. If you do not want extreme power, you can put uranium patches poor and low frequency and get tricky situations.

[stribika]

Nuclear energy is overpowered IRL too. If we ever ran out of mines, it would be worth extracting from extremely dilute sources such as average continental crust or even seawater.

And IRL, water has a heat capacity of around 4000 J/kg*K, so pumps and pipes and stuff are much better. (You could say 1 unit of water is 0.5 dl, but that would mean a storage tank is only 1.25 m³, which makes it 13 cm tall.)