Heat pipe throughput not enough

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Kolt93
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Heat pipe throughput not enough

Post by Kolt93 »

Heat pipe throughput is not nearly enough when building Nuclear Power Plant with legendary (or similar) buildings. A meager (considering the quality) 3,6 GW legendary plant i built as an alternative for thermonuclear plant cant fully function because legendary heat exchangers draw so much heat that some from the top rows are below 500°C when reactors are 1000. I didnt even load the plant by 50%. Exchanging all buildings with regular ones boosted the temp by ~80°C. There is a ton of uranium on Nauvis and now with quality and TN reactors I wouldn't want Nuclear plants to become obsolete.
I understand that there is a better way to closely arrange heat exchangers from the sides, but if you want to build even bigger legendary nuclear plant, much less load it by 100%, current heat throughput wont allow it.
Legendary heat pipe maybe? Though it will be too expensive...
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eugenekay
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Re: Heat pipe throughput not enough

Post by eugenekay »

Heat Exchangers work similar to the "old Fluid system", which moves Heat according to the Delta between Entities; it does not instantly move Heat from one end of the network to the other like Fluids currently do. You have a very long & winding Heat Pipe network which obstructs the Flow.

Try rotating your Heat Exchangers to minimize the distance from the Reactor to the end of the pipes:
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09-04-2025, 12-57-28.png (1.52 MiB) Viewed 296 times
This setup runs with a ~400C gradient when consuming Electricity at the 1.2 Gigawatt maximum output, using Legendary Reactors/Heat Exchangers/Turbines. It does "only" manage a +200% Neighbor Bonus, but the Fuel Cells are cheap to produce....



Good Luck!
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Tertius
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Re: Heat pipe throughput not enough

Post by Tertius »

If I upgrade my tileable 2x6 setup to legendary reactors, heat exchangers, pumps and steam turbines with an upgrade plan, no other changes except setting the control so the reactors heat up to 1000°C, I'm not able to get 100% output. But not much less.

A single tile (4.4 GW) toggles between 4.3 and 4.4 GW.
4 tiles of it has a nominal power of 18.8 GW and I'm getting 17.2 GW at 1000°C each reactor - that's 91.5% efficiency.

I'm not yet decided if this is so bad it needs an upgrade. It's not perfect, but I would say it's within the changed game mechanics connected with legendary parts. I see it as limit, not as bug.

These are 4 tiles, can add as many more as you like. Don't remember if there was a limit.
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Kolt93
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Re: Heat pipe throughput not enough

Post by Kolt93 »

Guys, I know the layouts. The point is there is no point in using legendary setups for powerful nuclear plants because the same exact setup with regular ones will run at 100%, whereas the legendary will be capped because of heat throughput. Legendary buildulings have scaled input and output, and while components can be transferred quicker by quality inserters, heat can't. The result is — you have less options (arrange-wise and size-wise) when building legendary nuclear. The setup i built is compact and runs smoothly with common buildings. Quality should not be a worse option, but with nuclear it kinda is.
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eugenekay
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Re: Heat pipe throughput not enough

Post by eugenekay »

Kolt93 wrote: Thu Sep 04, 2025 5:43 pmThe setup i built is compact
I count at least 56 Heat Pipes between the closest Reactors and the farthest Heat Exchanger of your design. The blueprint I posted has a worst-case length of only 35 Heat Pipes. So while your setup may be Compact in terms of Square Footage it is a long distance for Heat to flow, pushing much more energy through fewer Pipe-lines.

You can try a mod like More Quality Scaling which expands the Working Temperature Range from 500C to 2000C, allowing for more "Throughput" per Pipe line.

Good Luck!
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cbhj1
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Re: Heat pipe throughput not enough

Post by cbhj1 »

looks like a simple solution would be to rotate the exchanger sections, bringing the heat pipes straight off the reactors and putting the new fluid system to work.
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Kolt93
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Re: Heat pipe throughput not enough

Post by Kolt93 »

The key to throughput was using combined parallel pipes, legendary reactors produce so much heat that most of the heat ports must be connected to draw it efficiently. So there are more pipes - better heat drain from reactor - less exchanger on each pipe.
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