Biochamber fuel usage

[Henir]

comparing a steel furnace and a stone furnace, they both have 90kw power usage, but steel is more efficient than stone
why does the same not apply to biochambers

[jdrexler75]

The 50% productivity bonus counts for nothing to you?? The biochamber is OP as is. Its fuel is nearly free anyway.

[BlueTemplar]

Biochamber might share some of the same fuels with furnaces, but none of the recipes, and there's no «Biochamber Mk2», so I don't understand the question ?

[Henir]

Its about the principle of higher crafting speeds being more efficient than whats shown as their energy consumption, hence the comparison to the furnaces

Or are the furnaces the problem here?
Should the steel furnace's tooltip show 45kw instead of 90kw ?
Is it a bug ?

[BlueTemplar]

But they're crafting speeds of specific recipes. The rocket silo has a crafting speed of only 1 work/s, for a whopping ~4MW of power usage, should that be an issue too ?

[Khagan]

Should the steel furnace's tooltip show 45kw instead of 90kw ?

No, 90 kW is correct. The steel furnace is twice as efficient as the stone one because it crafts twice as fast for the same power draw.

The rocket silo has a crafting speed of only 1 work/s, for a whopping ~4MW of power usage

4 MW is the power draw for the launch sequence. Rocket construction only uses about 250 kW (before modules).

[Nemoricus]

comparing a steel furnace and a stone furnace, they both have 90kw power usage, but steel is more efficient than stone
why does the same not apply to biochambers

Hmm.

Assembling machine 1 - 0.5 crafting speed, 75.5 kW, 151 kW per 1 crafting speed
Assembling machine 2 - 0.75 crafting speed, 150 kW, 200 kW per 1 crafting speed
Assembling machine 3 - 1.25 crafting speed, 375 kW, 300 kW per 1 crafting speed

Electric furnace - Crafting speed 2, 180 kW, 90 kW per crafting speed

More advanced buildings aren't, as a general rule, more energy efficient than their lower tier equivalents. But the whole premise of the thread seems weird to begin with, since there's no equivalent of a "stone biochamber". There's biochamber and that's it.

[BlueTemplar]

Thanks, I didn't know that about the silo.

----

After some more thought, I think I see what you're aiming at, and if I'm not mistaken, that's something that I discussed recently :

[...]
And Factorio, after all these years still, is wrong/bugged/misleading on recipes, and confuses work units with time units :

you need X work units per recipe, and an assembler has a working speed of Y work units / second.

(IRL work units are called Joules, but it might not be the best unit for Factorio, because of efficiency considerations, and Factorio already decided to simplify things by for instance making boilers and/or steam engines 100% efficient in vanilla ?
Not to mention that the current balance might result in very non-round work units if directly in (k)J ?
I think there used to be references to this in how these work units or assembler's working speed are defined in Factorio's Lua scripts ?)

So you could normalize crafting speed to be in Joules/seconds, and then you would try to usually have 100% efficiency (or maybe 50% efficiency ?) in power conversion (whether from burning or electric or food or heat or...), but sometimes balance would require you to have a different efficiency.
(And power usage would be displayed in Watts, for clarity, even if technically it's the same unit.)

And still keep things simple, like 1MJ/s of crafting speed for a stone furnace,
and easy multiples/fractions of 1MJ of crafting cost for the most common ingredients.

(Wait, if those were indeed in the files, was that what the pre-release version of Factorio already did, but changed later to '''seconds''' for crafting costs ?!?)

[Henir]

So the problem seems to be furnaces not being labeled correctly among a few other things

[BlueTemplar]

In which way ? What would be the correct labeling ?

[EustaceCS]

I don't see any logics in a question which boils down to "why two completely different crafting processes don't follow same progression pattern".
In furnaces fuel does its job relatively directly by converting some mass to some energy with some losses.
In biochamber """fuel""" uses VERY indirect methods of achieving crafting result.