Factorio Forums

The portable fusion reactor seems a bit out-of-nowhere. It's obviously a very advanced device which should have predecessor devices, but doesn't.

To rectify this, I propose adding two other fusion reactors which are unlocked earlier in the tech tree.

1. A big, building-sized reactor which hooks up to the new heat-exchangers for producing power. Would run on deuterium extracted from water via a couple of chemical plant recipes (heavy water extraction (100 water in, 1 heavy water out), heavy water electrolysis (2 heavy water in, 2 deuterium out (ignoring the 1 waste oxygen which would go with a more realistic implementation))). Yes, I know real-world reactors are likely to use tritium as well, but let's just keep things simple for now. Maybe also require a jolt of electricity to get started initially or if it shuts down due to the deuterium supply running out and needs to be restarted.

2. A much smaller reactor with a smaller output. If you were transporting it in real life, you could fit two or three on a train car, so let's make it 2*2 tiles with an output of something like 10MW (exact value to be determined). Enough to power laser turrets for a small outpost. Would generate power directly rather than needing steam infrastructure. Could run off barrels of deuterium, so it's not set-and-forget just yet.

3. The existing portable fusion reactor, which would sit at the end of the fusion power research branch of the tech tree.

This gives us a nice progression from big, bulky and high maintenance, to small, compact, and no maintenance.

Thats true. I have many times wondered that how it is possible that this guy have portable fusion tech but no fusion plan tech at all. It would be much more logical that you need first develop fusion plant and after that you can make portable generator.
Anyway that would lead cap that it is very hard to power your suit in reasonable time. So solution for that is that make "suit charger technology" what allows you to install charging station to ground and when you are at area of station it will charge your suit battery from grid. I think that would be useful even at later state of game because when you really want build lot of thing you can take all generators away from suit and put it full of roboports & batteries and install charger to near by construction site. Probably one charger can give example 1MW charging power (or with 4x speed modules even 4MW). If you install 5 chargers to ground then you get 5MW charging power at their common range and if you put speed modules to each then you get 20MW. That will allow build quite fast charging spots and then you can use your suit with row of MK2 batteries.
That will allow to move portable reactor to much higher science level and then it make more sense.

Nuclear power is being added in 0.15. It's very possible this will be a gateway to the portable fusion reactor.

Also alien artifacts are being removed, so it might require nuclear fuel in the recipe instead of artifacts.