TL;DR
You know those times when there's just a bit of power missing? A diesel generator could solve this problem!What ?
Steam power is great for the first part of the game, nuclear power is powerful and only a bit dirty but not as much as steam power. Solar power is a cleaner alternativealthough it takes up lots of space and resources; its power density is really low. Additionally there is a phase in between the two where the steam setup is huge and the
other one is starting out. At least I had problems in this phase with keeping up with the power demand. A diesel generator could solve this problem.
How would it work?
In real life a big industrial diesel generator looks like this:
- dieselGenerator.jpg (210.1 KiB) Viewed 3668 times
In the game it could look like in the picture only a bit more rusty and Factorio-like. It Just like the KS power diesel generator. (The picture wouldn't upload, sorry for that)
It could be fueled like this:
Either you can insert solid fuels like wood or coal or it would be powered by liquids.
Solid fuel
Diesel engines can theoretically burn solid fuels, they just have to be ground up. Once the compression in the cylinder has heated up the fuel-air-mixture enough, it
explodes pushing the piston down, which also works with powdered solid fuels. As a visual detail a small crusher could the be added to the generator.
Pros for solid fuels:
+ Easier to use
+ Wide variety of fuels accepted
+ Solid fuel from petroleum products as a kind of 'liquid fuel'
Liquid fuel
Nowadays all (citation needed) diesel engines run on liquid fuels. They work the same way as described above. The fuel would be piped into the generator and be stored
in an internal tank. The generator the burns this fuel. Which fuels however is open, theoretically petroleum gas, light and heavy oil could be used. The amount of power
produced using these should be like this (in my opinion): light oil>heavy oil>petroleum gas
To put it simply: Light oil is what you would use as fuel in real life. The other two ones are scaled because of this: First, heavy oil is chemically closer to diesel fuel than
petroleum gas is. Secondly, (this one's difficult to understand without advanced engine knowledge) because of the low ignition temperature of petroleum gas and a diesel
engine's high compression, using petroleum gas could result in knocking. This reduces power output and efficiency.
Pros for liquid fuels:
+ more realistic
+ power output dependent on choice of fuel
+ coal can be used thanks to coal liquefaction
As a final word to this, it's important to know that such a generator would scale power output and (following that) fuel consumption.
Implementation
The recipe for the diesel generator could look like this:6 iron plates (fan), 8 engine units (cylinders, duh), 2 iron sticks (crankshaft), 10 copper wire (generator winding), 5 pipes (piping), 10 electronic circuit (control)
Next it should also produce pollution while generating electricity, I think a value like 6 would be OK.
The maximum performance could be like 6 to 8MW.
I hope you like this suggestion. Have a nice day!
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