Steam Turbine needs balance and fix

[Oozinator]

Since the steam engine is in the game, i was wondering why Klei do not remove/combine the additional ports, to counter blocking mechanism..
One input tile / vent.
Add an integrated pressure chamber, into the steam engine, to buffer inside steam engine (no buffer room needed).
When steam engine is only for deleting heat and to get some trash energy, it's not worth to build in survival (with low dupe pop).
Deleting heat is no problem, when you have access to space biome and that makes steam engine worthless at the heat deletion point (for me).
 

[lee1026]

I don’t think the game ever said that a dtu and joule is actually the same unit; the heat output of light bulbs and machinery should convince you that the two units are at least 100 times apart. 

 

The current balance of 600k dtu for 2000 watts (effectively) makes power a nonissue the minute that steel and plastic is secured for players. I am not sure if that is intentional, but it doesn’t feel like great game balance. 

[lee1026]

Sure, but you only need for one of the two units to be crazy wacko to have a 100-1 relationship between them. 

 

Considering that it takes a gram of petroleum to make a joule, the electric units are all crazy. 

 

The "correct" way to fix door pumps would be to force the doors to be powered,  and have it be slower (and use more power) as it pumps more pressure. This can be balanced against the other pumps as needed.

[D.L.S.]

9 hours ago, lee1026 said:

I don’t think the game ever said that a dtu and joule is actually the same unit;

from game data(should be somewhere in ingame "wiki"):

#. STRINGS.MISC.NOTIFICATIONS.DTU.MESSAGEBODY
msgctxt "STRINGS.MISC.NOTIFICATIONS.DTU.MESSAGEBODY"
msgid "My Duplicants measure heat energy in Duplicant Thermal Units or DTU.\n\n1 DTU = 1055.06 J"

 

22 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

It’s hard to understand why the flow rate is so high. 75 degrees * 2kg/s * 4 DTU/g/k = 600,000 watts. The turbine’s all of 0.3% thermally efficient. That’s more than a little ridiculous.

As for right now situation is: 75 deg * 10kg of steam * 4.179 dtu(J) ~3.13MW(MJ/s) of heat transforms into 2KW(kJ/s) of electricity. And this in perfect case, but if your steam is 250C it will kill 100C(output temp fixed)...  All this because some heat devices(water tepitzer) have very high ratio of consumed electricity to produced heat.

21 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Gas conflict is a natural result of one element per tile.

It is just wrong calculation of "gravity", tile(gas/liquid) which have bigger mass should sink to the bottom of the stack, but in game work rule that tile which have lighter element will always go on top(and heavier elements go on bottom) of the stack, it make weird things like 100kg of hydrogen floating on top of 1 kg of oxygen. No gravity, no pressure in game.

[noisycat]

I think the turbine works perfectly. Why would you condense the steam anyway? Just heat it the way you heated the water and use door pumps to maintain pressure.

This is a sanbox design for my survival base to make use of heat from copper volcano and cool the copper to solid state. It's survival mid-game friendly (only uses some steel and ceramic is good enough for insulation), it uses zero energy (so you get +2000W) and is fully automated with one switch (on the left). I use thermo sensor to keep the temp just above the turbine requirements to make as much of the heat as I can so the door is only closed when temp transfer is needed and when opened the vacuum isolates two parts completely.

Also the contraption on the right from thermo sensor in the petroleum was just a test to get a lower-temp secondary "pan" to make other stuff with the heat and is completely useless in this setup.

 

[cpy]

Research says renewable power.

[Madbro]

19 minutes ago, cpy said:

Research says renewable power.

Could be renewable, theoretically.

As long as the magma heat does not run out, so it is renewable with volcanoes, but partially renewable with core magma.

I mean, it doesn’t cosume magma, but when magma cool down too much, that’s the problem.

↑Though not very possible.

[lee1026]

Rockets produce enough heat to run lots of steam turbines. 

[cpy]

8 hours ago, Madbro said:

Could be renewable, theoretically.

As long as the magma heat does not run out, so it is renewable with volcanoes, but partially renewable with core magma.

I mean, it doesn’t cosume magma, but when magma cool down too much, that’s the problem.

↑Though not very possible.

Oil reservoir -> Petroleum boiler-> Oil Generator -> Waste heat -> Aquatuner -> Steam Turbine -> Free power.

[D.L.S.]

13 minutes ago, cpy said:

Waste heat -> Aquatuner -> Steam Turbine -> Free power.

But there is no free power in this part. Net result would be -1200W, turbine consumes at least 3.13MJ of heat each second, aquatuner(with supercoolant) can move only 1.18MJ of heat per second, so you need more then 2 aquatuners(virtually 2.65, so 2 and third will work 2/3 of time) - aquatuners will consume in total 3200W of electricity(1200*2 + 1200*2/3), turbine will produce 2000W so net will be 1200W of loses.(you can put DTU instead of J near numbers of heat, it doesnt change the result)

Moving heat with aquatuner too expensive, even with supercoolant as working fluid.

[lee1026]

i think people are mostly talking about either the reality of steam turbines with blocked ports or proposals where the blocked flow is the total flow. 

[Yunru]

On 23/03/2019 at 1:18 AM, D.L.S. said:

It is just wrong calculation of "gravity", tile(gas/liquid) which have bigger mass should sink to the bottom of the stack, but in game work rule that tile which have lighter element will always go on top(and heavier elements go on bottom) of the stack, it make weird things like 100kg of hydrogen floating on top of 1 kg of oxygen. No gravity, no pressure in game.

Welcome to an asteroid. In space.

Where gravity is but a faint memory of what it was.

[lee1026]

The firepole, along side many other things, says gravity is alive and well. 

[Yunru]

2 hours ago, lee1026 said:

The firepole, along side many other things, says gravity is alive and well. 

Alive, sure. Well?

[lee1026]

Hydrogen floating to the top is of course something that only happen because of gravity. The game tries to model this. Not too well, but it does. 

[Yunru]

3 hours ago, lee1026 said:

Hydrogen floating to the top is of course something that only happen because of gravity. The game tries to model this. Not too well, but it does. 

And? It'll do that in a low gravity setting too, mass will just have less impact.

[cpy]

On 25/03/2019 at 10:06 PM, D.L.S. said:

But there is no free power in this part. Net result would be -1200W, turbine consumes at least 3.13MJ of heat each second, aquatuner(with supercoolant) can move only 1.18MJ of heat per second, so you need more then 2 aquatuners(virtually 2.65, so 2 and third will work 2/3 of time) - aquatuners will consume in total 3200W of electricity(1200*2 + 1200*2/3), turbine will produce 2000W so net will be 1200W of loses.(you can put DTU instead of J near numbers of heat, it doesnt change the result)

Moving heat with aquatuner too expensive, even with supercoolant as working fluid.

You're doing it wrong then, try building mantis cooler. Net profit is over 1000W with SC, Just provide heat source.

[D.L.S.]

2 hours ago, cpy said:

You're doing it wrong then, try building mantis cooler. Net profit is over 1000W with SC, Just provide heat source.

Hm, show working setup with aquatuner?

[cpy]

18 hours ago, D.L.S. said:

Hm, show working setup with aquatuner?

 

[Yunru]

20 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Good luck with that now. Got nerfed by 68%. Should be rebranded to utilities, and might as well consume electricity.

Yeah, okay.

Let's not mention how it takes significantly less steam and a significantly lower minimum heat to run now.

[Yunru]

18 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Indeed, it has much lower throughput as well!

68% is pure efficiency including throughput.

Which means it got nerfed by 32%.

[Yunru]

I'm not sure where you're getting 100 and 75 from.

[Sasza22]

2 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Q2 turbine: turns 500K water into 425K water at 2kg/s into 2000J/s. This is a change of temperature of 75K

It actually was 10kg/s unless you glitched it by blocking ports. Now you can build 5 turbines using the same steam flow. That should be more efficient.

[Sasza22]

8 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

The function of being able to control the flow rate by blocking ports was included in both version of the turbine. It's obnoxious to call it a glitch.

It should alter the power produced then. I`m pretty sure port blocking was always a glitch and i will call it this way. There is no reason it would produce the same amount of power with a smaller flow.

Does the new one behave the same way? If it does i will still call it a glitch if it does. It should produce 20% less power for each port blocked.

[Primalflower]

@Mooka you were right...