outdated Icedrofan Is Probably A Scam (NO MORE)

[goatt]

The original topic is obsolete because this issue is gone after update. The new icedrofan is a fair game. It increases the temperature of ice in it until it melts, and you get all the water back. I would say it's somewhat like tempshift plates made of ice. The difference is that it requires manual operation, and only melts 50kg ice at a time, and it melts at a constant rate, while tempshift's melting rate depends on the temperature difference from environment. Ice machine has its own independent changes, its electricity usage and ice converting rate depends on the input water's temperature.

below is the obsolete content.

It will provide only cooling not nearly as much as melting pure ice would in most cases.

- Some basic knowledge about icedrofan

Spoiler

- It produces cooling of -16.5 kDTU / s

- The temperature of input ice does not affect cooling outcome

- 50 kg ice will allow it to run for 100 seconds, resulting in total cooling of -1650 kDTU

- It stops working when environment is 0 C because ice inside icedrofan will not melt below 0 C (and I guess it freezes?)

- Here is some example scenarios

    1. ice maker just made some 50 kg ice, and the ice was sent to icedrofan to cool a room of 40 C gas.

Spoiler

It those 50 kg -20 C ice were sent to melt at room temperature which is 40 C, it would absorb heat of (40 * 50,000 * 4.179 + 20 * 50,000 * 2.05= 10,408,000= 10,408 kDTU), compared to 1650 kDTU 

    2. you got 50 kg ice at nearly 0 C, let's say -5 C, and the ice was sent to icedrofan to cool 5 C gas.

Spoiler

Melting 50 ice from -6 to 6 results in heat deletion = (6 * 50,000*(4.179+2.05)=1868,700= 1868.7 kDTU), still better than 1650 kDTU ????!!!!

The math is consistent with what I observed in game. I think that's enough to draw a conclusion.

- Conclusion

1. Obviously icedrofan deletes very little heat from environment. In order to make it worth, you have to use ice of -3C to cool temperature < 6.42C, even tho you can, what's the point of doing that?
2. Not to mention icedrofan deletes ice / water source.

In a situation where you want an instant convenient temporary cooling, instead of icedrofan / hydrofan, I highly suggest that one use tempshift plate made of (polluted) ice, let the liquid from melted (polluted) ice running on tiles to further cool down the surrounding gases and structures, and mob the floor. Tempshift made of ice will have same temperature as the ice used to craft it.

@SakuraKoi Thx for pointing out the mistake in my calculation.

[Junksteel]

I have no means to discuss the mathematical aspect of it, but I agree. I was excited to build the new gadgets and just droped an ice machine and icedrofan next to each other. I realised pretty soon that I was wasting early game water while the dropped ice on the ground (which will eventually melt) was cooling the surroundings much more efficiently than icedrofan. I deconstructed it for good and have no current plans to use it again if not changed in future.

At least it was the true heir from hydrofan... equally useless. haha

[goatt]

@Junksteel sorry I must have published this post by accident. I will try to delete this.

[Junksteel]

@goatt What's wrong with it?

[goatt]

@Junksteel My bad. I am trying to delete the other post now. I accidentally refreshed page I think and this was published unfinished. Now I have copy pasted everything here, and I will try to delete the other one

6 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

I realised pretty soon that I was wasting early game water while the dropped ice on the ground (which will eventually melt) was cooling the surroundings much more efficiently than icedrofan. I deconstructed it for good and have no current plans to use it again if not changed in future.

Full of irony lol

[goatt]

4 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

@goatt What's wrong with it?

Nothing really. This one was unfinished, and I posted another exactly same topic, but finished. So I thought I should delete this one. But deleting the other one will work too.

[Gus Smedstad]

As I said in the other thread, which seems to be gone now, it seems a lot better to create a cold water tank for melting ice, instead of building tempshift plates. You can run radiant pipe through the tank for heat transfers from other locations, in a typical heat exchanger loop.

The new ore dropper means you can drop ice directly into the tank for melting, instead of relying on the ice melting from the conveyor. It’s probably a good idea to seal the tank completely to avoid it overflowing when ice melts. You can also put a pump in it to remove excess water, beyond enough to provide some thermal mass for melting ice and exchanging heat with your radiator system.

[goatt]

15 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Aren't temp shift plates capped to 15C minimum,

Newly built tempshift will have the same temperature as its crafting material. However, in debugging mode, an instant-built tempshift will have constant temperature of 20 C regardless of crafting material.

15 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

an becomes too cold at 20C, no? Can it really cool to 0?

Yes. Look the fan is spinning.

@Gus Smedstad I think my wording was not accurate. I was talking about an instant, convenient, temporary heat deletion like make a room cold in seconds. For a lasting cooling need, icedrofan / hydrofan / ice tempshift would be very inefficient anyway. I'll fix the wording to highlight that.

[SakuraKoi]

It's only a scam if you fall for it! Also Ice SHC is 2.050, not the same as water but less than half.

 

Now seriously though, the designers might like to take a very close look at it to make it not a dead building. 

To sum up the problems players will have with it and disregard it::

1. Ice disappears (not amusing)
2. Requires more than just delivery (manual operation in this case, a turn-off)
3. Cooling is worse than simply letting it sit (main problem)

So the solutions:

1. Ice turns into the same amount of water
2. Optionally Electrical Operation
3. Ice turns into water by increasing temperature to 0°C (or whatever number close to it, 2.1 would be the "natural" number, ingame) rather than decreasing mass while adhering to the proper formula while adding a bonus amount of cooling. 

The problem for those solutions? All need (completely) new programming rather than copypasta. Also one then needs to always use a block of precisely 50kg ice and change the content when melted.

Proper formula:

Cooling = SHC of Ice times the Mass of Ice (in g) times the Temperature rise per second in K

i.e 2.050*50 000*0.2=20 500 DTU Cooling (based on melting -20°C of Ice from the Maker in 100 seconds)

Personally I'd add a bonus of 10-20%.

 

Alternative but similar solution would be to unify the fans and use the coolant (ice or water or even anything else) and change it when the contents reach the surrounding temperature, though one would need to manually decide whether to use water or ice and keep it or not if ice changes to water. Well, anything is better than useless, of course it is best to make sense which fans don't quite anyway.

[goatt]

27 minutes ago, SakuraKoi said:

Ice SHC is 2.050

I didn't know SHC of ice is 2.05. I remember I always saw it show 4.179. But I just went back to check, both available versions have ice's SHC of 2.05. lel. Thank you for pointing that out. I've fixed it in my calculation (assuming melting point is 0 C)

27 minutes ago, SakuraKoi said:

I'd add a bonus of 10-20%.

I like your idea. However, I am not sure how to tell whether 10-20% is legit. Because the ice being deleted a lot of potential to absorb more heat before reaching room temperature. Then it can be deleted for example in outer space, and this will delete heat far far more than 10-20% in a lot of case. For that, I think this cooling device is just none sense.

8 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

wtf! Still learning everyday.

I thought it was 4.179 my whole (gaming) life.

[Gurgel]

I would suggest that Klei made an error when calculating the Icedrofan effect. Probably a bug. I have filed a bug-report here:

 

[Sasza22]

What about the time it takes to melt the ice. Does the fan melt it faster than it would on it`s own, lets say as a tempshift plate?

 

[goatt]

3 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

Does the fan melt it faster than it would on it`s own, lets say as a tempshift plate?

That’s why I wanted to suggest to build the ice into tempshift. It melts very fast and changes surrounding significantly in open area.

25 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Probably a bug.

Lel, must be.

[Guest]

6 hours ago, nakomaru said:

6 hours ago, SakuraKoi said:

Also Ice SHC is 2.050

wtf! Still learning everyday.

Polluted Ice also has a different SHC from pw, 3.05

[Bryce]

We're revising the Icedrofan and the Ice Machine right now.

[SakuraKoi]

^Great, looking forward to vanilla flavor!

[Gurgel]

37 minutes ago, Bryce said:

We're revising the Icedrofan and the Ice Machine right now.

Excellent. Thank you!

[Gus Smedstad]

Logically, the ice machine should be like the tuners - a way of moving heat out of the water, but not adding or removing heat. Sure, I like it as a tech alternative to the magical wheezewort, I'm just talking about what makes sense from a physical point of view. Your ice maker in your refrigerator doesn't destroy heat, it just moves it out of the water and into your kitchen.

Similarly, you'd think the ice fan would be an automated way of transferring heat from the environment to a block of ice. Every DTU it removes from the environment should increase the temperature of the ice. For practicality's sake, it should have a water output and not require a Dupe to operate it. Loading it with ice is either a Dupe or conveyor task.

To be worthwhile, the fan would need a higher DTU transfer rate than just letting ice sit in a pool of water. Otherwise you're paying electricity for an effect you could get more cheaply with ONI physics rules.

The only question that begs is what the fan would do with water. Should the water continue to provide cooling, like a water tank / radiator solution? Or does it just get pumped out a 5 C (the temperature of melted water in ONI), and the player can elect to move it through radiant pipes to try and absorb more heat?

[goatt]

23 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Logically, the ice machine should be like the tuners

I think the ice maker is more like tepidizer, which I think is designed to have nothing to do with extreme temperature technologies. And I would think it logical to have similar power hunger as tepidizer (now it's 240 W and too little). Tuner is quite a different device, if ice maker is like tuner, then it would be like a tuner that takes water input and produces ice output on rail convey, which is too similar as tuner in my opinion. All these new buildings are not for endgame, if I'm not talking from the angle of game science.

[goboking]

I wouldn't mind if they just scrapped the current iterations of these buildings (hydrofan and icedrofan) altogether and replaced them with a device that works sort of like a window AC unit.  Use the hydrofan's artwork and have it run on power and give it a liquid intake port.  Set the power and water consumption rates to a point where it's viable to use these for spot cooling in a few rooms, but expensive enough to make cooling an entire base with them uneconomical.

[Gus Smedstad]

36 minutes ago, goatt said:

I think the ice maker is more like tepidizer, which I think is designed to have nothing to do with extreme temperature technologies.

I guess it depends on whether you feel ONI machines should have some sort of logical explanation behind them. You can convert electrical energy into heat directly easily enough in the real world. You run current through an electrical resistance, it heats up. There's no equivalent way to turn electrical energy into "cold," since that would violate conservation of energy. Air conditioner units, refrigerators, etc. don't destroy heat, they move it from one place to another.

Now, arguably ONI violates energy conservation all over the place, with things like wheezeworts, fixed output temperatures, heat vanishing when fuel is burned, etc. It's just that ONI machines aren't usually too overt about it, they kinda-sorta resemble realistic ones. So, electrical heaters exist in the game, but no magic electrical coolers. At least, not until the ice maker came along.

[Machenoid]

5 hours ago, Bryce said:

We're revising the Icedrofan and the Ice Machine right now.

Here's my arguements on each of them

Ice Machine: Dumping heat directly into the room where the ice is being created is a bad idea^TM. I would strongly suggest it require a gas input/output on the machine which is used as the temperature transfer medium to carry the heat away from the machine more directly. (It should still be bottle-fed for matters of simplicity; if you want industrial ice creation, build your own machine!) The gas doesn't need to be cold either, it's just what the machine dumps DTUs from the pure water -> ice cooling process into. Considering its currently placed on the HVAC research line, it would create a nice symbiosis and tutorial opportunity: The Ice Machine removes DTUs from pure water and dumps the DTUs into a gas inside a pipe, and the Thermo Regulator machine takes a hot gas and removes DTUs from it to release into the environment. This resolves the problem of the ice machine making the room its inside of hot (heating the machine and the ice inside it, making it a useless energy-waster) and provides a much less-magical "pure energy" way of cooling pure water into ice, and uses pre-existing gameplay logic (aquatuner) from the player's perspective.

Icedrofan: Does it have to be "Industrial Strength" Hydrofan v2.0? What if it was a morale machine? Instead of performing the industrial-sized task of cooling at least a dozen kilograms of oxygen in the room (a fully pressurized 64 tile room has up to 128kg of oxygen!) the duplicant could use it during their scheduled down time to give themselves a relaxing "Cool Breeze" buff that reduces stress, gives a Quality of Life bonus, and the small tangential benefit of reducing room temperature. Since dupes won't be doing anything while they're on down-time anyways, it would be a better fit than wasting dupe time on a task done better by other machinery. It might also be possible to create an automated version of the icedrofan when smart storage is researched which acts like a robo-miner does, except it shoots dupes with cool breezes (lowering the temperature at their position) and is fed by a conveyor that accepts ice (and outputs the liquid water through a pipe)

[Gus Smedstad]

55 minutes ago, Machenoid said:

Ice Machine: Dumping heat directly into the room where the ice is being created is a bad idea^TM.

Funny, since that's exactly what the existing tuners do, and they're not "useless energy wasters," as you put it. Heat transfer's a highly useful mechanic if you know what you're doing, since there are various ways of removing heat from water, and later on from steam. The suggestion of adding a gas line in and out would make it one of the most complex machines in the game, and wouldn't really change all that much.

The main argument against ice makers being heat transfer devices (as real ice makers are) is that there's considerable overlap with aquatuners. Mainly what you get from it is a machine that handles the phase change from water to ice without breaking, unlike aquatuners. Whether that's important or not is debatable; it gives you a steady source of ice for ice sculptures, for example, but how many people actually use those as art? As opposed to emergency cooling blocks of ice.

58 minutes ago, Machenoid said:

Icedrofan: Does it have to be "Industrial Strength" Hydrofan v2.0? What if it was a morale machine?

Do not want. Cooling's a serious issue, and morale isn't. There are morale machines (espresso, arcade machine) already that go largely unused by pretty much everyone, we don't need another.

Mostly, what I'd like to see from these two is something to handle cooling that's earlier and easier than aquatuner setups, and not so prone to rapid overheating. Something roughly on par with a wheezewort. The pre-QOL3 cooling fan was clearly intended to be something like that, but was so useless that no one built them.

[Machenoid]

2 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

The main argument against ice makers being heat transfer devices (as real ice makers are) is that there's considerable overlap with aquatuners

Actually after testing the ice maker for a short time in a sealed room with 'insulation' insulated tiles and vacuum bottle, it looks like it doesn't even bother dumping the energy present in the water into the environment currently, so my original point and concern is currently meaningless.

What exists as of this post is an ice machine that dumps out -20^oC pure water ice with no real appreciable increase in atmospheric room temperature for the work that's done. In fact, the 18 tiles of 2kg oxygen dropped to match the ice temperature in less than 1 cycle. From 95^oC input water. It took the same amount of time to do the same job as 5 degree water, too. The machine is currently massively broken and over-powered because of these magical properties, and its functions really does need to be reworked.

Implementing a gas pipe in/out for waste heat removal is no more complex than the Metal Refinery's liquid coolant system.

[CodexDraco]

8 minutes ago, Machenoid said:

Implementing a gas pipe in/out for waste heat removal is no more complex than the Metal Refinery's liquid coolant system.

The metal refinery is a mid tier building, the lower tier equivalent is the rock granulator and that doesn't require any inputs other than electricity and labor.

Adding gas input/outputs to the ice machine would require setting up an extra pump, vent and a way to deal with the heated gas, and at that point you are basically setting up an air conditioning system.

But more interestingly, is that if the ice machine had gas inputs and outputs, then you could grab hydrogen, loop it trough the ice machine a few times and then destroy the gas in a hydrogen generator and voila, you had made a superior version of an AETN.