New Ice maker heat deletion

[KittenIsAGeek]

1 hour ago, Z0366 said:

Yeah, but other problems have better "alternative". While for cooling, this is much powerful than other solutions in older version. By saying dedication, I really meant I dedicated a dupe to do power generation, and only operate the ice maker once in a while. I dedicated the power person to do it so that travel time is minimized.

It isn't all that much different from sending 99c polluted water through a sieve.  The only real difference is that your output is below the freezing point instead of 40c.  

Of course, you could chain them together: 99c PW into sieve, 40c clean water into ice maker... the end result is the same in the end.  The only difference is what steps you chose to take to get you there.

[Z0366]

3 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Actually, you can. You just run some fluid through a pipe, cool it with an aquatuner, and then use the aquatuner to generate steam. You run radiant pipe wherever you need cooling, and presto, you're cooling your base with a steam turbine. It's a design pattern I've used several times to cool large sections of my colony.

If you've got steel and turbine tech, turbines are really your go-to cooling solution for just about anything. Wheezeworts, AETNs, etc are stopgaps for earlier in the game.

That would have to wait for mid game where you could afford an aquatuner. If you do happen to have a steam geyser next to base to start with so you need cooling fast , or you want to use that water earlier for farming, the ice maker is a good choice.

3 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

The best part of this (for me) is that the steam turbine covers a big part of the electricity cost of the aquatuner. 

A 110 steam generates less than 100 W yesterday I tested in debug. It is no way to cover your expenses in power if you are to cool that 90oC water for farming.

[SakuraKoi]

One does not even need a duplicant to watch it 24/7 or whatever the asteroid equivalent is since like already written, 40°C cooling takes about a minute. Double that time if you use 60°C water and near the boiling point it is triple dat.

Plenty of duplicants can do that job while also doing another, for that delivery has to have the same priority, the ice maker a higher priority than i.e the grill and other deliveries below that or outside their permissible area. Likewise long-distance goofers are not allowed in the ice maker "kitchen". Of course one can also do some overkill and have more than several ice makers but there should be still time in between deliveries (ofc pitcher pump right next to them) or your electricity bill is gonna truck.

Needless to say, auto-sweepers can easily deliver the ice to wherever it is needed and the "coverage" can be easily increased by splitting the conveyor rails. Important is to ensure that the ice actually does not stack, for on one side you will have less water and on the other you risk a water explosion once everything has melted.

[chemie]

8 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

It isn't all that much different from sending 99c polluted water through a sieve.  The only real difference is that your output is below the freezing point instead of 40c.  

Of course, you could chain them together: 99c PW into sieve, 40c clean water into ice maker... the end result is the same in the end.  The only difference is what steps you chose to take to get you there.

How does DTU of 99c to 40C PW compare?  I think the ice maker is providing much more DTU cooling

[Gus Smedstad]

6 hours ago, Z0366 said:

That would have to wait for mid game where you could afford an aquatuner.

I said as much in my post. I was responding to your belief that you can’t use steam turbines for base cooling.

As for the turbine paying for the aquatuner - you didn’t set up your test at all correctly. You don’t try and run a steam turbine on 110 C steam. In fact it shouldn’t turn over at all below 125 C. It sounds like you just connected it to a steam geyser instead of setting up an aquatuner cooling system.

The turbine pays for a bit less than half the aquatuner power. That is, you can expect it to produce about 560 watts if the only source of heat is an aquatuner, and the tuner costs 1200 watts.

If you use automation to ensure the steam is at 195 C, the turbine produces 800 watts at full power, and an aquatuner transfers 585 kDTU/s with water, so you’ll get a 585/835 = 70% duty cycle. 70% * 800 = 560 watts.

I don’t think you need to force 195 C, I believe at 165 C the turbine will run continuously and consume 585 kDTU/s while producing 560 watts, giving you equilibrium.

The old turbine definitely paid for the aquatuner. If you used only 1 port, you got 2000 watts for 600 kDTU. That was a 97% duty cycle with an aquatuner, and the net was 750 watts less whatever power you used to return steam to the lower chamber. I used gas pumps personally which ran 1000 watts, so my cooling systems had a net cost of 250 watts. A door pump let you run a net surplus.

The numbers are quite different with supercoolant, but we’re talking mid game and no space materials.

[Chained Phoenix]

I don't understand how people have so much difficulty cooling their bases...  Just use Weezelworts and Diamond Tempshift Plates to even it all out...  All my oxygen generation comes from non-cooled Electrolyzers and if anything I have to remove Weezelworts as it gets too cold in places!  If you precool the Oxygen supply it's even more efficient, to the point the base will be too cold (now that dupes complain about that).

I'm not a fan of the ice machine, seems way too OP.  Heat is easily the biggest learning curve but there are so many options, Weezelworts, aquatuners, vacuum gaps, polluted water cooling (from the off gassing into space)...

[Gus Smedstad]

6 minutes ago, Chained Phoenix said:

I don't understand how people have so much difficulty cooling their bases...  Just use Weezelworts and Diamond Tempshift Plates to even it all out... 

My guess is that you’ve been running colonies with very low populations. Or maybe you’ve just been extraordinarily lucky with geysers that primarily provide cold materials.

Off the top of my head, the major heat sources are hot geysers (i.e. cool steam geysers providing steam at 110 C), generators, and the metal refinery. The more dupes you have, the more water you need, and the more heat you’re accepting from steam geysers and the like.  Stuffed berries are probably your mainstay food once you get out of the early game, and that means you have to cool a good fraction of the water.

If you have a cold slush geyser as a major water source, that’s a lot less heat for water use. If you have only hot water sources, though, it adds up pretty quickly.

Then there are metal volcanoes. I had a copper volcano, and two AETNs couldn’t keep up with its net heat output over time. I only really tamed it when I built a turbine.

There are tricks to handling the heat from a metal refinery, but they’re pretty mid game since they involve doing things like refining heating crude oil or burning very hot petroleum in a generator. Or you can harness the heat for an oil boiler, which is again mid to late game.

Generators throw off heat. It’s manageable with wheezeworts, but it’s not trivial. Without active cooling of some kind a petroleum generator can easily heat the surrounding air above the Dupe scalding point.

 

[Chained Phoenix]

It's more that I isolate my base well.  It's surrounded by ceramic insulated tiles and the only way out is via atmo suits which I usually setup a few exits of.  I've run populations of 20+ with zero issues.  I don't do high heat generation activities like the metal refinery with-in the base zone, my current run that I started with MK2 I've got more heat than usual but cooling still isn't an issue.  It got a bit warm in points when I had to change to geyer water at ~80 degrees but once I had enough ceramic for the pipes that all started to cooled down well.  The living quarters of the base has never gotten above 24 degrees (even though the oxygen coming in is 35-45 degrees).

A previous play I had two cold steam geyers right next to my base, even that wasn't the end of the world after I got some decent vacuum and ceramic insulation happening with them.

[Gus Smedstad]

So there you go, you’ve answered your own question. You do have base heating issues, you just isolate them and ignore them. Presumably this means you’re running atmo suits from early on to prevent scalding your dupes in the superheated industrial areas.

EDIT: I’m not even sure how that would work, since ignoring heat issues doesn’t make the heat go away, and eventually the machinery will got hot enough to break. Going steel early for everything will delay that, but means you need a lot of lime.

[chemie]

11 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

So there you go, you’ve answered your own question. You do have base heating issues, you just isolate them and ignore them. Presumably this means you’re running atmo suits from early on to prevent scalding your dupes in the superheated industrial areas.

EDIT: I’m not even sure how that would work, since ignoring heat issues doesn’t make the heat go away, and eventually the machinery will got hot enough to break. Going steel early for everything will delay that, but means you need a lot of lime.

I run all industrial stuff outside base and it generally stabilizes at 60c at 1000 cycles.  nothing breaks or over heats ie needs active cooling.

[Chained Phoenix]

That's not a base heating issue though... I have a steel bunker shield on the top of the map by cycle 200 (would be quicker if I concentrated on lime production earlier) and again my base is cool, nothing overheats, even outside as it's all kept cool by where I build it.  Example I usually build my metal refinery near a cool geyer of some type like a slush, Carbon liquid one, etc. and use that both for it's coolant input and to keep the general area cool.  I'm up to cycle 733 on this map now and have zero heating issues, everything is kept more than cool enough in the living zone and even the outside areas nothing is overheating.

Anyway all off topic.  The ability to erase heat like this just seems silly and OP.  The only way you should be able to "erase" heat is when you eject it into space.

[pacovf]

Having a slush geyser radically changes how easy it is to deal with heat. You would have quite a bit more trouble without that. Sadly, cold CO2 geysers don’t output enough mass to make a difference.

[SakuraKoi]

44 minutes ago, chemie said:

I run all industrial stuff outside base and it generally stabilizes at 60c at 1000 cycles.  nothing breaks or over heats ie needs active cooling.

and on the contrary Duplicants need Exosuit training first or they walk at a snail's pace, never even mind the time it takes to construct the insulation and inconvenience when expanding.

It's good to have different playstyles which each have their merit and demerit but if we go by one like yours only, then the ice maker does not make any difference after all. For all you care instead of 60°C it could be 20°C and there would be no difference, well, besides germs dying slower.

Incidentally, imagine yourself living in a confined space and for outside you always need protective gear, that would truck, no? You are basically polluting the asteroid with heat because there is enough mass after all to truck it up. Needless to say, someday/cycle this will backfire or at least you need to provide cooling somehow and the concept of equivalent exchange in a game is not always for the best, if not also a mess.

Cool Slush Geysers would become even more "OP". A cool slush geyser provides indeed 282 kDTU of cooling material per second (not the same as providing the cooling per s) when taking 20°C as target value, double that if 50°C is fair game and 800 kDTU to prevent overheating (75°C)

But whoever is a physics purist, feel free to do the math first before arguing, like how much Energy a Steam Turbine "should" produce... and how it'd fit no sane amount of batteries and makes power a non-issue.

Ironically Solar Panels would then cause asteroidal warming. 

[Ipsquiggle]

Heads up, we're further revising the mechanics of this building. Still trying to strike the right balance between early-game usability and late game balance. Thanks for all the different perspectives!

[Sevio]

1 hour ago, Ipsquiggle said:

Heads up, we're further revising the mechanics of this building. Still trying to strike the right balance between early-game usability and late game balance. Thanks for all the different perspectives!

From what I understand so far, the heat deletion is all happening in the ice maker part, which doesn't take too much dupe time to operate and players are free to melt the ice afterwards and use automated ways to take full advantage of this very cheap and powerful method of heat deletion.

Some suggestions to mitigate this:

• Reduce the amount of ice made to reduce the amount of heat deleted per operation. Match the ice-e fan to use a smaller amount of ice but use up the ice completely instead of melting it.
• And/or change the ice maker to move (most of) its heat elsewhere, and...
• Change the ice-e fan to provide most of the intended heat deletion of this combination. This way the ice-e fan offers the better value early on (rather than just using the ice maker and letting ice melt), whereas the ice maker can be used later on for the ice sculptures and automated solutions replace the ice-e fan for long term cooling.

One possible way of having the ice maker move its heat elsewhere is to change it to something like the pitcher pump. Have it built over a liquid pool that is used to dump heat into.

[Z0366]

2 hours ago, Sevio said:

From what I understand so far, the heat deletion is all happening in the ice maker part, which doesn't take too much dupe time to operate and players are free to melt the ice afterwards and use automated ways to take full advantage of this very cheap and powerful method of heat deletion.

Some suggestions to mitigate this:

• Reduce the amount of ice made to reduce the amount of heat deleted per operation. Match the ice-e fan to use a smaller amount of ice but use up the ice completely instead of melting it.
• And/or change the ice maker to move (most of) its heat elsewhere, and...
• Change the ice-e fan to provide most of the intended heat deletion of this combination. This way the ice-e fan offers the better value early on (rather than just using the ice maker and letting ice melt), whereas the ice maker can be used later on for the ice sculptures and automated solutions replace the ice-e fan for long term cooling.

One possible way of having the ice maker move its heat elsewhere is to change it to something like the pitcher pump. Have it built over a liquid pool that is used to dump heat into.

Nice thought and good advice. I agree that the ice maker should not itself delete heat, if any, it should be done with the icefan.

[miauly]

3 minutes ago, Z0366 said:

Nice thought and good advice. I agree that the ice maker should not itself delete heat, if any, it should be done with the icefan.

If it won't delete heat, wouldn't it become just another aquatuner but with different temperature change? And a worse one - ice is less convenient to cool things down, plus dupe operation, plus extra building and more dupe operation to actually do that cooling that was the goal in the first place.

I think the heat deletion is the best part, because then you can use that ice for various cooling setups, from dumping it into berries water to building tempshift plates and on. If the deletion is done by the fan, then the setup is locked together and brings less fun to the game. Also you could then use the ice from ice biomes to feed to the fan and even to get more ice, which is now starting to sound interesting but probably is going off the way of original intent.

It sounds too powerful from computations indeed, but this can be addressed by a tweak in numbers.

[WanderingKid]

3 hours ago, Sevio said:

• Reduce the amount of ice made to reduce the amount of heat deleted per operation. Match the ice-e fan to use a smaller amount of ice but use up the ice completely instead of melting it.
• And/or change the ice maker to move (most of) its heat elsewhere, and...
• Change the ice-e fan to provide most of the intended heat deletion of this combination. This way the ice-e fan offers the better value early on (rather than just using the ice maker and letting ice melt), whereas the ice maker can be used later on for the ice sculptures and automated solutions replace the ice-e fan for long term cooling.

I personally would not like to see the water consumed by the Ice-E.  If that happens, the fan will go back to the status of the Hydrofan: Not powerful enough for the permanent water costs.  My understanding is this equipment is a stop gap for early / mid bases before you go whole hog on industrial sized solutions.  Deleting precious early water would make it a completely newb trap item again.  Making it not transfer coldness to the local area makes it a dupe time sink better spent in other places, like insulated walling up the entire base to keep your mealwood cool.

I believe the problem here is the Ice-E fan is actually fine.  Take out the ice maker, and it does exactly as advertised for the mined ice/polluted ice you have from raiding an ice biome.

However, with the Ice Maker overly powerful for temperature conversion, it can be abused heavily.  There are plenty of OTHER things that do the same process, but not in the early game.  For example, the sieve is actually a heating unit for the lavatory loop, since you usually want the plants around it about 10-13C lower than it resets any used water to.  That same item, used to delete 55C+ of heat from PWater to water, is incredibly powerful.  However, using that power requires a few other components... one of which is even a way to move heat into the water where it needs to go.  Excess polluted water AND Cool Steam/Aquatuners/Etc. make the sieve as powerful as it is for the fixed temperature, not the sieve by itself.

The only particular issue I see the ice maker creating is that it's too simple and straight forward for the deletion power it has.  It is a one-step process.  The problem is unless you're going to design heat rooms that have minimal dupe run times so their ice won't melt before they get it where it's going, a local heat exchange will become near useless.  After using a stopwatch in 1x speed a few times, I'm seeing about 1F / second of cooling for the 50kg of water.  That's 116.1 kDTU for the 4.5 kDTU of the ice maker.

I'm don't know what the solution is.  I just want the ice maker to be viable in early/mid game without making higher tech solutions (Aquatuner/sieve for example) to be outclassed before they even get there. 

The most obvious solution that I can think of is to make it dupe time expensive.  So, it can fix spot level problems, but it's not a long term/fix anything everywhere solution.  This would keep the heat from using it to be far too strong for an early base to contend with, but it's not something you'd use except in a pinch.

If you want to keep it in line with the majority of the heat deletion techniques (using petro/NG in the generators, etc) then decouple the Ice-E from the Icemaker.  Put in 100 kg of water, get 50kg of ice out.  Tune to preference.  Same cost as if you dug the ice from an ice biome.  More complicated approaches (Wheezes and AETNs probably) could give you full kg of water-ice conversion (once they fix the mass duplication bugs).

[Sevio]

@WanderingKid You make a good point with it becoming a newbie trap if the ice-e fan consumed water permanently. That suggestion wasn't fully thought through. I would want to avoid it from becoming another Hydrofan. So that changes my suggestions to the following:

• Change the ice maker to move its heat elsewhere and not delete (as much) heat. (for example dumping it into a lake by making it a pitcher pump type building)
• Match the ice-e fan to melt a smaller amount of ice but delete more heat than that ice would normally absorb.

This makes both buildings mass preserving and therefore valuable in the early stages of the game, but since the heat deletion is now all in the ice-e fan, automated solutions become preferable later in the game. Additionally, that makes digging up ice from an ice biome and using it in an ice-e fan more attractive in a pinch despite the mass loss.

[bmilohill]

My suggestion would be that it if devs want both early game availability and late game balance, then it really ought to be two separate buildings. The current ice maker, but whose heat deletion properties are closer to that of the refrigerator; it would be simple enough to make the chilling take much longer (maybe 40 seconds of dup operation to fill it, followed by 400 seconds of non-dup operation (varies depending on input temp), then it dumps ice on the floor). And a separate deep freezer that has the current heat deletion capabilities, but takes closer to 20kW to run. 

That would be modeled closer to realism, after all. Refrigeration takes significantly more energy than pumps or filtration systems. 

[mathmanican]

A pitcher pump can destroy more heat than this new device. It happens on accident without people knowing, and it can be abused brutally to cool just about anything.  Maybe one last plug to @Ipsquiggle to look into this thing. It might actually be a very simple fix (might).  Details are in the bug report, especially the comments section where the bug is greatly expanded upon.