New Steamturbine even more troublesome?

[Sarythian]

Hi guys, I really was excited about the new steam turbine, but that excitement was soon diminished when being confronted with harsh reality. If someone can point out errors in my musings below then I will be happy for comments, but as far as I see it, Klei has made the turbine even less attractive than before.

I like the new aspect that the power generated depends on the temperature of the steam instead of the former "binary" thing of either "hot enough => full power, one degree below minimum => NO Power" and I also really support the decrease of minimum temperature since it enables one to make good use of all the excess heat delivered to your door by the meteor showers, that you have no other means to get rid off due to the lack of thermal radiation to space.

BUT as it is now the turbine is almost as impossible to efficiently use than the old one. Okay we have condensed steam now as output which makes closed cycle turbines a lot easier (without using the hydrogen layer method of the old turbine) which is a good thing waterwise (if you don't happen to have some 8kg/s Steamvent around) and a good thing energywise since boiling water takes incredible amounts of heatenergy due to the 4.1 heat capacity, so it is already a point whether the water you turn into steam drops in at 94° or at 44°.

but the grudge I have against the change focuses on the output nerf that has been applied. A drop from 2kW to 850W for no apparent reason. Yes they said something about "fitting it in" but in my oppinion they missed the mark by stellar distances on that one. Especially the turbine now carries a new flaw that is a death warrant in context with the power output drop. It appears that the turbine converts the energy it takes from the steam not to electrical power but emits a good portion of it to the environment. I am not that much of a math genius so I might be running the wrong direction here. But if I take the numbers (Drop from 125° to 94 at 2kg/s) that means the steam turbine removes 258kJ from the steam fed to it. According to the info panel on a running turbine app. 45-50kJ are emmitted to the environment as heat. I WOULD'nt argue against heat emmission since the turbine is heated up by the steam fed to it. 

But at this point the turbine generates a meager app. 250W of power. So where did the remaining 210kW go? With a meager 0,11% efficiency rating this turbine is barely standing up to 19th century steam engines. That still would be kind of bearable if you wouldn't have to expend most of the power generated to the cooling of the thing since it shuts down at 100° Using steam temperatures ABOVE the lower limit of 125° causes the turbine to generate more power (app. 450W at 150°) but also drastically increases the neccessity for cooling. At least I was not able to prevent heat shutdown with a thermoregulator cycling hydrogen through a radiant pipe. Aquatuner with some liquid coolant would be an alternative but would completely hammer the energy balance into the negative range even if firing the turbine at full power (which is probably somewhere near the old lower limit of steam temp).

As steam turbines are a late game power source that should at some point replace non-replenishing energy sources like coal and Gas, it would have been great if this change would have come without such a drastic nerf to power output and overexcessive cooling requirements. Yes of course I could probably quench it with a zillion wheezeworts above the turbine room but that wastes 99,89% of the thermal energy put into the setup and of course requires a dozen flights to the ice planet in order to acquire the seeds.

So any ideas? Any chance that Klei thinks this over once more and gives us a turbine worth constructing?

S.

[Saturnus]

It's discussed at length here.

forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/104258-heres-the-new-steam-turbine/

The general consensus is that the steam turbine is release ready now. No further changes needed or desired.

It's primary function is to delete heat, not to generate power as without super coolant it is now impossible to make a self-sustained infinite power source using an aquatuner.

[SakuraKoi]

38 minutes ago, Sarythian said:

With a meager 0,11% efficiency rating this turbine is barely standing up to 19th century steam engines.

Actually 1 DTU is 1000J so we actually got 110% efficiency.

or was it 0,001? As if I'd bother with that silly math~ (point is: DTU =/= J)

Seriously thou', this is a game a real world science efficiency thingy is totally amiss here. The Steam Turbine still deletes over 200 kDTU/s with the lowest input (and you'd need only 5 Wheezes to keep 1 cool).

An energy positive cooling loop is also actually not something that should be, and that's what it previously was, minus the liquid output which also makes it less troublesome now.

 

Needless to say, down below there is also a sizable heat source, although... 

would make it a more fun endeavor (and it'd be neat if someone were to move that thread to the mod section and unlocks it/make mod threads not subject to archiving)

[fredhp]

The new steam turbine is just perfect IMHO. Steam get in, power and gern free water gets out, no need to cool down steam anymore... Just "install and forget".

You can extract a great amount of renewable energy from a vulcano, or farm a billions of watts from the magma biome, and. If you cheat a little to remove neutronium from that biome, you will have power for a long time.... 

[Gus Smedstad]

2 hours ago, Sarythian said:

but the grudge I have against the change focuses on the output nerf that has been applied.

It’s not actually a nerf. What was happening was that the old turbine was so out of whack that everyone blatantly cheated. Including me.

The old turbine was 2000 watts for 10kg/s of steam and 3000 kDTU/s. The new turbine is 800 watts for 2kg/s of steam and 835 kDTU/s. It’s an increase in efficiency, from 1 joule per 1500 DTU  to 1 joule per 835 DTU.

If you’re thinking “but I only needed one port, or 2kg/s,” you’re not alone. That’s what I did, of course. And it was cheating, since the intended power output was for 10kg/s, and the bug was that it ignored a number of conditions like blocking most of the ports.

As for them being a power source - they still are, if you have a natural source of heat like regolith or magma. If you’re using an aquatuner, of course they aren’t power-positive. Aquatuner / turbine setups are about significant heat removal, not power, and they’re still excellent for that.

[SakuraKoi]

23 minutes ago, fredhp said:

If you cheat a little to remove neutronium from that biome, you will have power for a long time.... 

Are you calling my humble mod a cheat?!

 

Fair enough~

But yeah, like already said, there are so many points for why it is now more convenient while there is but one point which made it more "troublesome", and that is power, while I dare to say:

99% would still prefer the new Steam Turbine, if not even love it, if it were to cost a little bit of power. 1% are those who love their exploits too much.

[fredhp]

1 hour ago, SakuraKoi said:

Are you calling my humble mod a cheat?!

 

No!!! 
What i mean is: "If you use debug tools to remove  the neutronium from the magma biome..." 

Edit: 
Ooops...

I just realized that your mod do exactly this!!!! hehehe....  (Its the first time i saw that topic... interesting!)

[SakuraKoi]

Just now, fredhp said:

No!!! 
What i mean is: "If you use debug tools to remove  the neutronium from the magma biome..." 

But mine does replace Unobtanium with Katairite, isn't it more of a cheat?

I do not mean that the above mod which is obviously not mine (but I'll message the author after release, in case Klei doesn't do anything to the magma biome, and whenever it can be flawlessly implemented to have it ported to Steam. Although only if permitted and not made by them I'll do it).

I meant the "simple" version which removes all Neutronium from the map or replaces it.

8 minutes ago, fredhp said:

Edit: 
Ooops...

I just realized that your mod do exactly this!!!! hehehe....  (Its the first time i saw that topic... interesting!)

Yeah, I really would like if it got more coverage... well, I guess what I can still do is to make a "compatibility" patch with my More Geysers mod and link to it. IIRC it just needs a "merged" world file.

[beowulf2010]

3 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

As for them being a power source - they still are, if you have a natural source of heat like regolith or magma. If you’re using an aquatuner, of course they aren’t power-positive. Aquatuner / turbine setups are about significant heat removal, not power, and they’re still excellent for that.

Exactly right. But I personally don't even think of steam turbines as a power source. For me, they are a cooling system that just happens to produce enough power as a by-product of the cooling to refund me a good portion of the 1200kW needed for aquatuners and metal refineries. 

Sure, it's quite good at turning magma into power, but I find that to be of lesser use to me. 

The old steam turbine I built exactly once and hated pretty much every hoop you had to jump through to get them to work. Now? I usually have 3 - 5 up and running by cycle 200 to cool petroleum coolant from my steel plant, cool a gold/copper volcano or 2, and provide <20C water to my base and drecko ranches. 

[pacovf]

By the way, do we need some specific skill to build turbines now? I played some QoL III yesterday and my dupes would not build one because they “didn’t have the required skill”.

[Sevio]

@pacovf The steam turbine requires an Electrical Engineer to build.

[0xFADE]

It seems more like a full improvement across the board except that you need another gas in the room it exists in rather than just having steam everywhere. 

The fact it has a colder steam operating temperature is great. 

[pacovf]

1 hour ago, Sevio said:

@pacovf The steam turbine requires an Electrical Engineer to build.

Thanks! It doesn’t seem to be specified anywhere. Really wish there was a special priority for this sort of stuff too.

[Sevio]

1 minute ago, pacovf said:

Thanks! It doesn’t seem to be specified anywhere. Really wish there was a special priority for this sort of stuff too.

Although it's not immediately obvious, it's in a tooltip you can get when placing it:

The same tooltip appears when you place a heavi conductive wire.

[pacovf]

I thought that was for uh “operating”, not building it. I guess in hindsight that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I will be in the lookout for that in the future.

[Gus Smedstad]

If I had noticed that tooltip - which I didn't - I would totally have assumed "operated by an electrical engineer" referred to the Engineering boost, which requires Electrical Engineer. Never would have crossed my mind that it meant construction.

[Onitricker]

Yep with aquatuner not included an engineer,its impossible.But;Here is my setup: 

Self sustainable only draw approx 500w. Gaining nice and pure 2.56kW "with engineer"

+ can use excess heat coming from Steam turbines any operation. e.g came to my mind crude oil to petroleum for 1:1 ratio.

[Denisetwin]

14 hours ago, Onitricker said:

Self sustainable only draw approx 500w. Gaining nice and pure 2.56kW "with engineer"

Are you pulsing the tepidizer?  I thought that it broke when you save/load if you pulse it?  Is that fixed now?

[0xFADE]

Cooling these are an issue.  Beware any images of them not being cooled in some way. They generate more heat the more power they are making.  It is something on the order of 2+ worts per turbine at even a lower power output. 

[Sarythian]

Okay so I basically took the wrong turn when seeing them as a large scale power source. I read through the thread Saturnus mentioned. I have 4 Worts in my Turbine chamber and the thing still overheats so I will still have to think of some other way to cool those things. Heat I have in abundance. Regolithmasses are still an issue even with Shove voles gobbeling the stuff like nothing else. Or get a hold of a few more worts.

Thanks to all for the input