Sense of future for too-clever systems?

[Saturnus]

@Sevio and @Denisetwin. One thing to note. As discussed in the thread mentioned, if one the mediums you want to exchange heat to or from is a liquid then submerging the pipes, be it gas, liquid, or even solids on conveyors will be vastly superior to any method involving metal tiles or gases with diamond temp shift plates and so on. Especially if you make a stepped or ladder design.

Ordinary materials like gold, iron, or copper using this method achieves efficiencies that can only be surpassed in area used by access to thermium. And if you got access to vast amounts of thermium then you could just make the liquid super coolant, and then you're back at submerged pipes being the better option.

[mathmanican]

2 hours ago, Denisetwin said:

You've inspired me to try this.  Crossing my fingers.

Yay! I hope you succeed. 

For me, building heat exchangers has been a fun endeavor.  I left the wiki for this one and went to Google and Wikipedia, and followed references there to read about lots of different types of heat exchangers. That side detour provided a ton of fun for several days. The actual real life theory doesn't match the in game physics exactly, but lots of principles are the same. Thanks @Sevio for posting the great info above.

2 hours ago, Denisetwin said:

I do not play in debug

Do you ever enable Sandbox?  This is a simple thing to enable that's already setup by the devs. For the first 500 hours or so of playing ONI, I refused to enable debug as well.  However, once I started playing around with Chlorine clamped turbines, I decided that in order to experiment with 7 different versions of something to collect data and compare results, I had to break away from this.  That's when the "survival game" game turned more into an "engineering simulation" for me.  I still play survival games, but anytime I want to build something new that I've never done before, I often build several almost identical copies and then compare contrast them with data before deciding which to build in survival.   

The most frustrating "survival" experiment for me was when I thought, "Can I build a tile out of 250C abysalitte, so that I can trick a turbine into running constantly?" This was around when the steam turbine on neutronium exploit was popular (eradicated finally with QOL3). Here's what happened.

Spoiler

1. I started a completely new survival game. 
2. I went out 50 cycles or so to get down to the magma biome, dig out some abysalitte, and prepare a huge vacuum room somewhere else on the map for my new steam turbine plan. I was pretty excited.   
3. I found a way to get my dupes to bring all the 500C abysalitte I had dug out up to my turbine chamber. I wanted to be sure to build with HOT stuff. 
4. I locked a dupe in this chamber, in an exosuit, to build myself a nice 500C insulated abysallite tile.
5. I built the tile, but the temp was 45C.  I reloaded, built again and 45C.  I was pretty mad.  How many hours passed to figure this out? I was quite furious. Several days wasted!
6. I turned Sandbox mode on the next day, added all of debug as well, and haven't ever been sorry. 

Some people argue that the "new tiles are clamped at a max temp of 45C" exists to prevent us from accidentally overheating our base when dupes stupidly pick up hot materials to build in our base.  But what if I purposefully WANT to build something hot? This clamping rule HURTS!  We have to first build it, and then heat it.  Ugh!

I will argue that it's 100% possible to force your dupes to build with exactly the materials you want them too. It just requires excessive micromanagement, in the current game state (a little annoying).  Now, if part of the build process allowed you to specify a temp range on materials, then that micromanagement would be gone.  But doing this would probably kill the path-finding algorithm which already hogs memory, crippling some computers. 

So the current "temp clamp" at 45C is probably a reasonable fix.  There might be better fixes, but this is a small fish to fry. I hope the devs work on more pressing things. 

 

[Denisetwin]

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

That's when the "survival game" game turned more into an "engineering simulation" for me.

This made me laugh.  ONI for me is all about making my base the best and then trying out some big something that I've read about.  Last base it was finally getting a double steam turbine running which I was very successful using your step by step and of course that all changed with the update and also trying to build a oil to petrol boiler which was not a success at all.  

Thank you @Sevio  @Saturnus and @mathmanican  great advice.  I'm off to try it.

[JohnFrancis]

6 hours ago, mathmanican said:

I often build several almost identical copies and then compare contrast them with data before deciding which to build in survival.   

I can relate.

 

[Saturnus]

@Denisetwin To illustrate my point about liquids being in many cases a superior medium over metal tiles I set up the following experiment.

It has hydrogen at 76.6C 200g/s running left to right. And water at 26.8C 4000g/s running right to left.

Surrounding infrastructure is insulation insulated tiles. Active pipes are iron/iron ore radiant pipes. Metal tiles is iron. Water is 1000kg/tile.

Result is hydrogen comes out at 26.9C from both. Water that ran through metal tiles is 28.3C so a gain of 1.5K. Water that ran through water is 27.6C so a gain of 0.8K.

So water as transfer medium is almost twice as effective a transfer medium as metal tiles.

[Grimgaw]

11 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

So water as transfer medium is almost twice as effective a transfer medium as metal tiles.

Is this the conclusion?

I'm assuming that you started your test with metal tile of the same temperature as water. Was it 20C? What if the tiles and water started at 95C or 0C?

Without testing is easy to see that 1000kg has more heat capacity than 200kg.

[Saturnus]

14 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

Is this the conclusion?

I'm assuming that you started your test with metal tile of the same temperature as water. Was 20C? What if the tiles and water started at 95C or 0C?

Without testing is easy to see that 1000kg has more heat capacity than 200kg.

I ran it 10 cycles to stabilize it. I spawned the water in at 26.8C because I already knew this was just slightly below the temperature it would stabilize at. Metal tiles are 100kg. Full water tiles have 93 times the SHC of iron metal tiles (10 times more mass and 9.3 times higher SHC per kg) so if I hadn't spawned it in around a temperature I knew it would eventually get to I could have waited ages.

[Denisetwin]

6 hours ago, Saturnus said:

So water as transfer medium is almost twice as effective a transfer medium as metal tiles

Thank you for checking this!!!

I'm printing this to save, I hope I am not the only one that has literal stacks of papers for ONI of various builds, favorite tips, and things I'm trying.  

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, Denisetwin said:

Thank you for checking this!!!

I'm printing this to save, I hope I am not the only one that has literal stacks of papers for ONI of various builds, favorite tips, and things I'm trying.  

If by stacks of paper you mean dozens of sheets of graph paper tucked under my keyboard and lots of post-it notes stuck around my desk, then no, you're not the only one. 

[SakuraKoi]

3 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

If by stacks of paper you mean dozens of sheets of graph paper tucked under my keyboard and lots of post-it notes stuck around my desk, then no, you're not the only one. 

I once had a second monitor... until ONI came along.

Though one might argue that the delay of over a year does by no means indicate correlation, never mind causation. But it's still broken/non-functional and Canada is to blame.

Here is how it looks like: 

Spoiler

on a side note, I'm not entirely sure what to make of the first post. asking for mere guesses based on simple common sense. Though I like the data on thermal stuff, I'd really like it to be noted in a simple fashion somewhere, https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Guide/Temperature_Management#Thermal_Conductivity sure does not do the mechanic justice, not even remotely with all those hidden modifiers.

[Yunru]

5 hours ago, Denisetwin said:

Thank you for checking this!!!

I'm printing this to save, I hope I am not the only one that has literal stacks of papers for ONI of various builds, favorite tips, and things I'm trying.  

I was born lucky enough to have the ability to keep it all straight in my head! Everything that I remember. Either that or the ability to forget something so totally that I'm unaware that I'm forgetting something.

[JohnFrancis]

7 hours ago, Denisetwin said:

I'm printing this to save, I hope I am not the only one that has literal stacks of papers for ONI of various builds, favorite tips, and things I'm trying.  

You are not alone, though my notes are usually so scattered about the place and without context as to be worthless. I made a bunch of video tutorials and strangely I'm my own best customers. "What settings did I put on that thermo sensor again?" "How many tiles across was that tank?"

Back to the point of this topic I think I can see the developers reasoning behind some of the decisions. Most of the really game breaking stuff requires a good knowledge of the game and some pretty fancy building. The obsessive compulsive among us in which I'm including most of the people on this forum (in a good way) have the experience to do this and this can remove the challenge and therefore the fun.

But for the game devs it's all about the bottom line if we are honest and so long as it's not going to affect sales negatively then it's priority is a little bit lower down the list. From a purely rational point of view if the choice is ->

1. Spending time adding a new feature/biome etc that will bump sales OR
2. Fixing an exploit that can only be achieved by a tiny fraction of the player base

What would a fiscally responsibly developer do? This is not great for players who have poured hours of time and love into the game I'll admit, but I for one am ok with it. More players, more ideas, more fun.

Quick sanity check here, people are complaining about the water sieve being used to delete heat, right? Something I have never gotten into. Am I the only one annoyed by the water sieve heating up the polluted water I went to all the trouble of making sure was created cold out of my power plant? 

[pacovf]

39 minutes ago, JohnFrancis said:

Quick sanity check here, people are complaining about the water sieve being used to delete heat, right? Something I have never gotten into. Am I the only one annoyed by the water sieve heating up the polluted water I went to all the trouble of making sure was created cold out of my power plant? 

I am annoyed by both, but in the second scenario, mostly for the early game (water from generators coming out at the temperature of the generator is also kind of exploit-y). The sieve has a tendency to kill your farms, if you don't know about its temperature output.

[beowulf2010]

55 minutes ago, JohnFrancis said:

Quick sanity check here, people are complaining about the water sieve being used to delete heat, right? Something I have never gotten into. Am I the only one annoyed by the water sieve heating up the polluted water I went to all the trouble of making sure was created cold out of my power plant? 

Annoyed? No. Has it screwed up builds because I forgot about the "free" +35C heating? Yes. 

[Gus Smedstad]

1 hour ago, JohnFrancis said:

You are not alone, though my notes are usually so scattered about the place and without context as to be worthless.

ONI doesn't reach the point where I feel I need external notes. I can usually visualize what I'm doing, and if I'm having trouble, I use the game itself as a planning tool. Keep it paused while I drop stuff down and see if I need to adjust anything, erase it if I need to make changes.

I'm not above notes in other games. I kept a long tiered checklist of all the stuff I was going to do when I was playing Gregtech. Plus occasionally some notes on conversions, since the petroleum cracker / distillation tower combo had 4-5 different outputs for each possible petroleum product, and I couldn't keep track of all the combinations in my head.

28 minutes ago, pacovf said:

 The sieve has a tendency to kill your farms, if you don't know about its temperature output.

I'm struggling with that right now, and I knew full well that it was going to be a problem.

The issue is that it's only my second colony, and I was still thinking in terms of my late-game colony. "I'll just drop in an aquatuner," I said to myself, "that'll fix the heat problem," and didn't realize that I simply couldn't afford the coal cost. So now I'm desperately trying to get petroleum power online before all my visible coal runs out.

[Denisetwin]

To everyone who helped me in this thread, I did build this, and way over-engineered it, but it takes 40c water and sends it back out at 14c

I did not need a fast through put, I needed cold water with a limited space and not a lot of power set up.  I am thinking about putting in a water valve to make it even closer to the polluted water temp of 11c.