Heat Transfer of Conveyor Rails in Solids - Does It Need Balancing?

[mathmanican]

Update. The 200 is the same multiplier as tile to tile transfer. Debris on a tile get a 12.5 multiplier. Debris in a tile get the same 200 multiplier that tile to tile gets. Liquid to liquid gets a much larger multiplier so liquid to liquid beats this. I do find it odd that debris in a tile are so much more efficient than debris on a tile by a factor of 16.

 

Conveyor rails turn out to be one of the most efficient means of temperature exchange (applying a multiply by 200 factor in the computation when the rails are inside solids). Should this continue to be a thing? Where do you find conveyor rails and their super efficient heat exchange properties useful? Thoughts? 

• Liquid duplication in mass quantities relies on this multiplier. Drop it to 25, or something less, and liquid duplication would no long be profitable.
• The "Chill Pill" heat obliterator uses this.
• Regolith melters use this.
• Tons of other things do

Would nerfing the 200 down to 25 or something similar be a welcomed change? Took me way to long to realize the true power of conveyor rails heat transfer in solids.  Once you realize how efficient this heat transfer is, no other method even compares. Seems broken. Thoughts?

(Secretly, this is really my final plug to hopefully help squash liquid duplication - not completely, but to nerf it, along with any other possible exploits that can, and will, arise because of this overpowered mechanic.)

[Junksteel]

Kinda broken. But personally, I wouldn't want to see it changed for now. As a very valid point, it should be looked properly after crunch time and release. Also, building Chill Pill is kinda fun! Let it live for longer. 

[Bromster]

It is kind of a mid/late game with the sheer amount of ore it takes to lay down any sizable grid. I think it is a fair feature on its own given the costs of setting it up. Plus Klei seems to be designing the game around everything useful adding to your heat map in some way so this is consistent with the rest of the risk/reward design philosophy. That being said the bugs you mentioned are probably not the best thing for the game.

[mathmanican]

13 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

Let it live for longer.

Never!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

I'm pretty sure @Blazing Falken would be just as happy as I am if it were squashed in one fell swoop. 

[simonchvz]

34 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

Liquid duplication in mass quantities relies on this multiplier. Drop it to 25, or something less, and liquid duplication would no long be profitable.

Can you give a brief explanation of the reason behind this? Once knowing it existed, I avoided duplication and never learned the ins-and-outs so I don't understand why this is or why the break-even point is ~25.

Other than something like this, for gameplay purposes I'm ok with heat transfer on rails being relatively efficient compared to other transfer methods as long as there's no aquatuner-like building to act as Maxwell's Demon and aggregate the heat somewhere.  Since the higher transfer method still necessitates a healthy infrastructure to do more than balance the heat, it seems fine to have it present.  Whether it should be 200x as effective or 20x as effective...

[Nickerooni]

To be totally extreme: Maybe to keep conveyor rails newbie friendly it simply shouldn’t be possible to build it inside of solid objects. Make it require a bridge. This suggestion would break a lot of things, but I certainly couldn’t guess In advance where a liquid should end up on state change, when it materializes inside a wall. I don’t even know what it does now in all the corner cases. 

Although, a change like this would require the devs to explain why they did it, or their loyal community would be mighty confused.

[Darkin Coaled]

No. Not this way. this is just another change too add to the other "fixes" for a wrong choice in the first place.

IF @Saturnus has it right, that the liquid duplication bug is a consequence of worldgen natural tiles having had their mass doubled then what needs to be done is going back to right before that change and doing it right this time. Whoever did it the first time went at it from the wrong angle, the effects, the consequences will only keep causing problems. If this is really the case, it already means the code is full of mass/2 or mass*2 in different places and possibly without even an explanation as to why and what for.

Redo from start. Do it right this time.

Fix the bugs, nobody wants them to be in this game. We had our fun with them, make them go away.

[mathmanican]

3 hours ago, simonchvz said:

Can you give a brief explanation of the reason behind this?

• Liquid duplication - the rails are the key to making the bug mass produce at industrial scale. Without rapid heat transfer, you can't melt newly formed ice fast enough (without increasing the size of the heat transfer room).  Drop the 200 to 20, and you need a room 10 times a large.  Drop it from 200 to 5, and you need something 40 times as large. This becomes a numbers game. 
  • You can use unbottled polluted water to create PO2, but getting it to offgas at usable rates requires a rather large contraption (or infinite storage facility with airflow tiles).
  • You can get polluted dirt to offgas as well, but to make it usable you need huge amounts of space. 
  • The fact that rails inside solids has this huge multiplier allow for some insanely overpowered mechanics, and once you find a single blip somewhere else in the system, ruby on rails in tiles allows for mass exploitation.  Was this intended, or did the dev who was typing accidently hold down the 0 key too long when typing 20 (and we got 200). 
• Chill pill - without the rails to transfer heat from the metal tiles to the vitamin chews, the build would fail. Currently temps are dropping from 109C to 30C (so about 80C).  If the multiplier went from 200 to 20, then the aquatuner room would have to get much hotter (probably by a factor of about 800C) to transfer the same amount of heat into the pills in the same space. The build would die. 
• Regolith melters (drastically changing SHC) - Without rails, getting the regolith up to melting temperature would be an entirely different story.

None of this would affect the SHC changes caused by matter conversion, but would completely kill all exploits that depend on super fast transfer of energy. It would also kill all builds (not deemed exploits) that require on super fast (insanely fast - so fast it doesn't make sense with the rest of the game) heat transfer.

[simonchvz]

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

[snip]

Thanks.  Didn't catch that you were referring to the physical scale of the transfer windows, which makes perfect sense and is a convincing reason to reduce the power significantly.  Still no clue what the right number is, but interested to see if there's any negative consequence to dropping it by a full order of magnitude.

[DarkMaster13]

Oh, this is why ice never reaches my reservoir when I try to automate moving it.

[mathmanican]

2 minutes ago, simonchvz said:

Didn't catch that you were referring to the physical scale of the transfer windows, which makes perfect sense and is a convincing reason to reduce the power significantly.

When lumber started dropping in 300kg chunks at 20C, the fact that people immediately starting thinking "ooh, I can cool my base with this if I run it on rails through the floors," coupled with the fact that no one started mentioning how exploity this was, tells me that this "feature" of rails is perhaps not in the right place. 

We've become so accustomed to it that we don't even question it.  However, why does "multiply by 200" fit into the game.  This is why balancing may be needed.  @Gurgel, I'm talking about taking away more toys.  

2 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Oh, this is why ice never reaches my reservoir when I try to automate moving it.

Haha.  Yep.  It seems pretty counter intuitive.  If you run your rails always in gas or liquid, you'll get your ice there just fine.  Use bridges across any solid tile (otherwise a single tile can melt your ice). This can be quite frustrating for a new player (or veteran who hasn't read up on conveyor systems and their "amazing" heat transfer properties). 

[hackcasual]

I'd be interested to test a lower conductivity between rails and tiles for a magma melter. I believe the rate is how quickly the slowest heat exchange occurs, which in my case would be molten glass in radiant pipes. If anything it might help the design by stabilizing the counterflow heat exchanger (I've never really gotten regolith to match outgoing igneous as well as I have with other materials).

[Ellilea]

As far as I'm concerned, the less obscure exploity things the better. Game mechanics should be available to all players to discover and understand using common sense and logic, not spotting oddities in the wild by chance.

It's cool to find a way to make some machines work together to accomplish something else than what they normally do. It's not so cool to work around illogical cooling/heating of things like instant-fridges or funky conveyors.

No offense to the mighty Pill. It's fun in its own way, but in a beta branch, not live

[Blazing Falken]

9 hours ago, Ellilea said:

No offense to the mighty Pill. It's fun in its own way, but in a beta branch, not live

The chill pill was for educational purposes only. Doin' it for science. It was never meant to be used in a practical way, hence the extreme degree which I took it. It wouldn't bother me in the least if all 3 exploits involved were fixed. (insta-cool, rail loader perma-cool, and high rail heat transfer.)

[nakomaru]

I don't want heat transfer nerfed. In order to avoid liquid duplication at industrial scale I need only not build it.

In my opinion, things like melting regolith should be possible the way it is. You should also be able to dump the heat of new volcanic metal into your bath without needing 300 tiles.

Liquid duplication and chill pills are both separate bugs that can be fixed without nerfing heat transfer.. which wouldn't fix the bugs to begin with.

[Yunru]

I don't get the issue. Sure it transfers really well to the block it's in, but blocks suck for transferring heat to anything else, no? 

[beowulf2010]

2 hours ago, Yunru said:

I don't get the issue. Sure it transfers really well to the block it's in, but blocks suck for transferring heat to anything else, no? 

That's all that's needed. Cool the tile (metal and diamond windows work the best) with a liquid pipe fed from an aquatuner loop and run 1,500C metal through it and the metal will cool almost instantly. 

Plus if you need the heat/cold transferred out of the tile, using diamond tempshift plates works amazingly well. 

As for Mathmanican's original question, yes, we need to reduce the multiplier. 

The fact that the material on the rails is limited to 20kg is a huge asset to speeding up temperature change so the 200x is overkill. I'd suggest reducing it to an 8th (25x) to start and see how that affects things. This would mean I'd need to use most, if not all, 24 rail pieces in my metal volcano tamer instead of the 2-3 that are currently used. 

But to be honest, 5x would probably be fine... 

[Ambaire]

First time I knew of that. Why does it have a multiplier at all?

[Gurgel]

On 7/19/2019 at 5:28 PM, mathmanican said:

 Should this continue to be a thing? Where do you find conveyor rails and their super efficient heat exchange properties useful? Thoughts? 

Personally, I would solve this as with the pipes: 3 Rail types, one insulated, one regular and one "high transfer". The last one could be the current one. That would make longer rails a lot more viable and useful. And the special ones could come with a material penalty, just like done for pipes.

[avc15]

Cooling with refrigerators is going to get balanced before launch, I think.

And cooling with a fluid radiator should be the strictly superior way. Conveyors shouldn't be so magical.

But eh, I'll just not use exploity things, there are enough people around here to shine a light on them. For me it spoils the game so I just steer clear. It's also fun for me to already have an answer ready when that nerf inevitably happens.

[Nickerooni]

2 hours ago, Ambaire said:

First time I knew of that. Why does it have a multiplier at all?

There’s hidden multipliers all over the place. Called “insulation” or “surface area”, I think. A high number is lower insulation (high surface area). Gas and liquids(?) have low insulation (25), tiles are normal (1). Some internal storage, as well as dupe skin, is some small number. It allows the devs to tweak heat exchange to more sane values. 200 Could have been some devs intentional interpretation of, “items passing through a block has the highest surface area imaginable!”

[hackcasual]

12 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

That's all that's needed. Cool the tile (metal and diamond windows work the best) with a liquid pipe fed from an aquatuner loop and run 1,500C metal through it and the metal will cool almost instantly. 

Plus if you need the heat/cold transferred out of the tile, using diamond tempshift plates works amazingly well. 

As for Mathmanican's original question, yes, we need to reduce the multiplier. 

The fact that the material on the rails is limited to 20kg is a huge asset to speeding up temperature change so the 200x is overkill. I'd suggest reducing it to an 8th (25x) to start and see how that affects things. This would mean I'd need to use most, if not all, 24 rail pieces in my metal volcano tamer instead of the 2-3 that are currently used. 

But to be honest, 5x would probably be fine... 

I believe if you're using tiles to exchange heat, the rate at which it happens will be the slowest exchange. So if you nerf conveyors to be the same as radiant pipes, you'll end up with the same overall cooling rate.