Exploiting the New Steam Turbine

[mathmanican]

Well, I guess I should start a new series on exploits. Here's a rough sketch of something that I'm pretty sure can be improved on, but I figure I'll let someone else tinker with it.

 

Spoiler

• The top tepidizer keeps the petro and crude at around 300C, cycling on/off every 1 second with a typical pulser (not gate followed by a buffer).  
• The bottom tepidizer engages only when the liquid level reaches 1kg. Its purpose is to make sure any liquid becomes steam (so another 1 second pulser).
• The tempshift plates in the upper chamber keep the 2 innermost inlets for each turbine around 300C, while the three outer inlets are around 110C. The point is that you only have to heat some of the incoming steam. 
• Tepidizers are made of steel.
• You need enough steam in the room to keep the center two steam tiles just below the turbines to stay above 500g. I bet I could get this even more efficient if I keep the entire room at very high pressure, increased the walls on the central heating element so there was only a 1 tile passageway, and then made sure only 500g of gas stayed in the center region. ONI physics...  

The current build above uses about 1/3 of the power generated, leaving you with over 1000W to use however you want. It will run forever without needing any thing else (aside from an occasional flash of cooling to keep the top chamber under 100C - something a simple aquatuner that runs almost never can take care of).  Free infinite power. Not as good as the old Steam Behemoth, but definitely simple to build. 

Please post any other steam turbine exploits you know of, that provide infinte power. Or feel free to improve this to get the efficiency up (I'd rather it use only 1/5 of the power or less, instead of 1/3, to keep things going).   Smaller is also better.  Built in cooling for the top could be nice as well. 

[Darkin Coaled]

You can rotate steam turbines? That's.. totally unuseful...

[mathmanican]

Well, I forgot about the good old "Save/Load" issue (I guess that's why I stopped caring about this long ago), wherein the tepidizer stops working above 125C when you load a game. So this build only works till you save/load. 

The following is a much simpler exploit, getting 4 turbines running at about 175-185C stable temp, with one pulsed tepidizer. 

I guess you can still use the tepidizer to heat your steam at least to 125C, and then save whatever other heat source you have to heat it past this (saving your precious magma - oh wait, use a regolith melter...).

[Saturnus]

As far as I remember you could avoid the save/reload problem if you used a power switch to cut power to the tepidizer completely instead of using automation to cycle it on.

[mathmanican]

7 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

you could avoid the save/reload problem if you used a power switch to cut power to the tepidizer completely

Something like this?

The pulse is on the switch, not the tepidizer.  Unfortunately (fortunately), save/load broke it as well. 

[Xuhybrid]

Can they just fix the tepidizer already? You know it's not supposed to go past 85C.

[mathmanican]

2 minutes ago, Xuhybrid said:

You know it's not supposed to go past 85C.

Since it's been in the game, the ability to make it go over 85C has never been nerfed, though they have tried many other things to tame it.  This fact makes me think they want us to be able to use it to pass 85C, provided we learn how the machine works. 

One fix would be a simple - this thing won't turn on until after the check has been made about being submerged and under 85C.  This requires they place the check before it powers on.  Yet they've left the code as is for a very long time, with no fix.  This causes me to think that it's intentional, so above 85C seems legit. 

The fact that it behaves differently before a save/load, and after a save/load, is in my opinion the real bug here. But save/load cycles have always been quite entertaining. 

[beowulf2010]

Not to be pedantic, but you're exploiting the tepidizers not the steam turbines... 

[mathmanican]

2 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

Not to be pedantic, but you're exploiting the tepidizers not the steam turbines

[wronny]

3 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

Yet they've left the code as is for a very long time, with no fix.  This causes me to think that it's intentional, so above 85C seems legit. 

Probably a very low priority fix, rather than intentional. The game has a couple of those left. Elements not changing state in pipes at low (<=10%) throughput is the first thing that springs to my mind.

[mathmanican]

8 minutes ago, wronny said:

Probably a very low priority fix, rather than intentional.

Though this one has been affected by quite a lot of balancing over the years.  It's been nerfed, and buffed, and nerfed, etc. A simple fix, to make it not work above 85C, has never even been touched. To me, this suggests that they want to leave heating over 85C in place. The buffs and nerfs have all been designed to cap the overheating to prevent run away shenanigans.  I'm going with "intentional" on this topic, though 

[Radam]

Linking it with a battery that has both levels set to 100% works better. Or maybe not

[Saturnus]

The 85C limit of the tepidizer is silly and sloppy game design. It should naturally only be limited by the material overheat temperature. If that makes it OP well then the problem is somewhere else, such as the efficiency of it being set way too high.

With one tepidizer I can currently heat up the return loop of 4 aquatuners cooling water. That's naturally crazy efficient at heating liquids.

The same is true with the space heater. If I wanna build it of thermium then I should bloody well be able to use it to 975C. Everything else is just an unfounded limitation in the game.

The game shouldn't arbitrarily put limitations on our creativity but rather balance the components of the game.

[Lancar]

Nah, like Wronny I don't think this is intentional at all. Simply because it naturally stops working at 85 degrees. That you can somehow coax it into exceeding that anyway is just an exploit that they haven't fixed.
That they haven't done any, in our eyes, "simple" fixes can be for any number of reasons. If they really wanted it to be able to be used in easy-to-build contraptions that provide limitless power with no resource input, I think they'd tell us.

Still. It's good that these designs are shown off. It'll encourage them to fix it.

[mathmanican]

Well, here is another silly exploit of gaseous matter conversion, in conjunction with the steam turbine. I stopped at 5 turbines because that's all that fit in one pipe.  I could easily increase it to more. The aquatuner runs occasionally, to heat up the chlorine, which then gets converted to really hot steam. I get to harvest over 85% of the power. With a bead pump to keep the steam near the conversion chambers away from the extreme temps, I could probably get this to above 95% of the power harvested.  

Oh, and of course this monster requires no further inputs to keep running. Zero upkeep, and it persists upon save/load.  I'll probably redesign it, minimize it, and make a simple to build tutorial for those interested, provided there is interest. 

[beowulf2010]

And another wonderful display of ridiculousness from our resident mad scientist. 

[badgamer123]

to really exploiting it,you could to super heat 1 cell of steam(like 100g) and other cell leave them be 100 C (vent)
a very small box of steam over 125 C will keep it working

[mathmanican]

15 minutes ago, badgamer123 said:

a very small box of steam over 125 C will keep it working

True. I was originally hoping to abuse just this. However the turbine appears to actually use the actual input energy, not max temp, when computing power. Well done Klei. That was an excellent move. No crazy one cell heating garbage. Yes you can keep it running nonstop at 104C, but you wont really get any power.