Reducing liquid tepidizer heat output but removing heat limit.

[Stabby Joe]

Currently the liquid tepidizer is a magical machine that creates far more energy than it consumes. To combat exploitation of this using steam turbines the liquid tepidizer will stop heating liquid at 85 degrees, which limits its use considerably.

 

Here's a rundown of the math. A liquid Tepidizer will produce 4,640 kDTU/s while consuming 960 watts of electricity, or 4.83 kDTU/s produced per watt consumed. A steam turbine will consume 877.6 kDTU/s to produce 850 watts of electricity, or 1.03 kDTU consumed per watt produced. So that means you can run 4 steam turbines non-stop at full power for a single liquid tepidizer not even running all the time, assuming it could heat liquid up to 200 degrees (such as a pool of petroleum), producing 3400W of electricity for 960W consumed.

 

For comparison the Liquid Aquatuner will produce (or move) only 585 kDTU/s or 0.488 kDTU/s per watt consumed whilst using water, or 0.985 kDTU/s per watt consumed whilst aquatuning super coolant.

 

If we reduce the heat output of the liquid tepidizer to create a net loss of energy when using steam turbines, the heat output would need to be 991 kDTU/s or lower. This still makes the liquid tepidizer more than twice as energy efficient for local heat generation than a water aquatuner, but only marginally more efficient than using super coolant, as it'll still produce 1 kDTU/s per watt consumed, without all infrastructure, piping and the need to harvest thermal energy from elsewhere when using aquatuners.

 

As a consequence of this it'll open the liquid tepidizer to a whole lot of different applications, such as water purification without using water sieves or desalinators, petroleum and sour cooking etc.

 

To keep the liquid Tepidizer relevant late game when super coolant is available it could have a default overheat temperature of 200 degrees or higher, meaning it'll overheat at 275 with gold, 400 with steel, or 1100 degrees with thermium, which makes sense as I imagine it's a far more simple device than an aquatuner. This would give it applications that is only just too hot for the aquatuner, such as melting copper ore and gold amalgam into metal.

 

I'm curious to hear your opinions on this as the liquid tepidizer is not currently used very much, and those who do use it are often told to use aquatuners instead. 

[mathmanican]

52 minutes ago, Stabby Joe said:

This would give it applications that is only just too hot for the aquatuner, such as melting copper ore and gold amalgam into metal.

I like the whole post. Devs please fix the metal cannon as well or it will be far to easy to rain gold.

[axxionx12]

But if this becomes the case, they'll have to remove the "perfect bath water" comment on the description  

[mathmanican]

4 minutes ago, axxionx12 said:

perfect bath water

Because we all love to bathe in 85C (185F) water... Lol.

[Nebbie]

15 minutes ago, axxionx12 said:

But if this becomes the case, they'll have to remove the "perfect bath water" comment on the description  

85 C will scald dupes! Perfect bath water in oil-refining gulag.

Default overheat of 200 C is a bit out of line with existing buildings. I get that the idea is to be able to cook crude into petroleum, and I do agree we need a way to do that relatively decently prior to space, cause extracting heat from rocket engines just to refine oil is a bit nonsensical, but it should be done another way. My recommendation is to make the tepidizer use refined metals instead of ore, and buff tungsten to +300 C overheat modifier. The aquatuner using metal ores is also a little silly, especially given their bad thermal conductivities, when the entire point is to conduct heat out.
Note that some asteroids (notably, Verdante) lack wolframite for tungsten, which is a real wrench in this, but I consider that to be a bit of a map design oversight with how useful it is even right now; maybe Klei can add a few more meteor types.

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, Stabby Joe said:

the liquid tepidizer is not currently used very much

I use it all the time. I have no qualms with the pulsing issue as I imagine that the machine is purposefully designed to run the checks on liquid and temp after turning on. I see this as a design feature and not a bug. The checks to turn it off require power and time after the machine turns on. Of course many do not share this opinion.

On a side note, why does the steam turbine have a silly 100C topside external requirement. The contents inside are insulated. Seems like another artificial requirement....

[Nebbie]

41 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

I use it all the time. I have no qualms with the pulsing issue as I imagine that the machine is purposefully designed to run the checks on liquid and temp after turning on. I see this as a design feature and not a bug. The checks to turn it off require power and time after the machine turns on. Of course many do not share this opinion.

On a side note, why does the steam turbine have a silly 100C topside external requirement. The contents inside are insulated. Seems like another artificial requirement....

This in itself wouldn't be so bad if not for the existence of both lead and aluminum. One lowers your overheat temperature by 20 C because it's infamously bad with high temperatures, unlike any other refined metal; the other is the only of the real-life very thermally-conductive metals to get its in-game thermal conductivity imported from reality. New player would obviously look to the latter one for their steam turbine...but the two are actually completely reversed and you want lead turbines to not get a ton of heat from steam, and it won't make it stop working at 80 C, because it only operates on the [ridiculous] 1000 C overheat temperature!

To pull in real-world stuff for a moment (general rule of game design or storywriting: audience knows an existing world, don't diverge from this without reason as having that footing helps keep things from breaking immersion and causing frustration), steam turbines are mainly limited to 600 C because steel will start to have problems above that temperature and the blades will break. 200 C is actually a rather low temperature for them (and the higher the better).
The problem is ONI doesn't want to expose such a temperature to a player's base, so it has this insulated casing whose temperature isn't allowed to get very hot at all, while it reveals no internal temperature of the blades.
If you ask me, steam turbines should be redesigned so that they have about a 400 C default overheat temperature, and will refuse to take in steam that's above their overheat temperature, and let you use more than just plastic as their insulative part (ceramic cladding to make sure that that 400 C steam doesn't result in a 400 C turbine surface in your base). Thermium turbines generating over 9000 watts off 1300 C steam, please!

[mathmanican]

While we're on the subject of the liquid tepidzer, we also need to get the following shenanigans removed from the game.

The tepidizer will never shut off as it is using the 9C 1000kg water tile to make both the temp and submerged readings. I can't justify these shenanigans in any way, other than they are flat out bugged. A newly built tepidizer will run until it either overheats or melts. Save/Load caps the temp to 125C, but does not stop the thing from running at all. Exploitable? Massively . If you make sure the temp of your steam always stays just below 125, then use an aquatuner in a separate room to keep a pool really hot, and finally transfer heat from that pool to a single tile under each turbine, you can easily reach (currently in game) pretty close to 3400W for 960 (plus tiny change). No need for automation pulsing trickery. 

[bobucles]

Is there even any particular need for the tepidizer to be so efficient? There are no shortage of massive heat producers in the game. Maps are littered with hot meteors, lava cores and all sorts of volcanoes. The most significant threads I find on tepidizers are about players who boiled their bases because they were trying to disinfect their entire water supply, and thus disinfected all the life in their base. Heat is a nuisance, and the tepidizer generates a great level of useless levels of heat under normal situations.

I don't think reducing the efficiency of the tepidizer will hurt it in any significant way. The efficiency was never its selling point. Players are more than willing to use the space heater, and that produces an absolutely abysmal 150DTUs per watt. 

I think it'd be more fun to reduce the efficiency of the tuner to stay lower than steam turbine levels. In exchange, drastically increase the operating temperature so that players can generate useful high temperatures with it. It's silly that the cold producing aquatuner is more effective at producing heat than the literal HEAT MACHINE. It's not as though pure heat creation is the ultimate end all, because hot materials will damage machinery and are useless for industry. High levels of tuner heat would still require special care. I know players would certainly try to build some kind of metal induction furnace if they could.

[cblack]

So, if I understand your proposal, you want to make the tepidizer less efficient but have a higher thermal limit?  And this is to make it more relevant late game?!

Right now the only time I actually bother with tepidizers is late game, and that's only because they are so damn efficient.  If you make them only as efficient as a TA using SC, they become useless late game, because they don't also vacuum up the heat from the plentiful natural sources around the map, or the dupe-made ones.

6 hours ago, Stabby Joe said:

As a consequence of this it'll open the liquid tepidizer to a whole lot of different applications, such as water purification without using water sieves or desalinators, petroleum and sour cooking etc.

I've never understood why people bother purifying water as there are much easier ways to deal with food poisoning that have additional benefits as well (such as preventing spoilage).  As for the sour gas cycle, the entire reason why I use it is for pre-heating the crude, and again, this is only because it is so efficient.  If it's only as efficient as a SC based AT, the only time it would be useful is before you have SC.  And I don't know about you, but I have SC well before I set up a sour/natural gas system.

[Nebbie]

3 hours ago, mathmanican said:

While we're on the subject of the liquid tepidzer, we also need to get the following shenanigans removed from the game.

...

As I've said before, the tepidizer seems to solely exist for exploits, it has basically no actual purpose in the base of a player who's just playing the game and not setting out to break it. It really needs an overhaul.

1 hour ago, bobucles said:

Is there even any particular need for the tepidizer to be so efficient? There are no shortage of massive heat producers in the game. Maps are littered with hot meteors, lava cores and all sorts of volcanoes. The most significant threads I find on tepidizers are about players who boiled their bases because they were trying to disinfect their entire water supply, and thus disinfected all the life in their base. Heat is a nuisance, and the tepidizer generates a great level of useless levels of heat under normal situations.

I don't think reducing the efficiency of the tepidizer will hurt it in any significant way. The efficiency was never its selling point. Players are more than willing to use the space heater, and that produces an absolutely abysmal 150DTUs per watt. 

I think it'd be more fun to reduce the efficiency of the tuner to stay lower than steam turbine levels. In exchange, drastically increase the operating temperature so that players can generate useful high temperatures with it. It's silly that the cold producing aquatuner is more effective at producing heat than the literal HEAT MACHINE. It's not as though pure heat creation is the ultimate end all, because hot materials will damage machinery and are useless for industry. High levels of tuner heat would still require special care. I know players would certainly try to build some kind of metal induction furnace if they could.

The only way I can really see it justified is under the lens of not obsoleting the oil refinery, which deletes half the crude and only gives you a bit of natural gas (less than a sixth the potential power when burned) in exchange. The intent seems to be to either use the crappy building that farts up your base, or go digging for an extreme heat source and figure out mechanized airlock automation. I can almost respect it, but at the end of the day it's crazy that heating is rendered hard in a game with heat sources out the wazoo, but that the moment you find some secret sloppy coding, you can get infinite power easily.