Getting power from ethanol actually does not worth it and my feedback on it

[blash365]

4 minutes ago, ruhrohraggy said:

90t of 40F co2.

I have 4 Petroleum generators and they still overheat fairly quickly. My co2 is not that cold though. How do you get it to 40F?

 

And how do you cool your steam turbine down?

[ruhrohraggy]

40 minutes ago, blash365 said:

I have 4 Petroleum generators and they still overheat fairly quickly. My co2 is not that cold though. How do you get it to 40F?

Not many people might like this due to lag...but I have a decent system that lets me get away with stuff...

I'm abusing a combination of : P-water high heat capacity and lower freezing temp + 24 deg F of straight heat removal* from aquatuner, and refined aluminum's stupidly high thermal conductivity. (Honestly, it could use a nerf)

[DarkMoge]

30 minutes ago, ruhrohraggy said:

The map type *should* dictate your strategy. But the argument didn't seem to reflect that to me. It's blasting a part of the game generally, not specifically. At least imo. *shrug*

Map type is not related to the topic of how good/bad ethanol is, it is more about what I have been doing recently.

What I mean by different play style is like... I do not get moments like this:
"hey, its cycle 200 and I have 300+ tons of lumber stored, lets turn it into ethanol"
"I have 14 tiles deep pool of water, lets burn all that water on trees"
"I have 11 tiles deep pool of petroleum, lets do something with it"
"I have 200t of polluted dirt, lets vaporize it into oxygen"

I tend to try making productions chains instead of trying to use stockpiles that I just happened to have. Its a different way of playing the game. 
 

39 minutes ago, ruhrohraggy said:

It's just like solar. Lotta people don't think solar is worth it. I personally find solar awesome.

solar is awesome though.

 

43 minutes ago, ruhrohraggy said:

There's only one thing in this game that I feel truly has no point, and that's the ore scrubber, and I'm sure there's someone out there that can make an argument for even that.

I vote for the "critter trap" as one of the most useless items currently in the game. You can just make your dupes wrangle the critters or even transport their eggs instead of building 1 use item from hard to get plastic.

Trying to breed Radiant Bugs is also pretty high on the list of useless, but it can at least be a challenge.

And yeah... Ore scrubbers are pretty bad.

[blash365]

14 minutes ago, ruhrohraggy said:

Not many people might like this due to lag...but I have a decent system that lets me get away with stuff...

I'm abusing a combination of : P-water high heat capacity and lower freezing temp + 24 deg F of straight heat deletion from aquatuner, and refined aluminum's stupidly high thermal conductivity. (Honestly, it could use a nerf)

Could you elaborate on the heat deletion?

Would this also work with super coolant?

 

And how do you prevent the coolant from breaking your pipes?

[ruhrohraggy]

26 minutes ago, DarkMoge said:

What I mean by different play style is like... I do not get moments like this:
"hey, its cycle 200 and I have 300+ tons of lumber stored, lets turn it into ethanol"
"I have 14 tiles deep pool of water, lets burn all that water on trees"
"I have 11 tiles deep pool of petroleum, lets do something with it"
"I have 200t of polluted dirt, lets vaporize it into oxygen"

I tend to try making productions chains instead of trying to use stockpiles that I just happened to have. Its a different way of playing the game. 

I understood what you meant.

I don't think like that though. I think "~ 100 cycles from now I'm going to be launching petrol rockets, better start stockpiling petroleum now"

I really do not like waiting on production to do the things I want. When I'm ready for something, I want it, and I want it now!

23 minutes ago, blash365 said:

Could you elaborate on the heat deletion?

Would this also work with super coolant?

Well, I may have slightly misused the term delete, so let me clarify. The Aquatuner isn't doing the actual deletion, it's the steam turbine that actually deletes anything. Apologies. As far as I know, the Aquatuner is fairly heat neutral.

I specifically meant that the aquatuner is stripping a set temperature from the liquid, regardless of the type of liquid sent through it.

So if you send supercoolant through, it removes 14C of temperature.

If you send p-water through, it removes 14C of temperature.

If you have a liquid with a very high specific heat capacity, then you get more heat removed by sending it through the aquatuner. If you couple that with highly conductive materials, then you are transferring a lot more heat over a set amount of time.

Full article with all the exciting math is here : https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Guide/Temperature_Management

 

So think of it like this. You have a hot-tub, and you have a cup of tea. Each is the same temperature. If you magically subtracted 14 degrees C from each of those, which one gave up more total energy?

In our case, High specific heat capacity = hot-tub.

Low specific heat capacity = cup of tea.

And I believe supercoolant has the highest specific heat capacity, and highest thermal conductivity of any liquid you'd send through the aquatuner.

 

[chemie]

1 hour ago, blash365 said:

I have 4 Petroleum generators and they still overheat fairly quickly. My co2 is not that cold though. How do you get it to 40F?

 

I have my nat gas gens drip on the floor of the pet gens.  Never get hot with that tiny PW puddle.  (Pet gens have a water tile on either side of center)

[Junksteel]

9 hours ago, Trego said:

You think this is an opinion based debate?

Yes. I think the outputs are way too overpowered for those wanting to get the byproducts and too of a hassle for those who don't want them. And I base my opinion in the fact that producing ethanol is dirtier than burning fossil fuel. You don't think the same way and made that pretty clear? There is no such thing as right or wrong opinion as we perceive the game differently. We aren't in disagree for calculations so there are no set of facts I'm against. Venting anything out to space is a generic mechanic of the game and nobody suggested to vent the excess of pre nerf cool slush geyser to space in order to solve its overpowered nature.  Why? Because it was an opinion based discussion on the balance exactly as it is right now. But ofc, this like, my opinion, man.

[Trego]

13 hours ago, Junksteel said:

 And I base my opinion in the fact that producing ethanol is dirtier than burning fossil fuel. 

That's not a fact, that's an opinion.  A.  There are multiple different systems to produce ethanol, as we've seen in this thread, and multiple different fossil fuel burning generators, so you're comparing an unknown to another unknown.  B.  Getting more specific, we're unclear not only on what type of thing is happening, but how much of each.  Producing how much ethanol to how much burnt fossil fuel, what ratio are you using? Are we equalizing based on watts produced, or mass processed?  Where in the process are we measuring? C.  What definition for "dirtier" are you using?  One person could say CO2 is the dirtiest thing around, it causes global warming.  Someone else could say it's neutral.  yet another person could say that CO2 is super cleaning, because it's a sterile environment and food stored in it loses germs.  I could go on for paragraphs about the vagueness of the term "dirtier", but I'm sure we all get the idea by now.

"Venting anything out to space is a generic mechanic of the game and nobody suggested to vent the excess of pre nerf cool slush geyser to space in order to solve its overpowered nature.  Why? Because it was an opinion based discussion on the balance exactly as it is right now."

More likely no one suggested that because that suggestion doesn't really make sense, unlike venting CO2 to space which actually solves the problems people were having with excess CO2.

"I think the outputs are way too overpowered for those wanting to get the byproducts and too of a hassle for those who don't want them"

All of the outputs are overpowered?  Or just the 'byproduct' outputs?  It's kinda a weird subject, in that the amount of dirt produced is very high, but it also seems right that dirt isn't that scarce, somehow.  I suppose I feel that the dirt sources elsewhere are undertuned, so I'm kinda ok with the dirt from the ethanol process being overtuned, although I'd rather they spread the dirt production out among other processes more evenly.  Or, realistically, there should be some way to make dirt from mixing crushed rock/sand/clay with compost, which is what we'd see in actual terraforming.

[PhailRaptor]

15 hours ago, DarkMoge said:

19 hours ago, ruhrohraggy said:

Need p-water? Keep the trees wild and scrub co2 for more p-water.

So:
Step 1. Pray for a good starting seed that does not have too many holes in the starting biome, so you can have clean lanes of surface for pips to plant on.
Step 2. Carefully dig the out the tunnels for trees and make sure to remove all the seeds from the area.
Step 3. Relocate pips into the prepared area together with the seeds.
Step 4. Wait for centuries until pips actually plant all those trees. Because they seem to have some random interval at which they consider trying to plant something.
Step 5. Wait 36 cycles for your first lumber harvest.

So, we have a setup that takes 36 cycles to kick start. Also:
Step 0: actually obtain enough arbor seeds, which really takes too long.

There are several ways to produce natural tiles later after you have excavated an area, nevermind the Workshop has at least 2 different recent mods that straight up let you build natural tiles from the corresponding materials.  So all of that "carefully digging" or not digging tiles business is a non-starter.

Granted the Seeds take a long time to acquire.  But...

15 hours ago, DarkMoge said:

realize that it is heavily limited by the number of seeds... Best way to produce seeds is to setup domestic tree farm which will constantly drain the water we are trying to produce

Arbor Tree seeds have nothing whatsoever to do with wild vs domestic.  Rather, it's dependent on how many Pips you have, because the best way to get Arbor Acorns is to have Pips "rummage" the Trees for them.

 

 

15 hours ago, ruhrohraggy said:

Also, if I decided to later on, I can setup the 24 domestic Arbor trees I currently have into farmed rooms, and double my production to 24 distillers...I probably wont...but I could.

Unfortunately, it has been confirmed that the Farmer's Touch buff from the Micronutrient only affects the trunk of the Arbor Tree, not it's branches.  So Farmer's Touch will speed the initial growth of the Tree itself, but it will have no affect whatsoever on the Lumber production of the branches.  It might let you use 1 less Armor Tree to feed a Pip ranch, but the numbers would have to be crunched on that -- what growth percentage a Pip eats, how often a Pip needs to eat, etc.

[DarkMoge]

2 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

Arbor Tree seeds have nothing whatsoever to do with wild vs domestic.  Rather, it's dependent on how many Pips you have, because the best way to get Arbor Acorns is to have Pips "rummage" the Trees for them.

what do you mean?

[ruhrohraggy]

17 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

Unfortunately, it has been confirmed that the Farmer's Touch buff from the Micronutrient only affects the trunk of the Arbor Tree, not it's branches.  So Farmer's Touch will speed the initial growth of the Tree itself, but it will have no affect whatsoever on the Lumber production of the branches.  It might let you use 1 less Armor Tree to feed a Pip ranch, but the numbers would have to be crunched on that -- what growth percentage a Pip eats, how often a Pip needs to eat, etc.

Well, that's typical. Oh well, thanks for the heads up. Least I hardly use farms for anything anyway...

[PhailRaptor]

17 minutes ago, DarkMoge said:

what do you mean?

Dupes harvesting Lumber from tree branches will very rarely produce an Arbor Acorn, it's a much lower chance than typical plants producing a seed when harvested or when they naturally drop after the ripened period.

The trunk of the Arbor Tree itself produces Arbor Acorns much more readily, but Dupes can't harvest from it.  But Pips can.  They are able to "rummage" the Arbor Tree the same way they do Storage Compactors, and when they do they produce an Arbor Acorn.

Pips are the best source of Arbor Acorns.

[DarkMoge]

8 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

Dupes harvesting Lumber from tree branches will very rarely produce an Arbor Acorn, it's a much lower chance than typical plants producing a seed when harvested or when they naturally drop after the ripened period.

The trunk of the Arbor Tree itself produces Arbor Acorns much more readily, but Dupes can't harvest from it.  But Pips can.  They are able to "rummage" the Arbor Tree the same way they do Storage Compactors, and when they do they produce an Arbor Acorn.

Pips are the best source of Arbor Acorns.

Does it need to be a domestic tree? I do not think my pips do that or I do not understand how to make them do that?

Like, I had this pips ranches for many cycles and I have not seen a seed appear outside of actually harvesting the arbor trees.

I know they ruin storage compactors, but I havent seen them ever touch a tree other than to eat.

[PhailRaptor]

The closed ranches may be contributing, as they do attempt to plant the seed immediately, but it doesn't matter whether the tree itself is domestic or wild.  The Pip just sees a tree.

[Zakery]

With mechatronics you need dupes interaction only to gather lamber, after that all automated, and you not need to think about CO2 - just use waterlock and store (you can add slicksrers for free oil)

In my oasise base ethanol is core of energy system, 2 PG for midgame - more than needed.

Just not waste energy to delete CO2 and you have energy positive system

[Ketmol]

Just vent all unwanted gasses from the ethanol power production into space and you get good net power output, especially if you boost them with power control station. And don't use pumps to vent the gas. just put it next to space and it will all solve itself...

[kerosene]

I think it's fine exactly as it is. The CO2 can be vented into space. There's tune-up. Wild arborea trees deliver significant amounts of lumber.

Is it worth it to set up 4x ethanol distillers and a big enough tree farm to run them full time? Probably not but it makes sense that this option is worse than a oil-based alternative. An early ethanol-based power production running off wild trees is worth it (except maybe on maps with easy access to lots of coal).

[Hellshound38]

42 minutes ago, kerosene said:

I think it's fine exactly as it is. The CO2 can be vented into space. There's tune-up. Wild arborea trees deliver significant amounts of lumber.

Is it worth it to set up 4x ethanol distillers and a big enough tree farm to run them full time? Probably not but it makes sense that this option is worse than a oil-based alternative. An early ethanol-based power production running off wild trees is worth it (except maybe on maps with easy access to lots of coal).

before you use up  2-3 ethanol pools you can have 20 solar panels and a ton of batteries.

Besides the logistical challenge their is likely no reason to set up a ethanol power plant anyway.

[Ketmol]

2 hours ago, Hellshound38 said:

before you use up  2-3 ethanol pools you can have 20 solar panels and a ton of batteries.

Besides the logistical challenge their is likely no reason to set up a ethanol power plant anyway.

20 solar panels before getting a running ethanol powerplant? It takes a lot less to set up the ethanol plant than safe space solar farm, first of all for the solar farm u need a ton of glass for the plants, steel for meteor protection, set up cooling for robo miners in space, all that takes a lot longer time than just dig up an area close to space with vent to lower space level, still protected from actual meteor showers and put a few powerplants up ... Especially considering on a lot of maps there are very big lakes of ethanol so you can start of without having to refine any. You can just pump it to the powerplants from different pockets of ethanol on the map for quite some time...

[storm6436]

 okay... so reading over a good chunk of the thread, I'm going to have to object on the OP's initial math on improper accounting grounds. (And hope nobody else pointed this out yet)

 By that, I mean the way he tallies the numbers is simply wrong.

Say you have a pump you built to supply a PH2O already to some other project, we'll call it Project X.  Project X's eats, say, 560kg of PH2O a day (ignore that that's the consumption of an arbor tree farm.  Purely coincidence.)  Now, during the course of the cycle, it can pump 10kg /s* 600s = 6000kg, but you're only moving 560 KG, so it's active 9.3% of the day.  Sure, the peak power is 240W, but the average power? 22.4 watts  It's costing you, averaged out over the course of the entire day, 22.4 watts to shuffle that load.  Even if you want to look at averaging across a single second, you should get the same duty cycle... sooooo....

 To take advantage of the difference between peak and average power, you need to automate your generators properly and try to avoid overstressing them... because when usage spikes to peak power for that 10th of a second it's on, the batteries barely notice they shed a few more extra joules, depending on the rest of the load.

 This says *nothing* about some of the games I got up to in my last game.  I'll disregard the fact that I goofed the numbers and waaay overbuilt the arbor farm due to fat fingering a number into my spreadsheet (nothing says "Whaaa? like finding 40T per tile when you look back at it 100 cycles later)  ... but you know what I did with the extra PH2O?  My generator reservoir was only used for two things: sieving or trees when I built it.  I had a secondary reservoir fed from the 2 slush geysers I had and when the tank hit 80F, I dumped it to the gen reservoir... and the feed to the arbor trees got pumped with radiant pipes across the entire generator setup on its way out.  Even when the PH2O got up to 100F+, it still wasn't 130F, so it took heat with it, which the arbor trees were more than happy to chew on.

Similarly, getting bent over the sieves and pretending you can easily count them in-full against the power cost is... ill-advised.  If the ethanol generator is the only generator you have dumping PH2O, then you might have a point, but again, look at the duty cycle, not the peak power.  If you have to pump it out every 7 cycles, you are not paying the full however many watts your pump/sieve system is rated for specifically to deal with petro gen's runoff.  Make sure you subtract the water you're dumping at the arbor trees before calculating sieve cycles, too, since that's not going through the sieve.    Beyond that, if you are already sieving into water because of other purposes, you should figure out what percentage of the water getting sieved is because of the petro gen and what is from the other sources... because those other sources don't count against the petro/ethanol gen's power budget.

 So, I was hopeful when I built my setup... I knew from back-of-the-napkin math that I wasn't going to get a whole lot out of it un-tuned, but since I was tuning with lead and had like 40k of the stuff, I didn't care. I just wanted to utilize one of my petro gens early before I had a lot of the infrastructure to do petrol proper set up (and had been prepping for lumber before this point.)  I was also curious about using the trees as a potential heat dump.  Being able to feed the Pdirt to sage hatches was just icing on the cake.  Proper shipping automation meant the excess is the only thing that made it to the compost heaps which really cut down on the heat bloom there.  I wasn't disappointed.   My generator room stayed, on average, less than 105F once I started shuffling heat to the trees.  The trees themselves?  Pretty sure they stayed around 85-90F most of the time. My average usage of my coal gen array dropped by one full generator and cut back the cycle time on a second one, so I was certainly getting at least 1-1.3-ish KW out of it, not the dinky numbers the poor accounting practices referenced produced.

IMO, Ethanol is worth it, if you can use the by-products to your fullest advantage.  The ethanol powered petro gen is the only one of the three I built that stays on all the time.  I later expanded to feed my pincha farm with the ethanol gen's output too. And it actually allows me headroom in my generation capacity to where I can run my quad-aquatuner cooling chamber for more than two seconds before my engineers get all bug-eyed and start crying... which is where I was before I built the three.  Now?  The second petro gen pops on to handle additional peak when I have that beast running and generally doesn't peep otherwise.

[DarkMoge]

On 8/27/2019 at 3:35 AM, storm6436 said:

Say you have a pump you built to supply a PH2O already to some other project, we'll call it Project X.  Project X's eats, say, 560kg of PH2O a day (ignore that that's the consumption of an arbor tree farm.  Purely coincidence.)  Now, during the course of the cycle, it can pump 10kg /s* 600s = 6000kg, but you're only moving 560 KG, so it's active 9.3% of the day.  Sure, the peak power is 240W, but the average power? 22.4 watts  It's costing you, averaged out over the course of the entire day, 22.4 watts to shuffle that load.  Even if you want to look at averaging across a single second, you should get the same duty cycle... sooooo....

You comment without reading my post arent you? Because my math accounts for duty cycles.

Here are some examples from the post:
-About 4 carbon skimmers... But lets be generous and take more precise number 3.8889. To run that many skimmers you need 3.8889*120=466W.
-To process 3.888kg/s, we need 3.888/5*120=93W.
-pump can pipe 10 kg/s, with 750 g/s production, you need 0.75/10*240=18W.
 

[storm6436]

Actually, no, I read your post. It's the subsequent replies I didn't read all of.  Specifically what made me decide it was worth commenting was the point  where you veered off into the screed at the end turning into doom and gloom about how horrible the whole thing is.and how it's underpowered... when, based off your summary argument, you're more or less complaining the set-up needs buffed because you're not using it to its strength.

 Provided I didn't fat finger any more numbers than I did my first time though, The Lumber->Ethanol->Petro gen cycle in the reasonable worst-case scenario (ie. you are tuning the petro gen and you're accounting the full costs of everything like they serviced only the cycle and were on 24/7) using the overall cycle structure I did, here's what you end up with
8 trees, 4 distillers, 14 compost bins, 1 Petro Gen,, 12 pincha peppers, 1 liquid pump, 4 scrubbers
This nets you 
PH2O: 1905 kg/cycle
Dirt: 760 kg/cycle
And 1320-ish W.

 And that's taking it right on the face without worrying about duty cycles and average power.  Is it a pain to build? Sure.  But here's the thing, you're not stuck with that dirt.  Again, set up a sage hatch farm.  Limit it to 4 hatches and you get 80kg of dirt per cycle until the sun burns out and can scrap most of the compost bins (and avoid their heat) while still paying for all the dirt the trees need. Or you could scale this to whatever output you needed in case you were eating through dirt and actually needed more... but going with 4 sage hatches which nets 600KG/cycle in coal, and given tuned coal gens roll 600kg/cycle for say, 900W, you're effectively getting an extra 900W (If you have excess dirt, 5 sage hatches net 1125W) of generator capacity if you choose to burn that... and since it's renewable infinitely, you can keep storing it until it crashes your game or you hit the point where your FPS becomes SPF due to cycle #.. 

If anything, figuring out what to do with all that PH2O becomes enough of a mess that maybe you go and get some oxyferns or sacrifice 240 of that 2.2kw you just got to feed some slicksters so you can afford to run actual petro longer.  Or any other use you can come up with for PH2O/CO2, there's tons.  LIke making water, which you pretty much insisted was a non-starter in your OP.  I guess 1905kg/cycle isn't enough?

Still, in the interest of fairness, let's dissect your final paragraph from the OP:

 

Quote

I believe that whole idea of lumber -> ethanol distillery -> petroleum generator should be buffed in some way... It really just requires too much research to even attempt making the system when you could much more easily find a natural gas geyser and hook it up with natural gas generator.

 Well, yes.  You could also just build a ridiculous amount of coal gens and run those until you can pull petrol and skip straight to solar.  Having other options does not invalidate the option being considered unless the opportunity cost of said option is so massive that you'd be an idiot for trying. 
 

Quote

It does not work as an early game power option, because of all the research required and it might be hard to figure out for newer players.

That's usually a sign it's not supposed to be early game.
 

Quote

It does not work as late game power source either, since oil and solar panels outclass it, not too mention some of the more difficult setups.

If you have enough glass and batteries, you don't need any other source of power than solar.  That's not going to change.  Opportunity cost, remember?  This is buildable before you get to solar and unless solar panels or the other options can print dirt and coal in the volume the ethanol chain does, this suggests you're using it wrong.
 

Quote

Perhaps, it should not be as punishing trying to make domestic arbor trees...

70kg PH2O and 10kg dirt per tree per cycle,all of which you can automate,is punishing how?
 

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Why do wild arbor trees have to be infinitely better? If we make all that water into oxygen, 1 domestic arbor tree pretty much consumes as much as an entire duplicant...

Probably because you're doing the math wrong.  Wild trees aren't infinitely better. The value of an item depends on its utility, which varies by person.  Some folks are fine running pips to spam trees all over the place.  That works for them.  Other folks don't want to dedicate an enormous section of their base to such a thing.  Some people are also fine with letting the lumber fall of on its own, others prefer to cut it the moment it's ready.  Again, that's what works for them.  You have options.  You don't have to like those options.  But wait, there's more!

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Instead of trying to do a lumber farm, I might as well add another dupe to my colony and make it run on the hamster wheel. 70 kg/cycle is just too much, I feel like somewhere in the world of 20 kg/cycle would make the whole idea much more appealing.

 So, you're saying that 300W (or 450W) tuned, only during waking hours, is better than 2.2 kw 24/7, 80kg dirt and 2 tons of water per cycle (while costing you maybe a quarter to half a dupe's labor for 1 cycle every 4.5 cycles?  I'm sorry?   Let's humor your assertion... how is an extra 0.4T of PH2O going to make this trade better when 2 tons (and all the other side benefits) wasn't good enough?  I am honestly, sincerely, and openly curious here.
 

Quote

Another idea, maybe, ethanol distilleries consume too much power on their own, maybe, it would be more interesting if there was a more advanced method of obtaining ethanol with more benefits or maybe instead of consuming 240W, they should consume 120W?

And I'll repeat a variation on my last question, how is 480W going to make you happier when 1.3 (or 2.2KW) didn't?  Is that wattage going to make 80kg dirt and 2T of PH2O per cycle, infinitely, for you?
 

And ultimately... the ethanol cycle is infinitely sustainable in it's own right... and the extra PH2O?  Can be processed and pumped right into oil wells provided you have 3 just chilling, and it'll sustain 1.x (x being small) petro gens (3KW)  running on petrol if you boil it, 0.5 (1.5KW)  if not,  Or, if you've built a sour gas condenser with enough capacity, you can turn that 2+ kg/s oil into at least 1.3kg/s NG... which is enough to throw down 14+ NG gens, or 16.8KW.  Forever. Or build one or two less and run your ovens, too. Forever.

 So, what makes this underpowered again?  Again, honestly asking the question because I'm not seeing it.

[DarkMoge]

1 hour ago, storm6436 said:

70kg PH2O and 10kg dirt per tree per cycle,all of which you can automate,is punishing how?

Because, a lot of people bring up how ethanol chain generates water and it does not generate water with domestic trees. Like, looking at your arguments, you yourself are saying that the chain produces water which it does not without wild trees. So, it ends up being a system that goes like:
input: water and sometimes dupe labor.
output: polluted dirt.

1 hour ago, storm6436 said:

So, you're saying that 300W (or 450W) tuned, only during waking hours, is better than 2.2 kw 24/7, 80kg dirt and 2 tons of water per cycle (while costing you maybe a quarter to half a dupe's labor for 1 cycle every 4.5 cycles?  I'm sorry?   Let's humor your assertion... how is an extra 0.4T of PH2O going to make this trade better when 2 tons (and all the other side benefits) wasn't good enough?  I am honestly, sincerely, and openly curious here.

ummm, first of all, hamster wheels are 400W. If you give your hamster wheel dupes 2 hours of downtime and 3 hours of sleep(btw they can survive on 2 hours sleep schedules if setup properly and you can squeeze in less downtime) than you are using 5/24 cycle segments which is about 21% rounded up... 400*0.21=84... So you have average 316W. And how is ethanol petro gen is 2200W? Even if you add tuning and disregard all costs to maintain it, it still does not reach that high of a number. At the best scenario, you are using 960W on ethanol production, which makes at the best case scenario, untunned petro into net 1040W. If you tune that petro it becomes 2040W at best, but than, we need to talk about the cost of tuning, it proves difficult to calculate how much it actually costs, because it involves: mining metal, refining that metal within rock crusher or metal refinery, actually tuning the generator. 

Its quite difficult to asses exactly how much a dupe is worth. In this comparison we start by assigning dupe 316W value when it costs about 67.5 kg of water supplied to electrolyzer. Basically, a dupe costs as much water as 1 domestic tree costs. Though, that is not taking into account that 7.5 kg of that water becomes hydrogen which we could feed into generator.

Lets calculate the extra power gain from hydrogen... At max production, electrolyzer would support 8.88 duplicants and would cost 120W for itself, 1/10 of a pump which equal to 24W for water pumping and 1/4.46 of a gas pump which is 54W for total 198W while it produces enough hydrogen for 1.12 hydrogen generators which will produce 896W... 1 duplicant is about 11.26% of 8.88 dupes. So, for 1 dupe, things will produce 896*0.1126=100W and it will cost 198*0.1126=22W... So, its extra 78W. Our 1 dupe is worth at least 316+78=394W. I feel like I could also find a much better use for the dupe at some point.

Without automation, 1 petro generator will consume 560 kg of water while producing 450 kg. So, it costs 110 kg of water to maintain.
110/67.5=1.63 dupes. I am not sure how long exactly does it takes dupes to harvest the lumber and how much extra water do we lose while harvesting the lumber... But even if we ignore it, 1.63*394=642W. it is less than 1040W from petro generator, but the problem is that you do not actually get those 1040W. I do not feel like just letting CO2 stack infinitely is a proper way to play the game, so I feel a need to use energy to get rid from it. Venting it to space is an option, but if you are at a point of getting to space, we are back to talking about oportunity costs, you might as well just start working on solar instead of setting up ethanol. Within my calculations the actual W gain from ethanol chain was close to 0W when I could instead have 642W by just accepting more dupes. I did not even take into account things like extra 6.7 kg of water dupes produce by using toilets.

So back to 
 

2 hours ago, storm6436 said:

70kg PH2O and 10kg dirt per tree per cycle,all of which you can automate,is punishing how?

It is punishing when you think about that 1 domestic tree = 1 dupe... 4 wild tree = no cost, but produce as much lumber. So, the only time when you consider ethanol production chain is when you have wild trees or you have infinite water supply... In my entire over 1000 hours of playing oni, I have never had too much water and I have no idea how do people manage to run into those situations where they do have too much. In my games, it is a constant struggle to try and get more water, looking for more geysers and taming them and water becomes a bottleneck that prevents me from adding more dupes to my base. 

So, as the result, I feel like domestic trees are not worth considering. Hence, I suggest to reduce the cost of a domestic tree.

 

 

2 hours ago, storm6436 said:

And I'll repeat a variation on my last question, how is 480W going to make you happier when 1.3 (or 2.2KW) didn't?  Is that wattage going to make 80kg dirt and 2T of PH2O per cycle, infinitely, for you?
 

Because, extra 480W looks to me like having 480W over having 0W from that system and 480W is very close to my dupes worth assestment of 642W.

Another thing that people talk about a lot is tuning the generator to actually make 1000W... Someday, I should probably calculate the exact cost of tuning a generator, but otherwise it is not something I will consider doing, because it tends to use a finite resource 

[QuQuasar]

3 hours ago, DarkMoge said:

Another thing that people talk about a lot is tuning the generator to actually make 1000W... Someday, I should probably calculate the exact cost of tuning a generator, but otherwise it is not something I will consider doing, because it tends to use a finite resource 

Finite? I'm confused by this assertion. Refined iron periodically falls from the sky, most maps have metal volcanoes, and in the worst case scenario you can get metal via cargo rockets. Plus, it would take a serious megaproject to use up all the lead on the map. Do you mean limited?

[DarkMoge]

1 minute ago, QuQuasar said:

Finite? I'm confused by this assertion. Refined iron periodically falls from the sky, most maps have metal volcanoes, and in the worst case scenario you can get metal via cargo rockets. Plus, it would take a serious megaproject to use up all the lead on the map. Do you mean limited?

Right, limited... The falling from the sky makes it infinite.

As far as I am aware, lead cant be used to tune generators.