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Cooling Below 125C with a Steam Turbine


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So recently in sandbox mode I figured out that you can use a steam turbine to cool stuff to lower than 125C.  I haven’t seen any builds utilizing this concept, so I wanted to share it to increase awareness because of how beneficial it seems to be, especially since it would open up more builds to using gold instead of steel.  Basically all you need to do is separate the steam chamber into two separate zones by using insulated tiles.  Dump the water on the exit side, and the steam turbine's cooler output water can cool stuff to lower than 125C.  It seems to work well with steam chambers using 2 steam turbines outputting to the same liquid vent too.

I just started messing around with it myself and it seems super useful.  Anyone currently using this concept in their builds?

Here's a short video demonstration showing the proof of concept with 1kg/s of 550C sour gas becoming safe for gold amalgam pumps.

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Check here for a recent post on it. I put a few links in that post (some date back to before the new steam turbine was created).  Back in the days, you could use the steam turbine to both cool and heat, and with the update to the turbine you can cool down any steam to 95C. The first discussion on the new steam turbine has this info it. Many people call it a blatant exploit, so it doesn't get much attention....  Links to all the things I mentioned are in the recent post. 

Oh, on a  side topic, it would be nice if the wiki kept info like this. However, I find that the wiki does not include useful ways to circumvent "designed" behavior.  The turbine is "supposed" to cool steam above 125C.  What the wiki lacks is the fact that the turbine only requires once cell under it to have 125C steam to work and suck up all other steam. 

Things like this are in general left off the wiki.  I have no desire to add them myself, as many people see these as "exploits", and I don't really care to have a wiki editing war. I could make a huge list of things the wiki completely ignores, but I digress. For this reason, @BLACKBERREST3, I haven't bothered with contributing to the wiki.  To much opinion is placed, in my opinion, on the facts about the game that are included/omitted from the wiki.  

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27 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

What the wiki lacks is the fact that the turbine only requires once cell under it to have 125C steam to work and suck up all other steam. 

It's a glaring omission because it's the intended behaviour of the steam turbine. The steam turbine checks the incoming temperature of all it's ports in order for it to average them in the power generation equation. So it can only be the intended behaviour since it wouldn't have been any extra work in simply putting a 125C minimum temperature limit, in fact it's probably more work to only have that limit on one port regardless of the number of open ports, so it can only be seen as the absolute intended behaviour of the steam turbine that it can and will accept steam at any temperature, as long as it's steam (and at least one open port sees above 125C steam).

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1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

I haven't bothered with contributing to the wiki.  To much opinion is placed, in my opinion, on the facts about the game that are included/omitted from the wiki.  

Thats ashame cause it is all apart of the game whether someone likes it or not. Its not so much a preference to not use it at that point, its more of forcing information to be kept secret, which isn't the most logical answer. People get things wrong all the time and have unintended consequences. In sea of thieves, the jump lunge was an accident and they included it in the game. For oni, transparency does not really exist because communication is harder to come by. This is why someone can mistake something as a bug when it is unintended design, or worse; claim it's a bug on an intended design like Saturnus pointed out.

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

It's a glaring omission because it's the intended behaviour of the steam turbine.

I'll move my convo to my other thread now.

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@mathmanican Thanks!  This is exactly the kind of stuff I was hoping to see by posting here.  TIL about completely separate chambers, the average temp thing, and the tiny density thing.  I think it would be cool to see more people using these types of mechanics, some of them don't seem that complicated to implement and they'd be very beneficial to the general player in several instances.

I don't even use the wiki, it leaves me with too many unanswered questions.  I just hop into sandbox and fire up a test instead.

People view everything not obvious as an exploit for some strange reason.  If it was intentionally designed/coded to work that way (as Saturnus points out), then it's not an exploit.  Basically I view an exploit as abusing a bug they haven't fixed yet.  There's some more cheesy application of the game mechanics at times, but they aren't exploits.  And in ONI most of the unconventional uses of game mechanics still aren't even cheesy imo.

 

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Someone apparently added the following comment to the wiki today, along with a reference to reddit. 

"Only 1 port requires 125 °C for the turbine to function. Therefore it is possible to create setup where a steam turbine accepts steam from 2 steam rooms where the temperature of one steam room is at 100 °C and the other above 125 °C. This effectively allows you to cool a room to 100 °C. "

Let's see if it stays....

On a side note, this is false as well.  You don't need two rooms.  A single room will do, provided you just make sure that one port has 125C under it.  That's it.  This is the fact about how it works, and should be up at the top of the page when the explanation occurs of what is required to get the thing to work. There are lots of ways to abuse this fact to get a turbine to work. Two rooms is one way.  There are so many more. :)   

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2 hours ago, mathmanican said:

On a side note, this is false as well.  You don't need two rooms.  A single room will do, provided you just make sure that one port has 125C under it.  That's it.  This is the fact about how it works, and should be up at the top of the page when the explanation occurs of what is required to get the thing to work. There are lots of ways to abuse this fact to get a turbine to work. Two rooms is one way.  There are so many more. :)  

How do you mitigate temperature transfer between 125 and 100C steam if all 5 ports are in the same room. Even if you leave a one tile gap on the port connecting the two rooms, the temperature will still transfer which is not what you want in this case. It's one of those "it's possible, but what to use it for" situations.

Edit. nvm, while writing this I figured it out. You would let it transfer heat. You would just keep one column (or one tile) heated the whole time which requires an external heating source. I know many builds like to contain it all, but there is beauty in having multiple systems coordinate with each other.

This method means that you will have to limit the quantity of liquid that goes into the steam chamber so it is more thermally reactive than temp buffering.

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@mathmanican That's my Reddit thread, so I edited in a link to here!  Now the loop of information is complete, and wiki people can find the links you and others here have provided.  I didn't intend to display sucking up <125C steam; that was just something that happened when I showed using the output water to cool stuff lower than 125C.  I didn't notice it sucking sub 125C steam (specifically 120C in my example) until it was pointed out to me.  You guy's examples are way better for showing two different steam temps.

@BLACKBERREST3 You don't need to mitigate temp transfer if you aren't in it for total efficiency.  What I've shown works even though heat will bleed over.

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