Petrol Rockets Are better* than hydrogen

[caffeinated21]

Been working on trying to see how many rockets I can run in parallel. Original plan was to go exclusively hydrogen, utilizing the excess water generated from the oil-well->petrol boiler ->petrol gen cycle on top of my geysers. 

However, if you assume that, late game:

1. Oxygen is generally produced to excess (I think I can support 100+ dupes on top of LOX production; which I don’t think my CPU can support) 

2. power is essentially infinite 

then it follows that you’re better off directly fueling petrol rockets than converting it to water for hydrogen rockets, by a lot: 2kg/s petrol -> 0.75kg/s water -> 84g/s hydrogen.

Therefor, assuming access to Sufficient petrol boilers:

1. You should tap all your oil wells

2. You should only burn as much petrol as is necessary to generate water sustain other water needs.

3. hydrogen rockets are best left to the long distance destinations only they can reach*
 

*or the shortest destinations with 100% steam capture

 

[SkunkMaster]

i wouldn't say one is better then the other, all 3 engines have their uses. 

 

Hydrogen is mostly used for farming of far far away planets, think 100k+, where petrol is more your "every day rocket".

 

Steam rocket is nice to setup early, and have it farm the remaining research, before you start building petrol rockets. - This way you can skip oxylite entirely.

Petrol is best used for thermal energy purposes in my opinion. can drive endless amounts of turbines while baking rego into magma. 

That and automated farming of the close planets. 

[caffeinated21]

H2 obviously has use for the long range missions, but Petrol is more water efficient all the way to its max range (110k for cargo)

[Fyrel]

Doesn't hydrogen rocket produce infinite power and water in a large enough silo?

[caffeinated21]

16 minutes ago, Fyrel said:

Doesn't hydrogen rocket produce infinite power and water in a large enough silo?

Only for flights to the 10km planet (a caveat I noted)

[Fyrel]

2 hours ago, caffeinated21 said:

Only for flights to the 10km planet (a caveat I noted)

So you did.

I somehow managed to misread the * marked sentence.

[psusi]

So if hydrogen is water positive at 10k with a long silo and steam capture, at 20 or 30k, does it not consume rather little?  Or is the amount of hydrogen you get from water just that small?

[BT_20]

On 1/12/2020 at 10:29 AM, psusi said:

So if hydrogen is water positive at 10k with a long silo and steam capture, at 20 or 30k, does it not consume rather little?  Or is the amount of hydrogen you get from water just that small?

I believe at best as in shortest range rocket with long silo you get a return of something like 5 or 6 times the water as steam for what you put in to make lh2 the process also produces more oxygen than it needs.

You could probably go out quite a bit further before the process uses more water then it generates. 
 

If you had a long silo with like 5 rockets all going to close destinations the water and power produced would be enough for an entire base easily.

[caffeinated21]

@BT_20 - how much water are you seeing per launch? I’d heard ~1200kg? Absolute minimum hydrogen for a launch in 141kg, which translates to ~1259kg of water. Seems barely break even @10k. Of course you do get a bunch of oxygen for free out of the deal... 

[BT_20]

9 hours ago, caffeinated21 said:

@BT_20 - how much water are you seeing per launch? I’d heard ~1200kg? Absolute minimum hydrogen for a launch in 141kg, which translates to ~1259kg of water. Seems barely break even @10k. Of course you do get a bunch of oxygen for free out of the deal... 

I have 6 rockets in my silo currently 2 going to the closest destinations and the others going 3 and 4 rings out.I have 4 steam turbines running That have been running full draw for 50 cycles and my steam pressure is at 35kg per tile.

the hardest part of the silo is the temp management I am currently deleting most of the heat with closed turbines.If I was using all the heat for power I would need 2 power grids.