Hydro Powered Generator

[hittamm]

man....i hate quarantine and i'm so bored

can we have hydro powered generator ?

[Meltdown]

While the idea is interesting, I think there is a problem with balancing such generator. The thing is that water could travel indefinetly long distance in the pipe without consuming any power in addition to one that used to move it into the pipe. The gravity and fall speed are, AFAIK, not simulated at all - the former is just a rule about things without support moving in the set direction, and the latter is just hardcoded value for such movement. 

If generator could be simply incorporated into the pipe, as on the first picture, one could just place as many generators in a row as needed, create a cycle of pipes, pump finite amount of water into that system and forget about power management for the rest of the game.

If it works with the water falling from the vent (like on the second picture), then it would just require to pump water back constantly, still resulting in essencially free power.

I think we are missing some mechanics that could help to create balanced solution that would match the concept. We may try to involve some unreallistic water destruction/transformation or balance everything with heat production, but I have my doubts about the results.

[hittamm]

Lol i also thought that one, "FREE POWER".

i lived in pacific island irl so it's a common stuff if i see hydro powered generator on some river across the road and i mean it's free also provide benefit much.When i played ONI i see somekind of "WASTED ENERGY" (the feel....), and here come my thought why we can't add hydro powered generator in-game in order to charge electricity for the colony ? why not ?

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Example for picture 1 :
-Power Tab menu
-any liquid as long as it's not too cold or hot
-Since it make electricity, the generator could heat surround the area (also heat the water output).
-Duplicate need to maintaining the hydro generator in order to prevent temperature overload (should the generator put inside water so no maintaining needed ? ).
-The input water should contain volume at last 1000 g/s, The output of the water is around 300-500 g/s (still the past volume still exist...is just like piping water through electrolyzer ).
-the pipe out put is placed backward (because that's how water gained mass circling down in order powering the generator and it's work irl).
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Example picture 2 :
-Power Tab menu
-any liquid as long as it's not too cold or hot
-this generator is an early generation 1 of all the hydrogen generator which mean it's only generate low electricity output (i doubt anyone would build this except someone build water sieve)
-Output not interfered by generator (still the same as output from liquid vent)
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my thought about adding new mechanic...i think that's a bad idea (for now) since performance of this game is beasty and i wonder if you know the struggle of 600-1000 cycle, so please don't expecting we get a new mechanic before they fixed/add "MULTI-THREAD" cuz i kinda had enough with this game LOL.

[yoakenashi]

Awesome drawings.

I wonder if the vent solution could be incorporated into the vent itself to regain no more than 240 W of power. A liquid pump takes 240 W to move liquid into a pipe; one could reclaim that as it moves out of the pipe. Perhaps scale it a little due to simulate inefficiency?

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is a thing and I have aways been interested in a non-battery form of power storage  while we cannot use gravity in ONI to do this, a hydropower vent would work.

There are some buildings that produce liquid outputs where this would be “free power”, but I think could be allowed due to the minor impact:

Toilet - very small increase from duplicant use

Steam turbine - could provide a small increase in power generation, could be offset by limiting the temperature tolerance of the hydro generator.

Algae Distiller - I personally haven’t used this in forever. Slime is a semi-limited resource, exploiting this for power would be limited.

Ethanol Distiller - this is probably the biggest issue, but again dumping enough ethanol into space is a waste of power anyways.

Glass Forge - also a small generator of liquid

 

[hittamm]

@yoakenashi good idea, i've been thinking 40°C (104°F) max temperature overload for this generator since it's free energy and also a fair penalty for it because you can use it through any pipe....

if this generator is a thing then i can imagine in 3 days after the update someone gonna make a bathroom slave factory room (lol) .

[Yetinotincluded]

To incorporate hydro power the game needs to incorporate convection as a heat transfer form. Now, only conduction is included. That is why things do not cool down in the vacuum of space, and almost get no heat from the sun, despite solar panels. That is why liquid does not move in a current no matter how large the liquid body is, and why the only way to ventilate is to push a gas with higher pressure gas. There are no air currents, even in large spaces with temperature differences.

[Tobruk]

On 5/19/2020 at 12:16 AM, Meltdown said:

If it works with the water falling from the vent (like on the second picture), then it would just require to pump water back constantly, still resulting in essencially free power.

If the generator would get you less than 240W for 10kg packets falling through from the vent (and possibly less than 120W for smaller packets drawn by plastic pump), you'd only use it mid-game for combining pools of liquid downwards. As such, it would be possible to balance it as a non-renewable energy source to stabilise a base while you work your way up. 

[Meltdown]

28 minutes ago, Tobruk said:

If the generator would get you less than 240W for 10kg packets falling through from the vent

But nothing prevents you from placing multiple generators. Imagine pump being on the lowest possible spot of the map pumping liquid all the way up to the highest possible height to the vent, and all the space in between them is filled with generators, each producing power from the same packets falling from the vent. Thats what I was talking about in my post.

Actually, it may be possible to balance this without gravity/kinetic energy simulation and nerfing output by artificially rulling that hydrogenerator takes penalty to power generation if there is vent/another generator in the certain range above them. This doesn't need any ongoing calcultations, just a check and an update any time new vent/hydrogenerator is built.

[Tobruk]

Just now, Meltdown said:

in the certain range above them

Not in a given range, any range within a straight vertical line. As you rightly said, you could be venting off liquid from the top of the map and run it against 300 generators.

[Sasza22]

18 hours ago, Yetinotincluded said:

To incorporate hydro power the game needs to incorporate convection as a heat transfer form. Now, only conduction is included. That is why things do not cool down in the vacuum of space, and almost get no heat from the sun, despite solar panels.

Actually i remember the davs mentioned that convection is in the game. It`s just weaker than gas separation and overall it`s hard to notice when normal conduction is considered.

Also it`s not convection that makes stuff cool in vacuum. It`s radiation. This one is absent from the game.

[Meltdown]

After some thinking, I came up with concept of relatively safe power-positive hydrogenerator.

1. Hydrogenerator works like a large pump. It sucks in liquid from the certain tiles it occupates and has a piped output. Liquid consumption speed is several times higher than liquid pump's.
2. The liquid is not released immideately. Instead, it stored in the inner buffer with limited capacity. In that aspect, generator works like Oil Well - once buffer capacity threshold is reached, it stops consuming liquid and has to be emptied by dupe.
3. Emptying speed is tied to an average liquid intake speed over few last cycles and equals to a fraction of it (Simmilar to OP's idea for inline generator from the first concept art).
4. Hydrogenerator's power output scale non-linearly with the amount of liquid it consumes, and at certain point should exceed the power it would take to pump that liquid to generator.
5. *Optional: Due to significant difference in input and output capabilities, the generator may need some mechanic that allows it to have some resedual, diminishing power production for a short time after it stops the intake.

As a result, this generator:

1. Requires continious supply of large amounts of liquid in order to produce power, which is not a trivial goal to complete;
2. Cannot work 100% of time, which creates additional requirements for the power system based on such generators;
3. Cannot be efficiently chained with another generator or power itself, as it always outputs liquid slower than consumes;

On the negative side, such generator might become replacement for a pump in situaltions where size/form-factor, duplicant access/time and speed doesn't play critical role. But I think that may be balanced by heavy tech and resource requirements, so "power-generating pump" could become a late-game optimization rather than a complete replacement for regular pumps.

Also, here is a variation of how could such generator look like. It isn't relevant to the main points of my post, just an idea.