Jump to content

Partial melting makes insulation insulated tiles useless for LH2 , LOx storage?


Recommended Posts

Whenever i try using coolant that is cooler than freezing point of the gas, it, now, instead of solidifying "boils" on the floor and exchanges heat with the insulation insulated tile like it wasnt insulated. That tile just cools by like a degree per second. 

 

20200725231250_1.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I find diamond window tiles to be ideal for lox/lh storage, but I normally have a vacuum surrounding the tiles to stop the spread. You can't do anything about the initial wasted energy, but at least once it's cold it acts as a heatsink to mitigate spiking. Best to just embrace it and slap down some tempshifts for good measure :D 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This is a mechanic I'm really not a fan of, because it causes problems for more average stuff (abyssalite that flash boils water, in addition to your particular problems), while only providing much of use for absolutely insane builds (getting tungsten from abyssalite by putting hot liquids against it).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

32 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

This is a mechanic I'm really not a fan of, because it causes problems for more average stuff (abyssalite that flash boils water, in addition to your particular problems), while only providing much of use for absolutely insane builds (getting tungsten from abyssalite by putting hot liquids against it).

I agree on that. The this and the "flaking" mechanic are a huge pain. I am also unsure why this is even included. It seems counter-intuitive. Maybe as a measure to "compensate" for the limits of regular heat-transfer?

That said, it is part of the simulation, and ripping it out would probably cause more problems than it solves.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

28 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

I agree on that. The this and the "flaking" mechanic are a huge pain. I am also unsure why this is even included. It seems counter-intuitive. Maybe as a measure to "compensate" for the limits of regular heat-transfer?

That said, it is part of the simulation, and ripping it out would probably cause more problems than it solves.

I suspect that the original purpose was to compensate for difficulties getting dripped water to flash-boil on hot metal tiles (which would be the go-to solution, especially copper, if you wanted steam power and were operating from knowledge of real-world materials). Most metals in ONI were implemented early in its design life, and copper and gold especially were given absurdly-low thermal conductivities compared to real life, seemingly as a design decision to separate what you could make in your starting biome from diamond/space metals without stressing the simulation with quad-digit thermal conductivities.
However, this design approach seems to have been abandoned later on, as when aluminum got added, with its ore in starting biomes on Verdante and Arboria, it was given its real-world thermal conductivity, making it rival thermium if you're handling temperatures that won't melt it.

If they ripped it out, I doubt it would really cause any major issues, as it's a rather rare case to begin with (likely won't even happen until you're either mining down to the core or doing something with rockets). It would of course help greatly if they made the thermal conductivities close to reality (and just bump up diamond/thermium to 500/600 or something), so that people in Terra asteroids can get that sweet thermal conduction pre-space.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Personally I like the partial melting part of flaking. You should be able to make a little steam with hot metal before heating the entire 1000kg to 100C. It just needs to take thermal  conductivity into account as a requirement.

Edit: My preference would be if a tile is hot and conductive enough that it could cause 5kg of a substance to phase change in 1 tick then flaking happens.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I agree on that. The this and the "flaking" mechanic are a huge pain. I am also unsure why this is even included. It seems counter-intuitive. Maybe as a measure to "compensate" for the limits of regular heat-transfer?

That said, it is part of the simulation, and ripping it out would probably cause more problems than it solves.

Flaking is why we can fry food. It's good it's in the game.

The problem I see here is that insulated insulation should not transfer heat.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 hours ago, TheMule said:

Flaking is why we can fry food. It's good it's in the game.

The problem I see here is that insulated insulation should not transfer heat.

I think you're confusing mechanics here; being able to turn raw eggs into omelettes by heat is just normal phase change, like how algae debris at a certain temperature becomes dirt debris.

Flaking is specifically the problem you are describing, in that tiles and adjacent fluids under certain conditions involving a potential for a state change will undergo a partial-mass instantaneous heat transfer resulting in that state change. Instantaneous heat transfers of such magnitudes are bad, because they in essence make it like things have near-infinite thermal conductivity, ruining the point of anything that has near-0 thermal conductivity.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

TheMule was talking about frying food in real life, I presume. You can throw ice on a hot pan and end up with steam, liquid and ice all at once. They are saying that the flaking mechanic simulates a real world phenomenon which allows for us to act just on the surface of something, so it's cool to have in the game.

About conductivity: even TheMule is agreeing with you. Most people think conductivity should be accounted for in some way. That would make me sad as I couldn't melt abyssalite anymore, but I'll live.

Personally, I think it is cool to have in the game for gameplay reasons. After you think you have mastered thermodynamics, flaking comes out and quietly sabotages your plans. You go through some stages of grief, and then learn to control it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

After you think you have mastered thermodynamics, flaking comes out and quietly sabotages your plans. You go through some stages of grief, and then learn to control it.

Although i have to admit, flaking on insulated insulation can be quite annoying, as the tile takes quite some time to not allow flaking anymore, when finally temperature is near LOX/LH temperature. It makes insulated insulation kind of inferior to other materials for this special case.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, TripleM999 said:

Although i have to admit, flaking on insulated insulation can be quite annoying, as the tile takes quite some time to not allow flaking anymore, when finally temperature is near LOX/LH temperature. It makes insulated insulation kind of inferior to other materials for this special case.

Surely so, but all the better, right? Insulated insulation comes with it both high mass and SHC, so maybe it's not always what everyone wants. One type of person wouldn't care about waiting a little longer (according to the OP, the tiles were cooling at 1 degree per second, suggesting this would have solved itself in minutes), and others would make a different design. (This is a comment about the good of having multiple good designs for the same problem.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

I imagine the whole flaking thing was to let ice melt.

Possibly for when people run warm piping thru cold biomes, yes. The problem really is not that there's a mechanism to "flake" by transferring heat to only a portion of mass causing a state change in such, but that it completely ignores thermal conductivity to do so. It would make far more sense to reserve the mass portion in both materials for a hastened heat transfer, and also allow them to slowly transfer heat with the rest of their full tile, so that then you still get partial melts, but while respecting thermal conductivity for sanity's sake.

13 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Surely so, but all the better, right? Insulated insulation comes with it both high mass and SHC, so maybe it's not always what everyone wants. One type of person wouldn't care about waiting a little longer, and others would make a different design.

The problem is that for this specific case of storing very cold liquids, both the way ONI presents things (go get the magic space stuff to make even better insulated tiles!) and basic physics understanding (low thermal diffusitivity is good for insulating) say to go do this, but then it turns out that's wrong. It's not good game design to frustrate people by leading them down the wrong path without any intention of doing so for any further purpose.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There are some contrary clues too: I always thought this line was referring to liquid hydrogen's extreme power. (H) Hydrogen is a chemical Liquid. It freezes most substances that come into contact with it. Flaking might not have a utility in this build, but you might learn about it from this and then apply to other builds. You have to at least get past the anger phase of grief, though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, nakomaru said:

TheMule was talking about frying food in real life, I presume. You can throw ice on a hot pan and end up with steam, liquid and ice all at once. They are saying that the flaking mechanic simulates a real world phenomenon which allows for us to act just on the surface of something, so it's cool to have in the game.

About conductivity: even TheMule is agreeing with you. Most people think conductivity should be accounted for in some way. That would make me sad as I couldn't melt abyssalite anymore, but I'll live.

Personally, I think it is cool to have in the game for gameplay reasons. After you think you have mastered thermodynamics, flaking comes out and quietly sabotages your plans. You go through some stages of grief, and then learn to control it.

Yes, exactly. Water-rich foods would probably explode (like in a max power microwave) if all water turned at once into steam. Instead, water in contact with hot oil creates a veil of steam that kind of insulates the rest from the extreme heat in the oil. So instead of burning or exploding, the food is slowly (relatively speaking) cooked. As water "flakes" out, it keeps the small amount of steam around the food. This process happens at the surface where the contact is made.

Ok, calling it flaking was a bit of a stretch, but it's a very similar phenomenon, where a tiny bit of water violently changes state while the rest doesn't.

The only problem is that in ONI the process happens at the tile level of scale (since the tile is the smallest we can go). So it involves kgs flaking of tons.
And yes it should not bypass TC that way.
And to make it clear, I'm not referring to the insulation part (the way TC is computed having one material at 0,000001 TC doesn't prevent heat transfer per se), but to the insulated part, or the combination of the two.

7 hours ago, Nebbie said:

it turns out that's wrong

It's not wrong. It just takes a bit to stabilize. Yes initially you're spending a bit of extra energy to cool down the insulation tiles, but that's it. Nothing that breaks the build.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, nakomaru said:

you might learn about it from this and then apply to other builds

Bingo. Once we realize that it is a mechanic, and what the rules behind the mechanic are, it becomes just another tool.

Thermal conductivity and heat transfer, as implemented in the game, are not exactly intuitive either, and have taken me 2 years to finally fully realize why my mental model is flawed. I expect that doubling the mass of a solid would increase heat transfer. This is because when I double the mass of something in real life, the surface area increases (in most ways I would generally double mass). The game presents elements to me as blocks, and so when i double mass, I think, "Oh, I just added another block of the same size."  That's the mental model flaw, namely that I added nothing new to the volume/surface area problem.  As such, heat flux (which depends on surface area, not mass) doesn't change because of ONI's one-element-per-tile rule. Conclusion: the mass of an object has ZERO bearing on how much heat is transferred (provided you have enough mass to avoid all the total heat and temperature clamps). Once you pass a minimum amount of mass, adding more mass does NOTHING to help increase heat flow. 

In real life, if you want to increase heat flow, then add more contact points (which can mean add more mass, hence surface area, in real life). In ONI, the key is still to add more contact points, but you have at most 4 immediate tile neighbors, and then as many buildings as you can think to add, all along having to pay attention to the total heat clamp, temperature clamp, etc. Not exactly real life here. But I think most of us have long since passed the grief stage of thermal conductivity, and just learned to deal with it.

Flaking, on the other hand, was just updated a few weeks ago.  The full equations describing it are mostly known (quite recent discoveries).  It's impacts are now observed daily in different forums. Give it a year, and it will be an integral part of the game that we have learned to master. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

Flaking, on the other hand, was just updated a few weeks ago.  The full equations describing it are mostly known (quite recent discoveries).  It's impacts are now observed daily in different forums.

I think, it happens now much more often and on a regular base, cause of near correct heat amounts exchanged. Before the patch, the temperatures were running off too fast to make it observable most of the time. I even think, crude/petroleum boiling on abyssalite was the only time, most player witnessed flaking, or the occasional, but rare enough boiling of liquid gases, while trying to cool them down. Now all of this happens more often, and more consistently.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

Bingo. Once we realize that it is a mechanic, and what the rules behind the mechanic are, it becomes just another tool.

...

Flaking, on the other hand, was just updated a few weeks ago.  The full equations describing it are mostly known (quite recent discoveries).  It's impacts are now observed daily in different forums. Give it a year, and it will be an integral part of the game that we have learned to master. 

The problem I think is that in its current form, it's too aggressive by completely ignoring thermal conductivity. Hot abyssalite is a lot more common now than when ONI was first put together, due to different map setups, and while rockets aren't exactly new, the mechanic most certainly wasn't put in place with "screw up players' liquid fuel storage when they try to insulate it" in mind.

As to uses, getting tungsten from abyssalite is pretty cool, it's just that the flaking mechanics to do it are a bit...excessive. The intuitive thing from real-world physics would be to turn the abyssalite into a powder so that it can be immersed in heat in a machine; rock crusher recipe of abyssalite into wolframite and sand might be a bit too on the simple side, but it'd be something.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Nebbie said:

The intuitive thing from real-world physics would be to turn the abyssalite into a powder so that it can be immersed in heat in a machine; rock crusher recipe of abyssalite into wolframite and sand might be a bit too on the simple side, but it'd be something.

Not from a gameplay perspective.  Wolframite is too valuable.  Way too valuable.  Even if you only got 5kg out of 100kg it would be too much.  They turned abyssalite from a super easy early near perfect insulator to something excessive and useless till late game.

I'm not saying I wouldn't like that, I really would.  It just doesn't fit game rarity/scarcity.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

Not from a gameplay perspective.  Wolframite is too valuable.  Way too valuable.  Even if you only got 5kg out of 100kg it would be too much.  They turned abyssalite from a super easy early near perfect insulator to something excessive and useless till late game.

I'm not saying I wouldn't like that, I really would.  It just doesn't fit game rarity/scarcity.

There's a core problem in that that abyssalite is just far too large in available quantity. I really think it should be trimmed down in terms of how much is on the map to begin with (only used for extreme temperature biomes and volcanoes), and most biomes given some things to maintain their temperature (please Klei make a drecko variant that eats nosh sprout and pees a bunch of chlorine so the rust biome isn't just a sad sack of chilly CO2 and dead plants after 20 cycles).
It would still be an issue to make it easy to convert into tungsten, but at least there'd be room for maybe some convoluted thing like abyss bugs pooping wolframite.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Please be aware that the content of this thread may be outdated and no longer applicable.

×
  • Create New...