Steam turbine should take 100C steam

[ZombieDupe]

This has bugged me for a very long time. I don't really understand what the need for 125C temperature is. It makes several things unnecessarily annoying to deal with. It is ought to confuse people for why putting a steam turbine over a cool steam vent won't work. It happened to me and I was furious. In the dlc it means you have to use the exploit of 1kg pushed liquid through a valve for making sulfur geyser taming simpler and you can't just put a steam turbine on top and export sulfur as it condenses, since it won't condense at 125C, but requires 115C to do so. Why is the turbine made more tedious than it needs to be to work? Not to mention the lack of information about this particular feature, the 125C requirement isn't mentioned in the description or anywhere at all, you just get a prompt when it's all already in motion, and even that doesn't tell you the requirement, just whines to you saying "steam too cold, can't work "!

There is also the liquid tepidizer not heating up beyond 85C. I can see this is because it creates heat from thin air, since it takes 960w, equivalent to the same amount of dtus, but generates 4064w equivalent of dtus in temperature, meaning that if it could be used to heat up water, you could use it under a steam turbine to generate power from nothing. Why didn't you just make it generate an equivalent amount of dtus in power, so a 926w output, with 64w self-heating instead of making an arbitrary cap? It would still make areas possible to heat up by throwing power at the problem, so what's the deal? When you need to take extra unnecessary precautions for geysers or builds that should clearly not have these kinds of requirements, it just makes the game not fun and makes you look like an idiot when it's not even your fault.

I would gladly have turbine taking 100C steam input and the tepidizer being less than x4 as effective if it means making things straight-forward. I like robust challenge, but as it is, it is stupid and annoying for no real reason.

[Fyrel]

Steam turbines in the real world won't run at 100C either. They generate power from steam pressure and as the pressure of the steam increases so does the boiling point of water.

The game doesn't model these factor, it doesn't change the boiling point of water and it generates power from the heat removed from the steam instead of generating it from the pressure of the steam.

I have no idea if 125C is a reasonable temperature to have to heat thing up to in the real world to generate the pressure required but 100C would definitely be too low.

As for the tepidizer I have to agree. liquid heaters in real life have no problem exceeding the temperature it shuts off at.

I think it should be changed to have no max temperature but have an overheat temperature dependent on the material it is constructed off. They would probably have to power to heat figures to not have it just be brokenly overpowered though.

[Saturnus]

2 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

... since it won't condense at 125C, but requires 115C to do so. ..

Sorry I snipped the rest. 

You can make something below 125C from a steam turbine. 105C is perfectly doable without cheating in any way.

 

[TheMule]

It's called game balance. ONI isn't a physics simulation, it's a game. Entertainment, not accuracy, is the goal. Think of Marvel movies. Not being realistic is part of the fun. The point in ONI is to challenge the player.

Those are actually two good examples: the tepidizer has to be a cheap heat generator (power is irrelevant of course, what matters is efficiency), otherwise (to summarize roughly) maps on Rime would be just a tedious wait for most players. It's a cheap way to produce heat, that of course needs to be made impossible to create power with. You can't even boil water with it.

125C is a balance/design choice. It occurs several times and is a tech threshold of sorts. Above that is steel territory. Of course, unless you really know what you're doing, that is. All early game machinery is limited at that, with golden amalgam. They made an exception for the AT, but also made a golden amalgam AT weak by other means (low TC, so you can use it as is for minor cooling or you need to address the low TC somehow).

125C is also a temperature that in not reachable by polluted water as coolant. If a turbine (out of the box) took 100C steam, you could use pwater as coolant in a refinery to run a steam turbine.

And of course a steam turbine can take 100C steam. I spilled water by mistake into a hot biome, I confined the steam and used a steam turbine to empty a room with 10kg of 108C steam per tile. That was yesterday.

 

Oh, I was about to explain how, but well @Saturnus beat me.

[KittenIsAGeek]

According to this fact sheet, industrial steam turbines generally use steam at around 550f on the input and 300f on the output.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/09/f33/CHP-Steam Turbine.pdf

 

[ZombieDupe]

22 hours ago, TheMule said:

It's called game balance. ONI isn't a physics simulation, it's a game. Entertainment, not accuracy, is the goal. Think of Marvel movies. Not being realistic is part of the fun. The point in ONI is to challenge the player.

Those are actually two good examples: the tepidizer has to be a cheap heat generator (power is irrelevant of course, what matters is efficiency), otherwise (to summarize roughly) maps on Rime would be just a tedious wait for most players. It's a cheap way to produce heat, that of course needs to be made impossible to create power with. You can't even boil water with it.

125C is a balance/design choice. It occurs several times and is a tech threshold of sorts. Above that is steel territory. Of course, unless you really know what you're doing, that is. All early game machinery is limited at that, with golden amalgam. They made an exception for the AT, but also made a golden amalgam AT weak by other means (low TC, so you can use it as is for minor cooling or you need to address the low TC somehow).

125C is also a temperature that in not reachable by polluted water as coolant. If a turbine (out of the box) took 100C steam, you could use pwater as coolant in a refinery to run a steam turbine.

And of course a steam turbine can take 100C steam. I spilled water by mistake into a hot biome, I confined the steam and used a steam turbine to empty a room with 10kg of 108C steam per tile. That was yesterday.

 

Oh, I was about to explain how, but well @Saturnus beat me.

Never said anything about making a real physics simulation, just something that makes sense at first glance, and the **** they are pulling here makes zero sense until you look at exploit mechanics and a failed attempt to balance things because of it.

Yeah, it's a game that's meant to be fun and simplified, which is exactly the opposite of what the 125C steam turbine and 85C tepidizer mark do. It makes things unnecessarily tedious. Cool steam vent would be a godsend with 100C mark, but it's by far one of the worst and most hated geysers for getting water in the game. Change turbine to 100C input and suddenly it's an amazing geyser that is much more simple to tame. Klei for whatever reason loves to throw cool steam vents at people on the supposedly easiest asteroid, so this sort of change would be one step towards making it better in my opinion. It's never fun to work with frustrating game mechanics like this. Any time I look at a cool steam vent, it makes me furious that I'm going to have to tame that thing for water. It's not a fun challenge, it's an annoying chore.

23 hours ago, Fyrel said:

Steam turbines in the real world won't run at 100C either. They generate power from steam pressure and as the pressure of the steam increases so does the boiling point of water.

Interesting, I thought it was the state change that would activate turbine, though I suspect that still has something to do with it?

22 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Sorry I snipped the rest. 

You can make something below 125C from a steam turbine. 105C is perfectly doable without cheating in any way.

 

Well, if you don't consider using exploits as cheats, then fair enough. I personally don't like to use the cheese method of valves involving 1kg packets to stop state change.

[Saturnus]

1 hour ago, ZombieDupe said:

I personally don't like to use the cheese method of valves involving 1kg packets to stop state change.

There's none of that in any of those builds in that thread at all. You obviously didn't read anything of what I wrote in that thread since the whole point of it is that you cannot use valves to split an intermittent flow correctly so you must use automation instead. Which in turn means there is more than 1kg in the pipes at all times.

[ZombieDupe]

Just now, Saturnus said:

There's none of that in any of those builds at all. You obviously didn't read anything of what I wrote in that thread since the whole point of it is that cannot use valves to split an intermittent flow correctly so you must use automation instead. Which in turn means there is more than 1kg in the pipes at all times.

Misunderstood what the build was doing, my bad. Nice build method to consider, but it's not that simple in terms of how obvious it is and could still be considered an exploit.

[Saturnus]

1 hour ago, ZombieDupe said:

Misunderstood what the build was doing, my bad. Nice build method to consider, but it's not that simple in terms of how obvious it is and could still be considered an exploit.

In the thread I do explain that there is absolutely nothing about the split turbine (as presented) that even remotely can be considered an exploit.

The reasons are fairly straight forward: a) the total power output scales exactly with the amount of heat deleted, b) you have to realise that the only way that is consistent with the game mechanics is that the steam turbine has 5 separate rotors blades, each driven by it's own port but all are connected to the same shaft. It takes 125C steam on at least one port to have enough pressure potential to get the turbine spinning but once that happens all steam is used even if the pressure potential (temperature) on other ports was too low to turns the turbine by itself. This is the only logical way of seeing the steam turbine as it's consistent with all observations we can make on it's behaviour in regards to blocked ports, different temperature on different ports etc. 

[OxCD]

5 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

Cool steam vent would be a godsend with 100C mark, but it's by far one of the worst and most hated geysers for getting water in the game. Change turbine to 100C input and suddenly it's an amazing geyser that is much more simple to tame. Klei for whatever reason loves to throw cool steam vents at people on the supposedly easiest asteroid, so this sort of change would be one step towards making it better in my opinion. It's never fun to work with frustrating game mechanics like this. Any time I look at a cool steam vent, it makes me furious that I'm going to have to tame that thing for water. It's not a fun challenge, it's an annoying chore.

Because you're sticking to the fact that steam turbine must be used to cool steam vents.

But many beginners are still using wheezeworts, like in the old days. Or sometimes AETN, if you have one close to the vent. I'm helping beginners everyday on french discord, and the turbine is just another "step" of the cooling tools. Many of them stick to WW or AETN for a long time. Turbine is not the only tool, even if experienced players like us tend to forget it.

Personally I see no point to change that to 100°C. Steam vents taming with turbine don't need to be simplified. More, I would like if turbine should need higher temp input, so the opposite of your request. It should make some stuff slightly harder to control, so funnier to setup.

[Fyrel]

2 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

Interesting, I thought it was the state change that would activate turbine, though I suspect that still has something to do with it?

 

It takes a huge amount of energy to transition water into steam. 

The game simulates this by not transitioning the state changes until the liquid is 2C above the boiling point and then transitioning all at once.

If that was how it worked in the real world we wouldn't have had steam engines we would have had steam bombs.

[TheMule]

9 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

it's a game that's meant to be fun and simplified

I've never said simplified, I've said challenging.

 

9 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

it's an amazing geyser that is much more simple to tame

No challenge, no fun. And if that's your sort of thing, the devs gave you sandbox mode. If you like playing with free energy, free water, etc.just use sandbox mode to build the most amazing colony.  I don't judge you if that's your thing, really.

That said, a basic CSV tamer is almost trivial, it's an AT/ST setup as basic as you can get. Doing it efficiently with pwater as coolant OTOH requires some game knowledge. You can reach power neutral (or barely positive) efficiency with clever designs, which involve no exploits whatsoever.

Also, I see no reason to trivialize CSVs to the point they are the same of water geysers, just with a different kind of pump (substitute a liquid pump with a 100C steam turbine and you get exactly the same flow of 95C water).  I don't get why Klei should make them the same, especially when you can find seeds with the geysers you want. Literally, choose a seed with water geysers in it if it's easy 95C water that you want.

BTW, 10% packets not changing state in pipes is a rule set by the devs, not a bug, a glitch, an unintended side effect. It's how the ONI universe is supposed to work. And, by far, it is not the most unexpected rule in the ONI universe.

 

7 hours ago, Saturnus said:

it's consistent

Thanks @Saturnus for opportunity to stress how important that is. There are a lot of things in ONI physics that diverge a lot from reality. They are not bugs, glitches, just the rules of the game. No matter how strange something is, as long it's consistent, it's a rule. Bugs are inconsistent in nature.

If packets of all sizes broke pipes and the only exceptions were only those exactly 1kg, and only of one element (water) inside only one type of piping (radiant), only for boiling and not freezing, that would almost clearly qualify as a bug. The <=10% rule applies to all temperature related changes, not only phase changes, including same phase transitions (oil -> petroleum), to all elements, to all type of pipes. It's super consistent. It's how pipes in ONI are supposed to work.

Klei doesn't even restrict you to their choices, the game is moddable.

 

[TripleM999]

and the 10% rule is explicitly intended, already shown by source code analysis: 

 

[Sasza22]

I think the big problem with the turbine is that it`s not obvious that it needs the steam to be that hot. I`ve seen a lot of threads from new players asking for advice about the cool steam vents. They kept saying they needed plastic for the steam turbine. They were sure that`s the way to tame the vent.

Yes the turbine states it needs a certain temperature but someone new likely won`t read everything in the description and is likely to get an unpleasant surprise trying the turbine for the first time. The plastic requirement actually helps by preventing building it too early but still it can get confusing.

I mean allowing cold steam in doesn`t really break anything, does it? And it would prevent a lot of new player confusion.

[Gurgel]

On 1/14/2021 at 10:11 AM, TheMule said:

It's called game balance. ONI isn't a physics simulation, it's a game. Entertainment, not accuracy, is the goal. Think of Marvel movies. Not being realistic is part of the fun. The point in ONI is to challenge the player.

ONI is also a very nice engineering simulation. True engineering does not depend on standard-physics being in use, it is a mind-set and an approach.

[TheMule]

11 hours ago, Gurgel said:

ONI is also a very nice engineering simulation. True engineering does not depend on standard-physics being in use, it is a mind-set and an approach.

Absolutely. That's another reason not to have complete solutions that can be built as a single object, but instead we are given building blocks. There's no place in ONI for buildings such a "CSV tamer", "metal volcano tamer", etc. We're supposed to come up with our designs.

[Gurgel]

3 hours ago, TheMule said:

Absolutely. That's another reason not to have complete solutions that can be built as a single object, but instead we are given building blocks. There's no place in ONI for buildings such a "CSV tamer", "metal volcano tamer", etc. We're supposed to come up with our designs.

Yes. Find out how things behave, check what mechanisms you have available, and then cooperate with the situation, no matter what, to achieve your goal. That is what engineering is all about.

[BaloneyOs]

On 1/14/2021 at 8:01 PM, KittenIsAGeek said:

According to this fact sheet, industrial steam turbines generally use steam at around 550f on the input and 300f on the output.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/09/f33/CHP-Steam Turbine.pdf

 

So Factorio got it mostly right

[ZombieDupe]

On 1/16/2021 at 9:41 AM, TheMule said:

Absolutely. That's another reason not to have complete solutions that can be built as a single object, but instead we are given building blocks. There's no place in ONI for buildings such a "CSV tamer", "metal volcano tamer", etc. We're supposed to come up with our designs.

Funny you say that because metal volcanoes are easier to tame than a goddamn cool steam vent by comparison. It's awful that the cool steam vents can't be tamed easily, because with something like Terra, the supposedly easiest starting asteroid, will have those as your water source, so they are probably going to be your first geysers ever to encounter. So why the hell would it be fair to have something that early on, which is supposed to be a stepping stone, be this difficult to tame with all these roundabout ways, exploits, being stuck between cooling/heating and so forth, meanwhile a metal volcano tamer looks like this!

Very well designed game indeed! Shouldn't this be the other way round? So you could put a steam turbine on top of a cool steam vent and tame it (with hot water output still that would need cooling of its own), and metal volcanoes requiring something more complicated than this? You like to be challenged? Play on a challenging map with challenging settings, and please stop advocating bad game design mechanics and needless awful difficulty on things that clearly should have never been as difficult as they are and punish less experienced players for dumb reasons. Or do you suppose everyone who gets stuck should play sandbox if they don't want to get external help? If that is the case, then all I can say is that you don't understand game design at all.

On 1/15/2021 at 9:02 PM, Sasza22 said:

I think the big problem with the turbine is that it`s not obvious that it needs the steam to be that hot. I`ve seen a lot of threads from new players asking for advice about the cool steam vents. They kept saying they needed plastic for the steam turbine. They were sure that`s the way to tame the vent.

Yes the turbine states it needs a certain temperature but someone new likely won`t read everything in the description and is likely to get an unpleasant surprise trying the turbine for the first time. The plastic requirement actually helps by preventing building it too early but still it can get confusing.

I mean allowing cold steam in doesn`t really break anything, does it? And it would prevent a lot of new player confusion.

THIS is precisely why it should be easier. It is the obvious thing for something that is given to you as your first geyser. That's how good game design would work, not the backwards builds you are required to have right now. New players being confused mid-game and coming to forums to ask for help, looking up guides, reading the wiki should be something you should mitigate as much as possible, not encourage with your game mechanics.

There are games that do exactly that, and you rarely get any guides for them or people asking for help BECAUSE they are so well designed from start to finish. That doesn't in least bit make these games easy, in fact they are some of the more difficult games out there. But unlike this game, a lot more people actually finish them. ONI doesn't have a week go by before someone asks "how to cooling", "how to clean germs" and so on. The player should be able to figure things out on their own without asking these questions elsewhere.

@TheMule you keep talking as if none of what I say has merit, yet this **** keeps happening to people and you know it, but you don't care because it doesn't bother you, you are perfectly content with the countless examples of awful difficulty presented in the game and are so adamant on keeping it that way. There are ways to do difficulty in this game right, like deadlier germs, late game geysers, meteorites, hostile creatures, more difficult asteroids LATER ON as you play. But not this early - mid game nonsense!

I have way too many hours into ONI and I have never got to the temporal tear in base game nor have I got the "home sweet home" achievement before starting a new run or moving away from the game for a while, and that is because there is way too much stuff that is tedious and nonsensical like the annoying shenanigans with the cool steam vent, which even though could be streamlined actually isn't. And it is Klei's fault for being incompetent with game design ending up with players being confused about what to do and how, because if they were competent in design, we wouldn't have this mess constantly come up again. I mean they haven't even made POI deconstructable, what is wrong with these people?!

[Saturnus]

Not sure why you think CSV taming is difficult. Here's an example of an infinite condenser I've designed.

[ZombieDupe]

10 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Not sure why you think CSV taming is difficult. Here's an example of an infinite condenser I've designed.

That is neither an obvious nor a practical build for a "newbie's first geyser tamer". The obvious thing to do would be to box the thing in, may be vacuum it out and put a steam turbine on top so you end up with hot water being pumped out, based solely on the description of the turbine when you first get to build it (it STILL lacks a ton of information for some reason). Such a build of course would never work because of the 125C turbine heat requirement and 85C tepidizer limit, so you can't even heat the output of the vent further (which would be your second guess to do before giving up) to extract the water without something that looks like this. Doesn't help that you also need plastic and some form of cooling for the turbine itself (assuming you don't know that the turbine can cool itself, because none ever assumes that), which chances are will be as difficult to get to do as cooling the output water itself, and that is IF that sort of a build was possible to begin with. So, in other words, making the most obvious and easy build possible would not solve every problem that comes with extracting water from the geyser, which is precisely why it is reasonable to tweak the tepidizer and the turbine statistics to make such a build possible. If Klei wants you to tame these geysers early on, they would better present you with very obvious mechanics for solutions, but they don't.

[Saturnus]

7 minutes ago, ZombieDupe said:

That is neither an obvious nor a practical build for a "newbie's first geyser tamer". The obvious thing to do would be to box the thing in, may be vacuum it out and put a steam turbine on top so you end up with hot water being pumped out...

By the time you got plastic for making a steam turbine most people would realize that just not how ONI works.

[TheMule]

1 hour ago, ZombieDupe said:

Funny you say that because metal volcanoes are easier to tame than a goddamn cool steam vent by comparison.

Only in your opinion. Taming a CSV invoves just a pwater loop to the next frozen biome and you're set for 1000 cycles, with both acting as a source of hot and cold water which you can mix to preference. Or dig the ice and build ice shiftplates behind the CSV now and then. You need a proper tamer only if you want to get a fully sustainable solution.  Making your base fully sustainable is an entirely different task from surving the first hundreds cycles.  Anyone implying that newbies should concern with that right off the bat is doing them a disservice.

And a CSV tamer with AT/ST is as basic as you can get, you only have to cool down the environment around the CVS, exactly as you would with the remedies I mentioned before. If you understand the basics of any AT/ST setup, you can design a CSV tamer.

Not even close to the complexity (in reasoning) of a metal volcano tamer. You need to understand how volcanoes work (which tile NOT to dig while you're building around them), liquid locks, how to create a vacuum, maybe how self cooling turbines work, how much steam you need inside the chamber to even out spikes that would overtemp your turbines. Not to mention if you mess up you're dealing with ultra hot liquid metal. That's a lot of different concepts and mechanics to understand for a newbie, compared to "just apply cooling here to make steam condense".

 

Quote

 It's awful that the cool steam vents can't be tamed easily, because with something like Terra, the supposedly easiest starting asteroid, will have those as your water source,

why are you assuming they are the only water source on Terra? Like I said you can choose a seed with the geysers you want. Plus Terra usually has a lot of free water already on the map, even more considering the frozen biomes. It's definitely easy to dig one and find ways to melt ice (or melt it in place). A newbie has other challenges to beat before getting to the phase "I've used all free water, sieved all the free polluted water, melted all ice, and p ice, sieved that too, I'm out of water, I was so unlucky that my map has no cool slash geyser, no polluted water geyser, no water geyser, no salt water geyser, how do I tame a CSV?".

BTW, toolsnotincluded lists only 2 seeds that force the player into taming a CSV for water: SNDST-A-246119667-0 and SNDST-A-1896307562-0.

All the others have at least one water geyser of any kind.

 

Quote

@TheMule you keep talking as if none of what I say has merit, yet this **** keeps happening to people and you know it, but you don't care because it doesn't bother you, you are perfectly content with the countless examples of awful difficulty presented in the game and are so adamant on keeping it that way.

The amount of time I spend here and on reddit helping other people speaks volumes about what I care about. Nowadays I spend 3/4 of the time I dedicate to ONI helping other people out on various platforms, and only 1/4 playing the game myself.

Personal attacks and insults don't help your cause at all, BTW...

Quote

And it is Klei's fault for being incompetent with game design ending up with players being confused about what to do and how, because if they were competent in design, we wouldn't have this mess constantly come up again. I mean they haven't even made POI deconstructable, what is wrong with these people?!

... neither does insulting Klei. If you don't understand the game, maybe ONI isn't for you. Maybe a different game is the solution for you, I don't know. What I do know is that insulting people on a public forums is not likely to solve your problem.

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, TheMule said:

... neither does insulting Klei. If you don't understand the game, maybe ONI isn't for you. Maybe a different game is the solution for you, I don't know. What I do know is that insulting people on a public forums is not likely to solve your problem.

I guess some people can only accept their own way as "correct". At the same time these people seem to be under the misapprehension they have absolute truth.  I should probably write some standard text to post whenever some person that does not understand that ONI is an engineering simulation but _not_ a Physics simulation starts to criticize the lack of realistic physics. Again. And again without merit. 

The nice thing here is that the amount of actual skill, education and insight here is a lot better than in any other place on the net I know and that these people get opposed with sound arguments. Even if they can usually not deal with that and just insist on being right, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Really a pity, because that would be an opportunity to lean. I guess these people value being "right" much more than extending their limited insights.

[Yunru]

46 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

ONI is an engineering simulation but _not_ a Physics simulation starts to criticize the lack of realistic physics.

I disagree! 

Engineering is just applied physics, and physics is just codified observations. 

A game like ONI is actually possesses a fully known and complete field of physics, being all made of code. 

 

But some people can't handle that physics is a study, not an absolute law, and thus complain that what's observed in game isn't what's observed in reality (or even more annoyingly, complain it isn't quite what's observed in reality). 

 

The Cool Steam Vent could run hotter though, and/or the Steam Turbine slightly colder.