My precious steam engine rocket!

[WhiteWind36]

This is my first topic so don't judge me strong 

I want to start a discussion about steam engine rockets as a source of water and power. So a little bit of history...

When I started to play ONI and SO (about 2-3 month ago), I did noticed that steam engine is incredibly expensive thing to build - 2t of steel, isn't a cheap price for bulky slow engine when you can build cheap engine like carbon, sugar or even better engines with option to build them even from metal ore, no need of refined metal... So I thought who and why would somebody want to use steam engine. Until...

I started my third colony after November updates ( had 2 colonies running up till 1000 cycles, never built a steam engine before, nor did find space too interesting to go further than building carbon dioxide engine), and ran into world generation with no drecko, no oil, no gold and lot's of hot salty water. I've built my steam engine rockets kind of early-ish, because I was forced to go colonize new asteroids to acquire fiber, plastic and oil, and after first try I realized that carbon dioxide engine isn't enough to carry enough modules for comfortable colonization missions and it is very short ranged. And I was pleasantly surprised to find out that steam engine produce power of 600 W during flight. That was the first moment when I started to realise why steam engine are expensive and why it's more than worth of 2t of steel, even if it would be 5t of steel it still would be worth it.

Here is why - although at first 600 W doesn't sounds like much power, but until you start to count things... So steam engine use 15kg of steam per tile of flight, and has very slow speed, mine still have 3 tile height left and have 0,8 tile per cycle speed. Let's do some mathematics 0,8 tile/cycle is 1,25cycle/tile, means 15kg of steam runs engine for 750 seconds that gives us 450kJ of energy produced from 15 kg of steam, so it's 30kJ/kg of steam. In comparison steam turbine working on full potential will make 0,4kJ/kg of steam. Off course you will say - turbines doesn't consume water and steam engine does, but is it really like this? And btw steam engine does not have requirements for steam, as long as it is steam it is good, while turbine will not work with too cold steam and overheat with too hot.

I saw earlier people where making water with steam engine rockets just launching and landing, and I did heard that now it is nerfed because before it did not counted fuel consumption for launch/land tile. And yes it is so, launching and landing consumes 30 kg of steam... But if you build at least 4 rows of drywalls to keep at least small part of the steam from venturing into space and make it condense on the surface it seams that you could end up multiplying water. Also I am loading steam of 105 C° in to rocket, and getting 150C° and more when rocket is launching/landing. It's quite unclear exact numbers without experimenting with debug mode or sandbox which I don't use, except for checking some problemtic builds before implementing them in survival. But as far as my observation sees you will end up with additional water and additional heat if you don't let it escape to space, even flying more distance will not consume so much water how much of it you can collect when launching/landing and by doing that you also will produce power, which you will not producing when just launching/landing. Those 450kJ per tile of space travel is a lot and it is impossible to use/store all of it. Because you must travel at least 2 tiles and then go back 2 tiles to get rocket going not just launching/landing and multiplying water. It makes 4 tiles of travel so potentially 1800kJ of energy, on steam rocket you can put 7 batteries that makes 700kJ. All this can be optimised if you have two asteroids close by that makes travel 3 tiles and could provide 1350kJ of energy when landing on both sides, if you would find a way to store those 1350-700=650kJ of energy. And yes the downside is that it takes 3.75 cycles to fly 3 tiles... So you need to be able to long store excess power or run several rockets to have more steady flow of power.

Okay, that's about it... My thoughts. Anyone has any thoughts about that? Anyone already using this? Maybe there is a flaw in my calculations, because it is looking just magically too much power per kg of steam compared to steam turbines.

[NewWorldDan]

If you build a sufficiently tall chimney for the steam rocket, it still produces far more water than it consumes going to orbit and back.  It dumps a large cloud of steam (and a plume of heat) when it starts to take off, and leaves a small trail of steam all the way up.  So you just need a few steam turbines near the top to collect the water before it escapes to space.  You can use its own steam to refuel it every time it lands.  If you can build a chimney all the way down to the bottom neutronium, even on a small asteroid that's a lot of water.  If your goal is insane amounts of power, switch to hydrogen rockets.