It is time to nerf BBQ

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

6 hours ago, blakemw said:

Not only is the Valve thing a pain, it's a debunked myth, though I can't find the debunking post anymore (basically someone did a very exacting test of different setups and measured how much growth took place before the plant stifled from overheating). But Valving absolutely does not work, it doesn't achieve anything, plants need to have irrigation water in the tile in order to not stifle, so you can't even maintain zero liquid in the tile, heat transfer is independent of mass and depends on the relative temperatures and conductivity only, so the small amount of water in the tile still absorbs just as much heat per tick, changing temperature much more dramatically. Anyway, both testing and theory show that it doesn't work.

Funnily enough it doesn't matter, elements never change phase inside any building, if the water drops to -5 C that's completely fine.

This principle is why a Metal Refinery can contain overheated liquid, that only flashes into gas when it exits the building and enters the pipe system. It's also why natural tiles can be made by putting Molten Glass into Hydroponics Tiles, the cold Molten Glass will immediately change phase when it leaves the hydroponics tile due to deconstruction or emptying.

So basically all you have to do is ensure the liquid doesn't change phase in the pipes, and simple insulated pipes are adequate for that.

 

At the end of the day a good Sleet Wheat setup relies on some unintuitive game mechanics, but once those mechanics are understood or if a working build is blindly copied it's really very easy.

I would say a valve has its benefits, especially if you are pumping and transporting water over vast distances. If you do not valve the water in the pipe, it will back up with a lot if it sitting idle in for instance cold biomes. It messes up the heat control.

For instance I have a pincha peppernut in the center, and my powerplant in the oil biome. I pump the pwater produced by the gas and petroleum generators back over a large distance (I have my game modded with a colony 4 times the normal size!). that water starts around 45-50 degrees celcius. Perfectly in range of the plant.

Now the water pipe crosses 2 cold biomes. The pipes are insulated, but still over time water not moving gets cooled down and will ensure the plant will stiffle as there are no hotzones hot enough for the water to heat back up efficiently.

However, i introduced a valve in the system, limiting the water flow to the exact number that is needed to feed all my plants. And this works. Water is not sitting in cold biomes and just moves through in a consistent flow, meaning the cold biomes cannot pull out heat in time. You do need a little bit of backing up in the pipe where it crosses the tiles. Just a smidge for the stifflng of the plant not going innto hysteresis.

[psusi]

9 hours ago, blakemw said:

Not only is the Valve thing a pain, it's a debunked myth, though I can't find the debunking post anymore (basically someone did a very exacting test of different setups and measured how much growth took place before the plant stifled from overheating). But Valving absolutely does not work, it doesn't achieve anything, plants need to have irrigation water in the tile in order to not stifle, so you can't even maintain zero liquid in the tile, heat transfer is independent of mass and depends on the relative temperatures and conductivity only, so the small amount of water in the tile still absorbs just as much heat per tick, changing temperature much more dramatically. Anyway, both testing and theory show that it doesn't work.

Oh, good to know.  That's what has always kept me from trying to grow them.

9 hours ago, blakemw said:

Funnily enough it doesn't matter, elements never change phase inside any building, if the water drops to -5 C that's completely fine.

This principle is why a Metal Refinery can contain overheated liquid, that only flashes into gas when it exits the building and enters the pipe system. It's also why natural tiles can be made by putting Molten Glass into Hydroponics Tiles, the cold Molten Glass will immediately change phase when it leaves the hydroponics tile due to deconstruction or emptying.

So basically all you have to do is ensure the liquid doesn't change phase in the pipes, and simple insulated pipes are adequate for that.

I thought that's how other buildings worked, but then I figured farm or hydroponic tiles must be different or they wouldn't say you need to use valves to keep the water from sitting in them and freezing.

[blakemw]

14 hours ago, psusi said:

Oh, good to know.  That's what has always kept me from trying to grow them.

I thought that's how other buildings worked, but then I figured farm or hydroponic tiles must be different or they wouldn't say you need to use valves to keep the water from sitting in them and freezing.

That wasn't really part of the "Valving" theorycrafting, the concept was that by the plant immediately consuming the water the water wouldn't exchange temperature and you wouldn't have to pay to cool the water down, this being particularly applicable when like using 95 C water to feed Sleet Wheat. In reality regardless of how you do it, feeding hot water to the plant results in the plant deleting only about 20% of the heat relative to cooling the water all the way down to the plant temperature, so you have to pay most of the cooling bill but not all of it. Also incidentally, if you feed 95 C water to Sleet Wheat, the water gets consumed at like 20 C, well above freezing, so the "no phase change in buildings" exploit usually doesn't even come into it, if you aren't cooling your Sleet Wheat much below 0 C then even relatively cold irrigation water probably gets consumed at above freezing point.

But anyway it's not a big deal to pay the cooling bill since even feeding 95 C water, a single Aquatuner can cool like 60 Sleet Wheat.

17 hours ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

I would say a valve has its benefits, especially if you are pumping and transporting water over vast distances. If you do not valve the water in the pipe, it will back up with a lot if it sitting idle in for instance cold biomes. It messes up the heat control.

 

Well, the Valving concept was quite particular, to feeding each plant with its own individual Valve, it's not a criticism of valving in general.

However when liquid is continuously flowing through a pipe there is no difference at all in heat exchange between continuous flow Valving and letting the pipe back up, that's because heat transfer is mostly independent of mass, if the package size is 1/10th as large, it still exchanges just as much heat and changes temperature by 10x more.

What you actually want to do to minimize heat exchange is to pulse packages, like if you only need a flow rate of 500 g/s you'd set a Timer Sensor linked to a Liquid Shutoff to emit a package once every 20 seconds, that would reduce heat exchange between the liquid and pipes by 95%.

Also with non-backed up pipes, if bridges are chained heat transfer can be reduced by up to 2/3rds, as first the bridge skips every second tile, and then the packages also skip over the bridge inlet tiles, so compared with a normal pipe the packages only exchange 1/3rd as much heat, If the pipe backs up instead of being free-flowing that increases to 2/3rds as packages will dwell in the inlet tiles.

Now is this worthwhile? I generally think not, I've measured an Igneous Rock Insulated Pipe to leak about 250 DTU/s, if the water inside is 95 C and the environment outside is 0 C, so like 100 insulated pipes would be like 4% of an Aquatuner's worth of cooling. And if I really care about minimizing heat exchange, I embed pipes in insulated tiles, a basic pipe inside an insulated tile cuts heat exchange to about 10% of that of an insulated pipe, and an insulated pipe inside an insulated tile cuts it to like 1%, outside very particular builds I prefer to just let pipes back up.

[wachunga]

I would add that in the case of transferring hot liquids through colder areas, insulated sedimentary or obsidian is superior to igneous. Not by much and the heat leaked by insulated igneous is already not very much. But hey, if you have sufficient sedimentary or obsidian, you might as well use those since they are better. The reason being igneous has 5x the heat capacity which, in this specific case, drives 5x the heat from the pipe to the surroundings. The piped liquid to pipe transfer isn't directly affected by igneous vs obsidian. But the equilibrium temp of the pipe will be lower with igneous which in turn drives the liquid and pipe transfer to be a bit more.

And backing up what @blakemwsaid,

Left to right is:

1) 10kg packets flowing in a full pipe once every ten seconds.

2) 10kg packets flowing in an empty pipe once every ten seconds.

3) 1kg packets flowing in a full pipe every second.

4) 1kg packets flowing in a mostly empty pipe every second.

1, 2, and 4 all lose the same amount of heat which is 10x what 3 loses.

 

I've tried the hydroponic thing on multiple occasions and it never worked. Outside of bugs or very specific edge cases it is an urban legend IMO.

[blakemw]

8 hours ago, wachunga said:

I would add that in the case of transferring hot liquids through colder areas, insulated sedimentary or obsidian is superior to igneous. Not by much and the heat leaked by insulated igneous is already not very much. But hey, if you have sufficient sedimentary or obsidian, you might as well use those since they are better. The reason being igneous has 5x the heat capacity which, in this specific case, drives 5x the heat from the pipe to the surroundings. The piped liquid to pipe transfer isn't directly affected by igneous vs obsidian. But the equilibrium temp of the pipe will be lower with igneous which in turn drives the liquid and pipe transfer to be a bit more.

I was curious so had to test this.

I made a setup where 100 C water is pumped through 3 pipes in 0 C oxygen at 1.8 C/tile, with the oxygen gas kept cold by a big old block of -1 C aluminium, after running for a long time:

• The obsidian pipes stabilized at 20.9 C, and the outlet temperature was 373.1327 K, a heat loss of 253.526 DTU/s per pipe
• The igneous pipes stabilized at 5.0 C, and the outlet temperature was 373.1292 K, a heat loss of 302 DTU/s per pipe
• The granite pipes stabilized at 6.6 C, and the outlet temperature was 373.1152 K, a heat loss of 497 DTU/s per pipe

So you are right that in this setup the igneous rock pipe actually lost 19% more heat than the obsidian pipe. Though the disparity being not nearly as large as with the granite pipe which lost 96% more heat, so TC matters a lot, but SHC still matters a little.

This seem to happen because the TC of Oxygen/CO2 is so low and very much limits heat exchange between the pipe and tile. When contained by something with much higher TC (hydrogen gas, water, crude oil, rock tiles etc) the insulated pipe practically reaches the same temperature as the tile (within a few tenth's of a degree anyway) so there should be no meaningful difference. And if the pipe is embedded in insulated tile I guess the lower SHC insulated pipe would be better, but heat transfer with insulated pipe in insulated tile is already glacially slow regardless.

[Henlikuoth]

This discussion is going off rail... 

[Pedro_L]

On 8/15/2023 at 4:29 AM, blakemw said:

Sleet Wheat is extremely trivial to grow on some maps.

Like if there's a Cool Slush/Brine Geyser, I always use this general pattern:

First the -10 C pwater runs through Radiant Pipes past the Sleet Wheat, which is grown in a shallow CO2 pit to keep the coldness in, then the pwater goes into a Liquid Tepidizer anti pipe busting heater (it can also be heated in other ways if there are enough heat sources) and a Water Sieve, the cool water (probably like 8 C) is then fed to the Sleet Wheat using Insulated Pipes and also used for other purposes. Bristle Blossom with it's min temperature of 5 C, is also easily fed the ~8 C water, in fact the fact that Sleet Wheat and Bristle Blossom have a 0 degree width of overlap in their temperature range (Sleet Wheat stifling at above 5 C, Bristle Blossom stifling at below 5 C) makes them quite easy to grow in close proximity with only a small amount of tuning of the heat flow, only the least amount of effort needs to be put into thermal isolation of the Sleet Wheat.

If you can be bothered with "taming" a Cool Slush geyser at all, then sleet wheat is close to no effort.

If you have the competence to put together a Aquatuner and Steam Turbine then it's also absolutely trivial to grow Sleet Wheat by using the similar pattern but running the Aquatuned pwater cooling loop (Liquid Pipe Thermo Sensor'd at -5 C) behind the Sleet Wheat, the Sleet Wheat should get "first dibs" on the coolant out of the aquatuner, but the coolant can go on to cool other things, Valves can be useful to ensure not too much cooling is performed on other things. This pattern also permits feeding the Sleet Wheat and Bristle Blossom with 95 C water, though you may need to dribble some crude oil or brine on the sleet wheat to increase heat exchange with the radiant pipes.

I'm sure some players would say "that's way more complicated than a Hatch ranch", but there's also a lot of moving parts to a Hatch Ranch and it breaks easily if things are not configured correctly, and I expect many players are copying FJ's Ranch. As long as the "Cool the plants not the irrigation water" mantra is followed, Sleet Wheat is really easy. On the other hand cooling the water is an absurdly hard approach.

you don't really need to cool down all the sleet wheat tho, only a few co2 and it will work

[wachunga]

8 hours ago, blakemw said:

This seem to happen because the TC of Oxygen/CO2 is so low and very much limits heat exchange between the pipe and tile.

Yup! The overall system is comprised of two transfers, each which follows a different ruleset. Sometimes one transfer outruns the other so much that it might as well not exist, the other dominates and determines the rate. When the pipe to surroundings is sufficiently fast, it becomes meaningless and you just have the liquid to pipe transfer where SHC plays no role. Conversely, when pipe to surroundings is sufficiently slow, the reverse is true and the 5x difference in SHC now matters. As you have said, in the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal. But I find it interesting to think and talk about.