Why does rocket dry exhaust exist?

[Shinkarr]

Recently my rocket platform automation melted again and I wonder why dry exhaust even exists.

It's unintuitive hidden mechanic that just checks that player reads wiki or other source of information. Wet exhaust is visible and obeys game physics simulation. Why should player expect to have his automation get hotter than rocket "wet" exhaust?

What game design considerations behind it? What exploits are being prevented by the existence of dry exhaust?

I'm pretty sure game would be better without it.

[ghkbrew]

Counterpoint: Dry exhaust is one of those quirky mechanics that make ONI great.  Part of the genius of this game is the emergent complexity of all the little game mechanics that kind of, but don't really make sense (e.g. bead pumps, 10% pipe capacity, stacked liquid locks, etc.). They provide a much higher ceiling for mastery (and the accompanying sense of accomplishment) than the game would have otherwise.

Dry exhaust, specifically, allows you to create some of the highest temperatures possible in the game and that has all sorts of fun applications.

[Shinkarr]

Hm... Well, use case is interesting.

I feel like some animation or visual effect is missing on rocket launch. The indication that some physics warping happening on that tiles. Otherwise it's very hard to understand what's even happened with automation.

[gigamoi]

Although I've know about it for a long time, I too find this mechanic counter-intuitive. I just stands there running contrary to otherwise established game mechanics and I've seen many new player who didn't know about it being a single launch away from learning about it the hard way. That being said, now that it's here, removing it would break existing build. There should at least be some visuals for it such as a large hot glowing plume under the engine IMO. (It would make a tiny bit more sense to think of it as the single case of radiative heat transfer in the game (even though infrared don't cross most physical barriers any better than hot gas IRL either) but I don't know how to make that visible in an understandable way.)