The thermal properties of natural backwall

[blakemw]

I had to know this out of nerdy interest, so I did some testing.

TL;DR: Natural backwalls are cells (natural tiles) for heat transfer purposes, exchanges heat only with the overlapping cell, and does not participate in flaking/partial evaporation.

Normal heat transfer

Natural backwalls use the same heat transfer calculations as for solid cells. The change in temperature per tick is exactly the same for natural cell and natural backwall of the same mass.

This includes factors like the 25x multiplier for gas:solid tile heat transfer. The calculations and factors seem to be identical as for cell:cell heat transfer.

Unlike background buildings (and all other buildings which aren't tiles) natural backwall does not have its thermal mass divided by 5, this makes natural backwall excellent thermal mass, much better than tempshift plates that effectively only have 160 kg of mass due to this division.

Natural backwall does not exchange heat with adjacent natural backwall, it only exchanges heat with the overlapping cell.

Natural backwall does not exchange heat with buildings, adjacent tempshift plates, not even with conduction panels.

Special cases

Natural backwall does not appear to have any flaking/partial evaporation mechanics.

If a natural backwall melts into another solid (e.g. algae->dirt, dirt->sand), then it melts into natural backwall of that type. Otherwise of course, it melts into foreground liquid.

Edited July 1 by blakemw

[BLACKBERREST3]

I should probably stop digging out my backwall then.

[Gurgel]

Very nice. Now we only need somebody to create one by accident, notice and analyze what did it.