Advanced Filters

[Eiscream]

It would really be nice to have some 2nd tier gas/liquid filters. They should have the ability to to set a temperature up to or over which the selected gas/liquid will only be filtered out.

This would make it much more manageable to cool the base to a desired temperature, by only letting gas in, which is cooled down to the wanted temperature. The rest could then be fed back into the thermal regulators to be cooled down more. At the moment it is an absolute pain, to get stable a temperature.

[DuraLex]

This should be coded like right now, I love this.

[chromiumboy]

The only problem with this idea is that you could feedback gas as much as you like into just one thermal regulator; even to the point of freezing gases to solids. This seems unlikely to happen. I'd be pretty happy with a temperature setting for the thermal regulator (with a slider, similar to how valves work currently) to cool gases by though. e.g. cool gases by  somewhere between 4 and 20°C.

[Masterpintsman]

Maybe that could be a separate filter type building that only selects by temperature instead of gas/liquid type, one output gives the warmer and the other the colder material.

This would allow for all scenarios: chaining two of them to create a contraption that gives one output within a selectable temperature window and another two (overheated and chilled) that allow purposeful treatment (cooling/heating) to get the material into the desired target window - and using a single one for where it dosn't matter (just heat/cool to a point where a bit more isn't harmful).

3 minutes ago, chromiumboy said:

The only problem with this idea is that you could feedback gas as much as you like into just one thermal regulator; even to the point of freezing gases to solids.

It would make several passes through the regulator to reach target temperature, but overall throughput (when viewed from the intake side) would go down.

Where would be the problem with this?

[chromiumboy]

14 minutes ago, Masterpintsman said:

It would make several passes through the regulator to reach target temperature, but overall throughput (when viewed from the intake side) would go down.

Where would be the problem with this?

The problem is the power consumption: one thermal regulator doesn't require much power to run in the grand scheme of things, but cooling with only one is very inefficient with the current tools we have. If you want to cool gases down more efficiently, you can run more regulators along the pipe line but you pay the cost in increased power. Running a single thermal regulator with this advanced filter and a feedback loop completely steps around Klei's ability to balance cooling via power consumption. Gas currently passes through filters pretty fast, so they could slow gas filtering dramatically to provide a balance, but I don't think that's a particularly good solution

[Masterpintsman]

I don't understand your issue with balancing.

A thermal regulator cools a gas packet by 10 (°C/K) for a certain price in energy.

Cooling a certain amount of matter (in gas state) with them will cost the same amount of energy (for the actual cooling), whatever approach you take - have a chain of them and let the gas pass once -or- have it cycle in a loop with a thermal gas filter till you reach target temperature - it dosn't matter when it comes to the actual cost of cooling.

They differ in throughput though, chaining several thermo regulators will get the job done quicker while the repeated cycling with a filter version will be slower to process the same volume. The thermal filter version would have the upside of not having to be micro-managed on changes to the input temperature, which will be offset by the extra power cost for the thermal filter. Chaining enough regulators do do it one-pass would need to be constantly managed, as the output temperature is a direct function of the input temperature a change in that might give unwanted results (like making ice).

But if I would want to do micro-managing in the first place I would get the board game version where one has to move every gas packet by hand every tick...

[Eiscream]

10 hours ago, chromiumboy said:

The problem is the power consumption: one thermal regulator doesn't require much power to run in the grand scheme of things, but cooling with only one is very inefficient with the current tools we have. If you want to cool gases down more efficiently, you can run more regulators along the pipe line but you pay the cost in increased power. Running a single thermal regulator with this advanced filter and a feedback loop completely steps around Klei's ability to balance cooling via power consumption. Gas currently passes through filters pretty fast, so they could slow gas filtering dramatically to provide a balance, but I don't think that's a particularly good solution

Theoretically you are right, but the thermal regulator only uses energy WHILE cooling down gas, when it is idle it does not consume any power at all. When you link multiple thermal regulator, most will not be likely active at the same time, where as when you feed back everything that is to warm, it will have to do more work and therefor will be active a lot more. Plus it will drastically limit the throughput, because the thermal regulator has to reprocess every gas that is to hot on its own (taking away throughput from your input)

But I also would be totally fine, if the power consumption is raised to maybe the double or triple amount of what it is currently, just to balance it a bit more. Also I think it would be a good idea if the filter also uses significantly more power than the ones we have now.

10 hours ago, Masterpintsman said:

Maybe that could be a separate filter type building that only selects by temperature instead of gas/liquid type, one output gives the warmer and the other the colder material.

This actually sounds better than my initial idea.