More Hot Stuff

[alficles]

We need some solutions for heating things and dealing with hot things.

First, oil is very often found between 125 and 200ºC. This leaves us mostly creating a gold pump and just repairing it. That feels unsatisfying. I suggest we have a high-temp material for handling this. Tungsten might be a good choice here. That also gates high-temp things behind refining. We need high-temp gas pumps, too.

Second, there's an advanced mechanism for producing petroleum and NG by directly heating oil. This is difficult, as it ought to be. There are two issues: heating the oil and cooling the result. The second is reasonably doable with current mechanics, but the first relies mostly on either a bug with the tepidizer (which should be fixed) or magma. Magma is actually a great solution here, but there are two major issues. First, it is found too cool. The magma you can get to is just a few degrees above freezing, so as soon as you start extracting heat, it turns right to rock. Second, most of the magma is locked inaccessible within neutronium. Consider making more magma accessible, and hotter magma. In the long term, we should also get a magma geyser or two ("core fissure"?) that produce ~2500ºC rock gas and ~2000ºC magma (similar to the steam geyser). This should be generated in abyssalite, to avoid melting everything. A player is advised to have fully functional anti-entropy systems running or be ready for a really, really hot base before opening one of these, of course.

Third, there is no mechanism for turning heat into electricity. (Heating oil only half-counts.) A turbine could take steam in the gas pipe and turn it to power and 99ºC water on the liquid pipe. There are other mechanisms as well. This would also create a "heat sink", but electricity should turn back into heat when it's used. Excess power should heat the generator, to avoid losing heat that way.