Potential improvements on oil boiler design?

[Lifegrow]

1 hour ago, BlueLance said:

Hmmm if i can load the save when I am home I will have a wee peek, im curious to see other peoples bases cuz all I see is mine, which is cookie cut and @Lifegrows which is always fun to watch. 

"fun to watch" as in entertaining, or "fun to watch" as in "what is this clown doing?"

 

[BlueLance]

8 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

"fun to watch" as in entertaining, or "fun to watch" as in "what is this clown doing?"

 

Why not both! But why not also fun because its a puzzle, guesswork, mystery, as to what the heck your gonna do next!

[JonnyMonroe]

5 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

But as you say in your post - you don't always have a volcano, so magma efficiency is arguably the only real variable that matters.

Pointless having a 10kg/s throughput if you piss through all your magma in 100 cycles  

 

You can breed magma to get way more heat out of a system than the base amount. I have a nice design for this that currently triples the magma output of a minor volcano. I can push that much higher but pre-heating actually breaks the whole system if you take it over about 96% efficiency.

[Carnis]

Don't tell, show?

[AzeTheGreat]

16 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

You can breed magma to get way more heat out of a system than the base amount. I have a nice design for this that currently triples the magma output of a minor volcano. I can push that much higher but pre-heating actually breaks the whole system if you take it over about 96% efficiency.

I'm guessing this is an exploit?  I'm not sure how you're increasing the magma output by "breeding"...

[Lifegrow]

15 minutes ago, AzeTheGreat said:

I'm guessing this is an exploit?  I'm not sure how you're increasing the magma output by "breeding"...

He may mean melting igneous rock with magma, but I really hope not  

[AzeTheGreat]

1 minute ago, Lifegrow said:

He may mean melting igneous rock with magma, but I really hope not  

But that wouldn't actually add heat to the system, so I can't see any advantage.  You'd just be more likely to get blocks solidifying instead of items.

[Cilya]

Feed the volcano with cheese !

I'm in a similar situation where I have problem finding water sources but no problem with heat or energy. I have two steam geyser and and poisonous Infectious Polluted Oxygen Vent but three Volcanoes. I only have 39 dupes, but I may run out of water between cycles 700 or 800. I can abuse the morb thing, but I'm really interested in the NG solution.

[Lifegrow]

Just now, AzeTheGreat said:

But that wouldn't actually add heat to the system, so I can't see any advantage.  You'd just be more likely to get blocks solidifying instead of items.

That was my point  

Just now, Cilya said:

I only have 39 dupes

This isn't starcraft, you can't just build additional pylons - you need to live within your means if you've depleted everything  

[Cilya]

Hey ! When I last played, last year, it was easy to sustain a colony of 96 duplicants. Now, I didn't know I wouldn't find any water geyser.

[0xFADE]

Space rocks are an unlimited supply of hot enough for boiling polluted water and not hot enough to do anything else of value. Using magma for water stuff is a waste. 

[Zarquan]

9 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

Space rocks are an unlimited supply of hot enough for boiling polluted water and not hot enough to do anything else of value. Using magma for water stuff is a waste. 

But this isn't a water cleaning setup.  Water cleaning is just a biproduct.  The main purpose is to boil crude oil to natural gas.  That creates water through natural gas generators.  It like being able to build your own geyser.  Plus limitless cosmic power!

[0xFADE]

Oh yes. It is still great for making polluted water out of oil.  I’d still never use that heat to change the polluted water to clean.

[AzeTheGreat]

So I'm working on version 2, and everything seems to be going well, except I seem to be creating gold items...

[JonnyMonroe]

21 hours ago, AzeTheGreat said:

But that wouldn't actually add heat to the system, so I can't see any advantage.  You'd just be more likely to get blocks solidifying instead of items.

You melt regolith with magma. Magma has a heat capacity of 1, regolith 0.2. Regolith turns into magma when it melts. Therefor melting regolith into magma massively increases the available thermal energy.

Edit: link where I was discussing this a few days back;

 

[BlueLance]

3 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

You melt regolith with magma. Magma has a heat capacity of 1, regolith 0.2. Regolith turns into magma when it melts. Therefor melting regolith into magma massively increases the available thermal energy.

But you are still spending energy heating up the regolith to make it melt, and the temperature of it will be a lot lower than the magma that melted it. Sure the Mass of magma would increase, but wouldnt you still lose 1/5th of the energy coverting a 1:1 mass of regolith? I am not saying you are wrong, I don't really understand the numbers.

[JonnyMonroe]

Just now, BlueLance said:

But you are still spending energy heating up the regolith to make it melt, and the temperature of it will be a lot lower than the magma that melted it. Sure the Mass of magma would increase, but wouldnt you still lose 1/5th of the energy coverting a 1:1 mass of regolith? I am not saying you are wrong, I don't really understand the numbers.

For every 1 degree you cool the magma by, you raise the same mass of regolith by 5 degrees. Since looped belts passively maintain temperature equilibrium what actually happens is for every 1g of magma you drop by 1degree you raise 5g of regolith by 1degree. When regolith melts into magma it effectively gains 5x the thermal energy. If you use the hot igneous rock you take out to pre heat the regolith you put in you end up getting absurd thermal energies back out. Its possible to preheat the incoming regolith to nearly it's melting temperature but at that point the system breaks as the magma stops cooling enough to turn to igneous rock (as the game overlaps melting/freezing temps). I could solve It by adding some other form of cooling but I just don't need that much heat.

[Lifegrow]

1 hour ago, JonnyMonroe said:

You melt regolith with magma. Magma has a heat capacity of 1, regolith 0.2. Regolith turns into magma when it melts. Therefor melting regolith into magma massively increases the available thermal energy.

Aye, I saw this but didn't realise just how much additional heat you could get out of it - sounds a little...wonky to me  

[JonnyMonroe]

39 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

Aye, I saw this but didn't realise just how much additional heat you could get out of it - sounds a little...wonky to me  

Absolutely. I don't want to start that whole 'what is an exploit' debate again but it certainly feels exploitative.

Still it was fun to build a machine that takes advantage of it, and at the end of the day that's what I play for.

 

If you combine a magma breeding design like the one I linked above with your or the OPs oil cooker you can probably end up with something that cooks enough natural gas to run an entire map full of gas gens.

[Lifegrow]

26 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

Absolutely. I don't want to start that whole 'what is an exploit' debate again but it certainly feels exploitative.

Still it was fun to build a machine that takes advantage of it, and at the end of the day that's what I play for.

 

If you combine a magma breeding design like the one I linked above with your or the OPs oil cooker you can probably end up with something that cooks enough natural gas to run an entire map full of gas gens.

I think you may be right - i just did my own little test on it, and although the magma does lose a fair bit of heat, the additional material/energy you generate is crazy...

 

[JonnyMonroe]

22 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

I think you may be right - i just did my own little test on it, and although the magma does lose a fair bit of heat, the additional material/energy you generate is crazy...

 

With only minimal heat recapture on the regolith I was comfortably cooking 600+grams/s oil, running 2 steam turbines with near 100% uptime and feeding the igneous rock to 32 stone hatches whilst it was still over 600degrees. All off 2 minor volcanos.

Like I said above, if you recapture too efficiently it breaks as the regolith needs to solidify the magma in my build and it was coming in within 1 degree of melting temp which was too hot to solidify it. Due to the large thermal energy difference between igneous rock and regolith you only need a bit of recapture to get the regolith over 1400c.

If however you're dripping the magma into an oil source to cook it this won't cause as much of an issue. Just use a weight plate and a copper or gold state sensor, drop magma when the sensor is solid (below 1050c), scoop when the mass is too high. The result should be a fairly stable output temp/rate of igneous rock you can preheat regolith on and a solid amount of heat for your oil cooker, and enough hot output mass to run a couple of steam turbines and feed your goombas. You might need a hydro sensor as well to make sure the magma doesn't get above 1800kg where you drop it, as doing so could cause it to form solid tiles. I dunno. This is all in my head right now. It'll make more sense if I try and build around it.

[Lifegrow]

3 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

Like I said above, if you recapture too efficiently it breaks as the regolith needs to solidify the magma in my build and it was coming in within 1 degree of melting temp which was too hot to solidify it. Due to the large thermal energy difference between igneous rock and regolith you only need a bit of recapture to get the regolith over 1400c.

 

it seems pretty easy and efficient to reduce the flow of magma below the 1470kg cutoff - here i used a hydro sensor and a door to ensure it stays low.

I'm just burning regolith into igneous and plan to tinker with a boiler build though.

[JonnyMonroe]

26 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

it seems pretty easy and efficient to reduce the flow of magma below the 1470kg cutoff - here i used a hydro sensor and a door to ensure it stays low.

I'm just burning regolith into igneous and plan to tinker with a boiler build though.

In my initial build I just made the basin wide enough that it wouldn't reach 1800kg, Using a door regulator allows a more compact build, which makes sense.

Looking forward to see how far you can push a boiler with this.

[Zarquan]

One thing I'm curious about is what if you are extremely unlucky and don't get a volcano, or get an extremely bad one.  Can you build something like this with the glass forge as your heat source instead of magma?  Or use the glass forge to supplement your magma boiler?  It comes out hot enough, but it has a bad heat capacity, so it can't boil very much per use of the glass forge.  I would try to build it myself, but I tragically don't have time to play ONI this week.

[JonnyMonroe]

1 minute ago, Zarquan said:

One thing I'm curious about is what if you are extremely unlucky and don't get a volcano, or get an extremely bad one.  Can you build something like this with the glass forge as your heat source instead of magma?  Or use the glass forge to supplement your magma boiler?  It comes out hot enough, but it has a bad heat capacity, so it can't boil very much per use of the glass forge.  I would try to build it myself, but I tragically don't have time to play ONI this week.

In theory you could but glass forges give a very, very low amount of thermal energy. You could potentially pump the output of a glass forge to a smelter and loop it on itself and effectively use the smelter as your heat source. If you have enough ranching to keep it going then steel is technically in infinite recipe on a smelter.