Are Glossy Drekkos more space efficient power generators than slicksters?

[Zarquan]

I was doing the math and I noticed that glossy drekkos produce 50 kg of plastic every cycle.  If you melt that in to naphtha and boil the naphtha, then you get 50 kg natural gas per drekko per cycle at the cost of a small amount of dirt (for the mealwood).  Comparing that to slicksters, who only produce 10 kg crude oil per cycle, it seems that glossy drekkos are better for supplying natural gas boilers, even though the slicksters are essentially free,  than slicksters, since you can get 5 times the amount of natural gas per unit space.  That is certainly not negligible.  So we can either use CO2 to run carbon skimmers or vent it in to space and not worry about it.

I know that glossy drekkos actually produce slightly less than 50 kg/cycle because they only produce it in hydrogen, but it can be close.

The fact that slicksters cost no resources makes them useful when you have plenty of space, but if you can't afford the space, then the glossy drekkos may be a better alternative.  Or if you don't want to have to maintain a dupe accessible room that is above 75 C.

[Lilalaunekuh]

2 hours ago, Zarquan said:

The fact that slicksters cost no resources makes them useful when you have plenty of space, but if you can't afford the space, then the glossy drekkos may be a better alternative.  Or if you don't want to have to maintain a dupe accessible room that is above 75 C.

Keep in mind that slicksters can be farmed without dupe interaction and with a 99% deterministic production rate.

Glossy dreckos got a nice list of downsides attachet:

a) You need a duplicant to shear your glossy dreckos

b) You need to keep your population of glossy dreckos consistent (Much harder for dreckos than slicksters)

c) You need to manage the fluctuation of your production

d) If space is your concern even glum slicksters produce something so you can put 10+ inside on tile of space ...

[Carnis]

It takes 2.2 joules of heat per gram per Kelvin of heated naphta..

It only takes 1.69 joules to heat oil.

For same reason molten slicksters are omeletts.

[BlueLance]

I never actually thought about melting plastic and boiling the naptha... but with 10 Glossy Dreckos that is kind of dangerously broken! I mean I have been producing plastic since early in the game. The only downside is I dont fancy boiling at all XD

Any idea how much more or less conductive naptha is to heat? If it is easier to boil than oil/petroleum then thats good.

Also food for thought, would it be more beneficial if you converted your oil into plastic? For instance you get natural gas when converting it, which is enough to power itself and more. This nets you even a little bit extra Co2 and Polluted Water, Then in the polymer press this nets you more Co2 as well as steam. The Plastic also comes out just below melting point. meaning you dont have to spend as much energy melting it as you would if it was from a drecko.

[Lilalaunekuh]

6 hours ago, BlueLance said:

Any idea how much more or less conductive naptha is to heat? If it is easier to boil than oil/petroleum then thats good.

Naptha has a lower conductivity than oil or petroleum and a higher capacity than both

=> Naptha boiling requests the most effort

 

6 hours ago, BlueLance said:

would it be more beneficial if you converted your oil into plastic?

Each conversion step involving a refinement building results in ~50% mass loss . Even if you heat your oil into petroleum you can´t skip the polymer press.

=> The best case would be a 50% conversion from oil to plastic

(But we can convert oil/petroleum/naptha/plastic all at a 1:1 ratio into natural gas and natrual gas has still a higher energy potential than petroleum)

[JonnyMonroe]

I did a plastic melter back in ranching 2 preview for just this reason. Wasn't worth the ballache of ranching dreckos tbh. Slicksters are crap throughput but I use them any way to delete co2. Just use oil wells. They power themselves and cost less water than you get from the nat gas.

[Zarquan]

6 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

I did a plastic melter back in ranching 2 preview for just this reason. Wasn't worth the ballache of ranching dreckos tbh. Slicksters are crap throughput but I use them any way to delete co2. Just use oil wells. They power themselves and cost less water than you get from the nat gas.

My concern isn't power.  Once you have a nat gas boiler, you have as much power as you could ever need.  I'm in it for the polluted water that comes out of the nat gas generators.  One glossy drekko can produce enough water to provide for almost 2 bristle blossoms!

14 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

Naptha has a lower conductivity than oil or petroleum and a higher capacity than both

I didn't think about the effort of boiling.  It would take more out of your heat source to boil, which may make it not worthwhile if your colony is big enough that you don't have space for slicksters anymore.

12 hours ago, Carnis said:

For same reason molten slicksters are omeletts.

You mean since it is harder to boil petroleum than oil, you eat the molten slickster eggs I assume.

12 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

a) You need a duplicant to shear your glossy dreckos

b) You need to keep your population of glossy dreckos consistent (Much harder for dreckos than slicksters)

c) You need to manage the fluctuation of your production

d) If space is your concern even glum slicksters produce something so you can put 10+ inside on tile of space ...

a) I would argue that if your base is big enough that this level of space efficiency is required, you have more than enough dupes to do jobs.

b) That is true, I rarely see glossy drekko egg at that high of a priority (>80%).  However, you only need one egg per glossy drekko.  The whole ranching thing takes a lot of micromanagement anyway.

c) Not that much.  If you have 10 glossy drekkos, then your plastic intake can be fairly consistent.

d)  You can not overcrowd the drekkos at all, which is annoying.  However, you can expose your "stable" to space in a certain way such that the room remains pressurized but the room size is the size of space, meaning you can have an extremely crowded "stable."  But it would be better with slicksters because they won't be able to get out but still have the same.  I haven't tested this yet however.  I will release a build for this stable tonight if I remember.  You don't get the stable bonus. 

Does anyone know how high space is?

[Lilalaunekuh]

47 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

a) I would argue that if your base is big enough that this level of space efficiency is required, you have more than enough dupes to do jobs.

I want my systems to be 100% reliable in every scenario, so everything involving dupes seems bad.

(Sure you will have enough dupes and my base got always some idle ones to spare^^)

47 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

c) Not that much.  If you have 10 glossy drekkos, then your plastic intake can be fairly consistent.

It´s more the struggle of shearing and the travel time for my dupes / dreckos.

=> Harder to build a boiler for a fluctuating amount (slicksters are more deterministic)

 

47 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

d)  You can not overcrowd the drekkos at all, which is annoying.  However, you can expose your "stable" to space in a certain way such that the room remains pressurized but the room size is the size of space, meaning you can have an extremely crowded "stable."  But it would be better with slicksters because they won't be able to get out but still have the same.  I haven't tested this yet however.  I will release a build for this stable tonight if I remember.  You don't get the stable bonus. 

Does anyone know how high space is?

If a room reaches a specific size, critter will not count space anymore.

=> You don´t need the surface, just a big enough room and you can put in as many critter as you like.

(But to manage 100 slicksters I still need no dupes, but for 50 dreckos I need a lot of shearing stations and dupes ...)

 

 

 

PS: Boiling oil into petroleum or petroleum into natrual gas will create more thermal energy and will make a boiler use less of your "normal" heat source.

=> Your liquid will leave with 30% more thermal energy

(Melting plastic will just result in ~15% more energy and boiling naptha is energy neutral)

[Zarquan]

24 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

If a room reaches a specific size, critter will not count space anymore.

Are you sure?  Because I put over a thousand shinebugs in a very large room using debug and they all turned off because they were overcrowded.

[Yunru]

If it was small enough to count as a room, it wasn't large enough.

[Lilalaunekuh]

My room test chamber is something above 5000 tiles^^

[Zarquan]

1 hour ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

I want my systems to be 100% reliable in every scenario, so everything involving dupes seems bad.

You can dedicate dupes to those tasks by forcing them to stay in the area.  They become very reliable when you do this.  Most boilers are capable of turning off when things aren't happening as well.  Also, most of the boilers on the forum can take fairly dynamic amounts of materials so long as the material is coming in at a fairly reasonable rate over a long period of time.

22 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

My room test chamber is something above 5000 tiles^^

A room of size 5000 should be able to support 416 slicksters or drekkos.  Put a thousand in the room and see if they are overcrowded.  The way I see it, there is a large amount of area above where you can't build in space, so you don't need to have that large room in your colony.  I'll make a creature room that uses my line of thinking.

52 minutes ago, Yunru said:

If it was small enough to count as a room, it wasn't large enough.

It was far too big to be a room, I made sure of that.  It was quite large.  Unfortunately I didn't take a picture or save because my game was too laggy and I couldn't do anything for some reason...Probably the absurd number of shinebugs....