How to fix steam turbine

[Eugeni]

I think only reason steam turbine was added is because people constantly begged for it.  
First, it wasn't thematically related to Occupational Upgrade.  
Second its mechanics was "raw", weird and bugy, and was almost instantly reworked, rendering mechanism unrewarded and practically unusable.
 
Personally, i see "fixed" version something like this:

• Steam turbine have gas input, can buffer some amount of gas and works only with steam t>110C.
• When buffer is full enough Steam turbine starts to "spinning up", it consumes large quantities of hot steam (>500g) from buffer and emits it as "cold" steam from above. After some time it "spins" to max and begin produce energy.
• When inner amount of steam is low Turbine drops to "spinning up" and stop producing energy.

[D.L.S.]

4 hours ago, Yunru said:

No, they don't (with maybe the exception of coal), the require manual setup. Once it's done, the dupe is free to do other things. The manual generator requires constant dupe time as long as it's running.

Manual setup or initial setup could eat worker time of 1 dupe for 30-50 cycles, building time, gathering materials, research generator itself, dig tunnel to natural gas vent, building pump/piping network, wiring it all, dealing with waste co2, pollute water(it need to be drained somewhere), waste heat, setup this all will require a lot of cycles if building by 1 dupe.

 

3 hours ago, Eugeni said:

• Steam turbine have gas input, can buffer some amount of gas and works only with steam t>110C.

It wont work for this small temperature, it extracts heat from steam(cooling steam basically) so to extract 2kW of power it suppose to drop steam temperature significantly, but your purposed min temperature already near to condensing point of steam. Also gas input means need connect pipe, injecting steam with gas pump, but for gas pump max working temperature 125C(gold version) which is around your minimum temperature for steam input, also pipe can transfer only 1kg of gas per second, it is not enough for turbine, maybe fine for some 100W micro-turbine.

Devs made steam turbine realistic, dont ask them degrade it to casual nonsense. Ask for stirling generator or peltier elements, they work exactly how TS described cold and hot side, extract energy of moving heat from hot to cold side.

[Eugeni]

20 minutes ago, D.L.S. said:

so to extract 2kW of power

In my calculation Turbine output should be somewhere near 720w.

[D.L.S.]

49 minutes ago, Eugeni said:

In my calculation Turbine output should be somewhere near 720w.

Hard to calculate, i tried and giveup, something wrong with watts in game. Joule/second to watt in this game strange, probably because time compressed, but i have feeling that 1kW in game = 1MW RL, fuel consumption of some generators confirm it - they burn too much fuel as for their output. Such turbine as we have in game could produce 2MW in RL(i failed checking how much joules it actually extracting from steam in game, but it consume whole more steam as 2kW turbine should), same for petrol generator it can be similar to diesel generator from RL, marine or train diesels can output even more so 2MW diesel generator seems reasonable too.

[Tobruk]

6 hours ago, Eugeni said:

I think only reason steam turbine was added is because people constantly begged for it.  
First, it wasn't thematically related to Occupational Upgrade.  
Second its mechanics was "raw", weird and bugy, and was almost instantly reworked, rendering mechanism unrewarded and practically unusable.
 
Personally, i see "fixed" version something like this:

• Steam turbine have gas input, can buffer some amount of gas and works only with steam t>110C.
• When buffer is full enough Steam turbine starts to "spinning up", it consumes large quantities of hot steam (>500g) from buffer and emits it as "cold" steam from above. After some time it "spins" to max and begin produce energy.
• When inner amount of steam is low Turbine drops to "spinning up" and stop producing energy.

How are you gonna pump that steam in the first place? In your suggestion there's a very small margin of 15 degrees C where the steam is usable by pumps. What about anything over 125?

[Eugeni]

Most thing in this game not like "In Real Life", maybe they simulated at some degree but in overall its more "simplified" and thus may work very different.

11 minutes ago, D.L.S. said:

Hard to calculate,

Actually i do only simple math, like "how much energy must produce turbine that consume 120C steam, emits 100C Steam, if it uses 2 Pumps for pipe filling and Aquatuner as heat source". Long story short its 240x2 +1200/5, so if turbine output is 720 system works like free cooler for liquid (water) that pass through aquatuner.

Unlike other generators, that consume mater (or time) and produce electricity (and etc.), Turbine consume heat and produce electricity. You can calculate watts of energy per gram of matter, but is there any way to compare this with energy per watt of heat?

5 minutes ago, Tobruk said:

What about anything over 125?

Better to cool steam beforehand.

[Tobruk]

1 minute ago, Eugeni said:

Better to cool steam beforehand.

You'd need some ridiculous temp precision to go below 125 and over 115. Not even door decouplers can do that, as they themselves have mass and thermal residue.

[Eugeni]

1 minute ago, Tobruk said:

You'd need some ridiculous temp precision to go below 125 and over 115.

Currently only few thing in game can produce stable high temp output (like hot steam geyser, hot hydrogen geyser and vulcans), all of them are periodic so there is time for preparations.

If Stem Turbine became potent and easy to use it break game power management, like it was when it first released.

[NGMZero]

when i first read the steam turbine description, I thought of the other natural source of steam that is also hot is the cool steam geysers. of course their heat isn't enough to turn on the turbine. which lead to why i call it complicated, there is nothing in the environment hint to its use, and the geysers are partially misguiding.

I do think they should wash it down. follow the suggestion to make the steam turbine give different power per second depending on the steam and heat input, make it so it function over those steam geysers by just installing them in the middle of a tunnel above the steam geyser, with an energy about of 600~800W, this basically will make the turbine attractive to use by more basic players like me, for both having decent power output and turning the steam into water faster basically for "Free". i am sure 2 turbines at 600~800W will not break the game.

more advanced player will have to figure ways to pump even more steam in hotter temperature to reach the output of 2KW in 1 turbine, or have a line of them at  30~40% efficiency

yeah it will need a draw back, i am not sure what is it (other than steam geyser to hyphenate) and i disagree with it current high heat demand, its the cause of all this complication.

[Yunru]

6 hours ago, D.L.S. said:

eat worker time of 1 dupe for 30-50 cycles

So maybe 0.1% of a midgame colony?

Compared to what, 50%-90% of a midgame colony with just manual generators?

[D.L.S.]

3 minutes ago, Yunru said:

So maybe 0.1% of a midgame colony?

Well i think i need to play fully manual generators colony and look how good/bad it is, but i had many times problem with waste heat(plants stop growing and colony losing food), problems with lack of coal and such at middle game, thats why i'm almost sure that using manual generators would give better results in that situations.

 

4 hours ago, Eugeni said:

Actually i do only simple math, like "how much energy must produce turbine that consume 120C steam, emits 100C Steam, if it uses 2 Pumps for pipe filling and Aquatuner as heat source". Long story short its 240x2 +1200/5, so if turbine output is 720 system works like free cooler for liquid (water) that pass through aquatuner.

Unlike other generators, that consume mater (or time) and produce electricity (and etc.), Turbine consume heat and produce electricity. You can calculate watts of energy per gram of matter, but is there any way to compare this with energy per watt of heat?

Yes calculating how many heat turbine consume from steam = how much energy it delivers since it convert heat to mechanic energy, but in game measure how much steam it consumes and exact temperature drop kinda tricky, or i was just lazy.

[tulkusiii]

On 8/27/2018 at 8:52 AM, Alfons100 said:

Another thing that'd help tremendously with Steamed Turbines is having some sort of way to move really hot stuff. Like a Scalding Gas Pump or a Lava pump. This'd make it so you wont need a weird door setup to make it work, because lets face it. No regular player would ever figure that out.

You should be able to make things out of refined metals like Tungsten that have rally high bonus temp resistance. (like +3600 deg) 

[Alfons100]

On 2018-08-31 at 10:01 AM, tulkusiii said:

You should be able to make things out of refined metals like Tungsten that have rally high bonus temp resistance. (like +3600 deg) 

A little too easy, in my opinion, maybe its a new pump that needs a lot of power or ranged manual operation by an Engineer to make it run for a day.

[Lazy-Anemic]

Honestly I'd just suggest pretending like it isn't there like how the H. Generator used to be completely useless without cheating.

Since they probably can't just add a huge source of heat for you to vaporize water and coal generators magically turn coal into power you're better off just waiting until the update that finally adds radium as a way to turn turbines.

[Eugeni]

5 hours ago, Lazy-Anemic said:

finally adds radium as a way to turn turbines.

I think radium will be used as advanced rocket fuel, or directly converted to energy like coal. 

At some point of time, somewhere after Steam Turbine was released, someone mentioned "Burner" in game files. Apparently this machine "burns" crude oil and produce large amount of heat, but this solution was not released. Why?

I think that even you have powerful heat source, you still have to do something with tons of 151C steam exhaust, and you can do nothing except destroy it, pump with doors, or trick Turbine with hydrogen, or use some other exploit. 

[D.L.S.]

9 hours ago, Lazy-Anemic said:

coal generators magically turn coal into power

It could be direct carbon fuel cell, was invented more then 100 years ago. Generators in game which use fuel can be considered as fuel cells(basically there is lot more efficient burn for example hydrogen in fuel cell directly to electricity then burn it to gain mechanical power to spin generator).

 

3 hours ago, Eugeni said:

I think that even you have powerful heat source, you still have to do something with tons of 151C steam exhaust, and you can do nothing except destroy it, pump with doors, or trick Turbine with hydrogen, or use some other exploit. 

Dump in open space best solution, but you losing water, a lot of water. Get rid of heat is difficult(without using bugs or exploits), you can spend a lot of power to transfer heat from one substance to another with aquatuner, you will condense water and can pump it back to hot side to reboil, but aquatuner will heat another substance, next you will need to heat some useless solids and transport it to some heat insulated storage... this cooling chain will eat all power gained from turbine.