Condensation run steam turbine

[Nickerooni]

No door tricks. No pressure tricks. No heat tricks. Although, I did have to block some of the inputs to the steam turbine or the complexity gets out of hand and the numbers are unreasonable.

I have attached a save so you could check it out. The basic details are:

1. Since you will be condensing the steam, you have a source of 100 degree water - you use this for cooling the steam. If you did this once, you could cut the output steam temperature in half  (eg. 210 stream to 155 degree steam)
2. Reboiling the water means you have a huge pressure room. You can use this to make staged heating rooms. One room at ~100 degrees. The next at ~130 degrees and so on. You add doors that open for only a moment every day and lets some of the pressure and colder steam into the next room. Don't worry about the temperatures, they'll reach an equilibrium.
3. You use the staged heating rooms to cool the output steam even further. Each room circulates it's cooler steam into the output steam of the turbine. In my save, I have two stages of cooling for the steam - cutting the heat by a quarter. Not too complex, but you could do more for more efficiency.
4. Finally, to cool the steam to water, the steps above allow single aquatuner circulating water to remove the remaining heat (or better yet, supercoolant). For efficiency, you can use a steel aquatuner to put the heat output right next to the steam turbine.
5. As a bonus, you can add more staged heating bins for heat sources that are > ~150 degrees but < ~250. In my save, I have one of those. Heat from meteors are being fed to prime the heat a bit. Pressure doors for those are controlled by temperature, not time. This isn't really necessary, but I got carried away a bit
6. Because of all this pressure buildups you need and all these staging bins, this takes up a lot of map space.

The numbers:

• It takes 1.4 MDTU/s to run this turbine with >95% uptime. That's a constant input pipe of petroleum at 350 degrees cooled to 260 degrees. The turbine gets more efficient if you input fewer DTUs, but the uptime is reduced.
• At 95% uptime, the aquatuner runs 75% of the time. The liquid pump runs a bit too. This leaves the net average power output of the system at 1000W.

The power output and heat input is nearly the same that you need to run a single aquatuner circulating supercoolant. This is by no means the most efficient you can get this system. Build challenge anyone?

Just turned on.sav

[wachunga]

Nice work. You've already seen my take on this. It's good to have different approaches to the same problem. Your stages may lend themselves better to intermittent heat sources better than my continual flow. Something to play around with.

[Nickerooni]

I agree. I built this with intermittent heat inputs in mind. Hence all the extra logic gates to make doors that don’t do any heat transfer. Steam is so slow at heat transfer that it’s probably unnecessary. I didn’t even try the simpler approach of “just a door”

[GottIsBarmherzi]

Hi. Can you please repost your save? I'm trying to load it but the game says wrong version game...

[avc15]

10 hours ago, Nickerooni said:

This is by no means the most efficient you can get this system. Build challenge anyone?

Just turned on.sav

Have you benchmarked total efficiency by the way? In fact, how would one go about doing that? Since traditional measures wouldn't work terribly well.

 

%effic = (Pout -Psupport) / Qin doesn't work because of units

 

Need a baseline with which to start comparison, and the real life formula needs some corollary here first.

[Nickerooni]

The save won't work unless you're on alpha branch. Or, you wait a day or two for Space Industry to release. I use Steel Aquatuners, which isn't in the Rocket release.

I benchmarked efficiency by first letting it stabilize for 10 days and then running it for 5 days using a heat source of 1 million kg of petroleum. I compared the temperature of the heat source before and after and did some math on the 2.1 degree temp change. I was surprised by the amount of heat loss. I was expecting something less closer to 600 kDTU based on math and my understanding steam turbines.

[Nickerooni]

Here is an in-game version of this no-guilt steam turbine. It's shaped a bit different, since I had to actually get dupes in there and fit it around indestructible in-game content. If you want an extremely low-guilt version, you can clear out one or more of the blocked tiles below the turbine and fiddle with the automation. However, I'm not convinced you can get much net power gain if you clear all of them. As it stands, I'm going to have to shut this turbine off in this game since it's generating too much power and my natural gas generators aren't running enough. I want the polluted water and CO2. Therefore, I wanted to share my save file while the recent reports show all the good the generator's been doing for me.

It's powered off of an iron volcano that I'm trying to cool down to a reasonable temperature, so that I can clean out all the junk that ended up in it. It has some extra unused inputs to the heat bin, as well as an unused aquatuner, so that I can feed it heat from other sources when the volcano cools.

 

Steam turbine demo.sav

[clickrush]

On 17.10.2018 at 5:21 PM, Nickerooni said:

Although, I did have to block some of the inputs to the steam turbine or the complexity gets out of hand and the numbers are unreasonable.

 

Turbine tile blocking nets you a massive heat to power conversion and is much more impactful on your net power than pushing down the steam with other gases or with doors, since each tile cools X amount of steam and 1 tile is enough to run the turbine at 100%. W/O this you would spend 600W instead of getting 1kW.

I think the main takeaway from any steam turbine build/discussion is that it is intended primarily a powerful cooling device w/o tile blocking. Tile blocking feels completely 'borg cube'/old fertilizer maker&natgas gen level out of whack in terms of balance.

Don't get me wrong. I'am not one of the people who point with fingers. I personally use and build all the variants of anything that I find fun or interesting. But if you introduce your posts with 'trick' this and 'no-guilt' that then I get the shivers. Especially if you then proceed to use probably the most powerful exploit in the current version.

[Nickerooni]

It feels pretty balanced. That’s what makes it guilt free. That’s implicitly a personal opinion. For example, perhaps it’s about right at 2 tiles exposed. I realize that blocking tiles is the biggest gain here in terms of balancing the output power.

The balance of the turbine is based around how broken the mechanics surrounding it are. Since this relies on non-broken mechanics, I don’t feel guilty about arbitrarily rebalancing the building.

[SkunkMaster]

I like the designs you guys are posting, they are very different then what I've build.

[clickrush]

14 hours ago, Nickerooni said:

It feels pretty balanced. That’s what makes it guilt free. That’s implicitly a personal opinion. For example, perhaps it’s about right at 2 tiles exposed. I realize that blocking tiles is the biggest gain here in terms of balancing the output power.

The balance of the turbine is based around how broken the mechanics surrounding it are. Since this relies on non-broken mechanics, I don’t feel guilty about arbitrarily rebalancing the building.

I might have misunderstood you. What turned me off was the use of the word 'guilt' in the context of all of this. There is nothing to feel guilty about

But I get what you mean now. Your build showcases exactly what you said. A condensation based turbine. You successfully to build it in an alternate way that still works. In fact that is really interesting.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

I guess it depends on what you call "no-guilt". It does not work any way it was intended to. It consumes so much heat you can't run it continually without exploits (yes I am calling them exploits here including blocking the input tiles, just to clearly define intent from reality). However, if they changed the requirements to something that is much more handable, I imagine the whole map having these things spawned.

Worse is how people actually ended up using it without exploits. Most of us don't see it as a genuine power source, but as a mass heat deletion device.

I personally would recommend a change alongside getting all the silly bugs fixed (which are understandably exploited currently because there's no way else to get the generator working constantly): have it turn steam into water, make it have a far lower overheat temperature (I'd say 125°C and water output at 95°C)  and change the power output from 2000 to 380W. That way it's less of an advantage.

@Nickerooni I agree with clickrush. Calling a bug guilt free and using it to your own advantage to make a flawed system to work, is down to opinion. Really guilt free for everybody would be to have nothing block the input tiles. Then again, we are using them as to get rid of rediculous amounts of heat, so how guilt free that is, I don't know either. I think I just would personally refrain from involving moral terms on this.

I do very much like the complexity of it. The hydrogen on the volcano is a nice touch.

[clickrush]

37 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Worse is how people actually ended up using it without exploits. Most of us don't see it as a genuine power source, but as a mass heat deletion device.

I think that is the whole intent of the turbine. People have been calling for alternatives to drip cooling and fixed heat devices. I think the turbine is a great solution to mid-late game industrial grade cooling. It requires expensive materials, such as plastic, ceramic, refined metals (also for plumbing) and even steel (alot of it actually) if you cool anything but a metal refinery with it. It takes careful priming and in some cases automation (peripheral). Right now it is the first relatively complex thing a player encounters after figuring out electrolyzers. I think this is a great tradeoff between material expenses, complexity and payoff. Also it is rewarding to convert the generated heat of a cooled industrial area into something useful

37 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

make it have a far lower overheat temperature (I'd say 125°C and water output at 95°C)

This just makes it so it is cheaper to make since this implies that the steam needs to be <125°C. You don't need petroleum in your metal refineries anymore to push the heat >250°C and you don't need steel anymore of you use it with an aquatuner.

I personally just don't use tile blocking anymore since it generates too much power for my taste this way, making other power generators almost obsolete, which feels completely out of whack. Also in contrary to door pumps or gas pushing it seems like an obvious bug/oversight to me that the turbine doesn't proportionally convert heat into power based on blocked inputs.

[pacovf]

An easy fix to the power output / block input deal would be to separate the turbine into 5 power outlets, each one 400W and "connected" to each input. Though the numbers would still need to be tuned. Maybe a "smaller" (less throughput, less temperature difference), but less efficient, steam turbine should be added to the game too?

I *think* the reason why the steam turbine is good at deleting heat is because you can "delete" electric power. If the power you didn't use was dissipated as heat (as is the case IRL), it would be less good at that. A more "realistic" behaviour of electric power would mean that the steam turbine can't delete heat, but it can reduce the amount of heat your base produces by potentially removing the need to use other sources of power that do produce heat.

I am not sure Klei can balance ONI in such a way that it's relatively faithful to the laws of physics while still making for good gameplay, though. But one hopes!

[clickrush]

29 minutes ago, pacovf said:

An easy fix to the power output / block input deal would be to separate the turbine into 5 power outlets, each one 400W and "connected" to each input. Though the numbers would still need to be tuned. Maybe a "smaller" (less throughput, less temperature difference), but less efficient, steam turbine should be added to the game too?

I *think* the reason why the steam turbine is good at deleting heat is because you can "delete" electric power. If the power you didn't use was dissipated as heat (as is the case IRL), it would be less good at that. A more "realistic" behaviour of electric power would mean that the steam turbine can't delete heat, but it can reduce the amount of heat your base produces by potentially removing the need to use other sources of power that do produce heat.

I am not sure Klei can balance ONI in such a way that it's relatively faithful to the laws of physics while still making for good gameplay, though. But one hopes!

First of all the turbine doesn't delete heat. It converts it into first kinetic and then electrical power. This is kind of how it works in real life too.

Secondly virtually every building that uses power generates heat. The equation isn't proportional/exact here, in fact almost all the power consuming buildings generate way more heat than they should based on the input power. This is why Klei changed the heat metric into DTU/s from Watts, so we don't get confused about this conversion.

A lot of people got trapped into this mindset that any sufficient or powerful long term cooling solution is somehow a problem, since industrial grade cooling often relied on bugs (drip cooling) or clunky game mechanics (fixed heat output). Now we have the turbine, the expensive but powerful solution everyone was wishing for.

Again, it uses multiple, expensive refined materials, can be built in several ways and needs time to be primed correctly. W/o tile blocking it doesn't produce net power when used for cooling refineries/aquatuners. It can still be used as a power generator in combination with volcanoes/magma.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

2 hours ago, clickrush said:

I think that is the whole intent of the turbine.

I don't think so actually. It's basically the same as with the fertilizer synthesizer, where people were scrambling for polluted water to get as many as synthesizers running as they possibly could just for the natural gas. Klei eventually fixed that through making it a power negative operation instead of a positive one.

The intent for the steam turbine is to generate power in a sustainable way, I believe they made that clear on a live stream. The issue is they never really bothered to fix it afterwards.

Of course, the game does lack some decent, rational options on mass cooling. Especially liquids. I hope we don't have to depend on pure heat deletion through oil refineries, water sieves,... when the game is finished . Deleting heat through a steam turbine is rational where you transform heat energy to electric energy (just not how it implemented right now). (just not in the way it is now) What I personally would like to see are the addition of endothermic processes for cooling.

[pacovf]

@clickrushI think we agree on most things, we just look at it from different angles. Although I honestly do not know what the intent of the steam turbine is, from Klei's point of view. It is not used for cooling IRL because moving heat around is complicated and not something we have much of a use for, but maybe in the specific context of people living inside an asteroid, that's something that would make sense?

At any rate, if you can delete electric power, then the steam turbine becomes a way to delete heat: convert that heat into electric power (this is fine! it's what real turbines do), then delete that power (no fine, can't do it IRL).

@ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy what are "endothermic processes"? I have been racking my head for ideas of realistic ways to deal with heat in the context of ONI, but the only thing I could come up with are space radiators, jettisoning mass into space / reverse-volcanos, or adding some ultra-massive heat sink inside the asteroid. And only the first one of those allows for a sort of closed system.

[clickrush]

12 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

I don't think so actually. It's basically the same as with the fertilizer synthesizer, where people were scrambling for polluted water to get as many as synthesizers running as they possibly could just for the natural gas. Klei eventually fixed that through making it a power negative operation instead of a positive one.

The intent for the steam turbine is to generate power in a sustainable way, I believe they made that clear on a live stream. The issue is they never really bothered to fix it afterwards.

The steam turbine is currently w/o tile blocking power negative when used to cool an aquatuner/metal refinery as far as I know. By adding steel as a possible building material for aquatuners it is clear that Klei intended the turbine to be used as a late game industrial cooling device.

Think about it: It is the only device that allows for sustainable, industrial scale cooling aside from fixed heat output buildings (or bugs/exploits) but it does the cooling in a very direct and elegant way, by converting heat into electrical power. The only issue I see here is that tile blocking makes it power positive when used for cooling.

It is however power positive when used alongside magma/volcanoes regardless of the setup, which is in line with the above statement.

17 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Of course, the game does lack some decent, rational options on mass cooling. Especially liquids. I hope we don't have to depend on pure heat deletion through oil refineries, water sieves,... when the game is finished . Deleting heat through a steam turbine is rational where you transform heat energy to electric energy. (just not in the way it is now) What I personally would like to see are the addition of endothermic processes for cooling.

You can easily view oil refinement, water filtration, electrolysis and air skimming as endothermic and in fact I think that is the intent of the admittedly lazy fixed heat output configuration.

Going back to steam trubines: What I don't get is why there is so much resistance against the steam turbine as a sustainable cooling solution. I mean how expensive does it have to be?

A steam turbine cooling build is easily the most advanced and expensive pre-rocketry system aside from natural gas boilers (which only the most experienced players build if at all): The building materials and the tech used are mostly expensive, easily use up 80% of the deeper, pre-rocketry research tree and use up alot of duplicant time to make.

Just the basic build alone uses refined metals, plastic and ceramic all of which are huge mid game bottlenecks. In order to cool a metal refinery you need a coolant such as oil/petroleum. The piping is ceramic and refined metals again. Then you need to prime it carefully and automate the whole thing so your pipes don't blow up.

The aquatuner variant for cooling your industrial area/systems uses massive amounts of refined metals and most importantly steel. Steel is by far the most expensive pre-rocketry material.

1. To sustainably churn it out you need refined carbon, which means you have a hatch ranch somewhere, cooling and again some automation going on, possibly a conveyour system to both deliver the coal and later the refined carbon.

2. You need to continously produce iron, especially if you don't have meteor detection, bunker doors and an array of robo miners/doors to chunk down regolith from space yet.

3. The biggest bottleneck for steel and what ultimately makes it so expensive is lime. The oil biome fossils will get you enough to cover your surface and maybe build a rocket. A steel aquatuner costs you a whooping 1.2k of steel.

As a reference I started a new run to test pacu egg ranching instead of mushrooms as a midgame food source so I can churn out more lime. At cycle 300ish I'am already waiting for lime to come in in small chunks. I mined out the whole oil biome for fossil. The only steel made equipment is full coverage of the surface (currently just with tiles), two unfinished steam rockets/hangars and 3 aquatuners, two of which are cooling my base and one to generate steam for the rockets and later cool the robominers and other equipment on the surface. Alot of my duplicant time is sucked up by mining out marsh biomes for algae/slime so my pacu produce eggs at a faster rate. All that on a strategy that specifically aimed at a high lime/steel output so I can afford these cooling systems and two rockets as early as possible. And mind you I'am not a beginner.

My bottom line is: I really don't see an issue regarding the turbine as is, with the exception of the tile blocking bug. The time, effort and planning to use them is full in line with the benefit, especially when compared to other challenges and systems.

[pacovf]

I don't think the argument against turbines as a cooling system are from a game balance point of view. It's from a realism point of view.

EDIT: wait, I think we are derailing the thread. Sorry, Nickerooni

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

42 minutes ago, clickrush said:

The steam turbine is currently w/o tile blocking power negative when used to cool an aquatuner/metal refinery as far as I know. By adding steel as a possible building material for aquatuners it is clear that Klei intended the turbine to be used as a late game industrial cooling device.

You are missing the point. A fertilizer sythnesizer was used as a power enabler primarily instead of creating fertilizer, primarily. A steam turbine, without tiles blocked off, is used as a cooling device primarily instead of a power device. A steam turbine should logically not be a cooling device as its primary function. Us using that way means the developers missed the mark.

42 minutes ago, clickrush said:

Going back to steam trubines: What I don't get is why there is so much resistance against the steam turbine as a sustainable cooling solution. I mean how expensive does it have to be?

It doesn't have to be expensive or complex, or whatever. It doesn't even have to follow the laws of physics. Just it has to make sense.

 

42 minutes ago, clickrush said:

You can easily view oil refinement, water filtration, electrolysis and air skimming as endothermic and in fact I think that is the intent of the admittedly lazy fixed heat output configuration.

endothermic means there is a chemical waste product. You can argue the oil refinery (I actually meant petroleum generator, but that's on me) is endothermic, although chemically that is rubbish. water sieve however is no endothermic process! It's a filter, nothing more. The waste product is nothing more than the sand having the dirt clogged up in it.

They kinda got the right idea with the sour gas to methane conversion (although by no means is that an endothermic process, just to be clear!). I merely put it forward as a suggestion; if the developers don't like it or feel this is not something for their game, then of course

44 minutes ago, pacovf said:

 

@ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy what are "endothermic processes"? I have been racking my head for ideas of realistic ways to deal with heat in the context of ONI, but the only thing I could come up with are space radiators, jettisoning mass into space / reverse-volcanos, or adding some ultra-massive heat sink inside the asteroid. And only the first one of those allows for a sort of closed system.

It's a chemical reaction between 2 compounds where energy is used from the surroundings (heat). Opposed to for instance an exothermic reaction which blasts energy into the surroundings. For instance, petroleum and oxygen are an exothermic reaction (when first heated properly to have the reaction occur). Putting ammonium chloride into water will cause an endothermic reaction. So ingame you could for instance create certain compounds and have them combine in sort of heat conductive device, which will lead to cooling but also having to deal with the waste product. Atleast that's a proposal. Again, seeing we could do with additional ways of cooling stuff, I don't think it's bad to put forward suggestions.

[clickrush]

36 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

It doesn't have to be expensive or complex, or whatever. It doesn't even have to follow the laws of physics. Just it has to make sense.

Ok you lost me there completely. Absolutely nothing makes "sense" in this or any video game I played so far. There is no general rule that the turbine breaks. There is no balance issue (aside from tile blocking, which again nets you too much power) no discrepancy in how it is described or how the general mechanism works as it cools down steam to produce power and it behaves and jiggles exactly as weirdly as all the other stuff we have. This is the equivalent to "I just don't like it this way" and basically ends all further discussion to be had.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

6 minutes ago, clickrush said:

Ok you lost me there completely.

Let me put it this way then: the steam turbine sits on the power tap and is "advertised" as a power device. It should therefore be a power device as its primary function, not as its secondary function. Just like the fertilizer maker should have its primary function to make fertilizer, which it did not in the past.

This is where primary and secondary functions matter. Of course you can use the steam turbine to cool stuff down; that's intended. That's using your synergies. It's not intended to use the steam turbine primarily for cooling and the power being a nice little bonus on the side. That just does not make sense.

I do think that will be fixed in the near future. They really neglected, among other things, the steam turbine.

It's not really a balance issue for the record. it ironically fills up the gaps in the gameplay we currently have the way it is now. I think that does show for the creative mind this community has, including the topic starter who created a marvelous piece.

[Nickerooni]

5 hours ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

I think that does show for the creative mind this community has, including the topic starter who created a marvelous piece.

Thank you.

I think I’m saying the same thing - I’d like to see the steam turbine end up balanced for two goals:

1. Meaningful power generation from heat sources far outside normal dupe operation. Magma, volcanoes, rockets. Ideally, reducing them to temperatures that are manageable with Steel industry. It’s be nice to have a system that benefits from space materials, in some way

2. When paired with an aquatuner running supercoolant, it should do heat deletion with marginal net energy loss. This implies that it should provide half the heat deletion and require a meaningful energy cost if paired with an aquatuner circulating an inferior coolant. Giving you some nice feelings of progression 

in my opinion, that looks like that’s the direction the devs are heading. But, when they threw the device to the community, we chewed it up and spat it out. I can appreciate why they added it, then left it untouched. Some other aspects of the game need polish before the steam turbine can fulfill that role without being abused.

[Iriswaters]

On 10/17/2018 at 5:50 PM, avc15 said:

Have you benchmarked total efficiency by the way? In fact, how would one go about doing that? Since traditional measures wouldn't work terribly well.

 

%effic = (Pout -Psupport) / Qin doesn't work because of units

 

Need a baseline with which to start comparison, and the real life formula needs some corollary here first.

I would say W/DTU/s is a decent measure.    Especially given that DTU/s kind of -is- Watts.  In a way.    You are going to end up with teeny tiny numbers though.

Like, I made a highly efficient system earlier (in sandbox, not in play) that is definitely not 'guilt free' that burns off 1,318,000 DTU/s and creates 2kW of energy, average.  That's 0.0015 W/DTU/s.   Or just 0.0015 Joules per DTU.  That was with blocking 4 vents.   It was not perfect efficiency, but due to the massive jump in efficiency blocking vents gives, it will still be higher than any fully exploit free variant.

1M DTU/s is really .... a lot.   That's the issue with these things.   They do so much cooling that that really ends up the point of them, not the energy they create.   The energy is just a trivial side effect in the end.

[clickrush]

1 minute ago, Iriswaters said:

The energy is just a trivial side effect in the end.

People need to realize how there is a fundamental balance tradeoff with all of this: The turbine should not have a better power to heat consumed ratio or else you could just stack aquatuners and turbines to infinitely scale up your power production. Which by the way is the reason why tile blocking is such a balance issue in my eyes,

With that in mind: As long as the turbine is balanced it will always feel like the power generation is a side effect when used alongside a cooling system (aquatuners/regulators/radiators etc.). Only in combination with a massive heat source it should be power positive. There is absolutely no way around this. If it cools less than now it will simply throw over the whole power generation balance, which again, can easily be demonstrated with tile blocking builds.