I present to you, the Thermal Annihilator!

[suicide commando]

I thought I'd share a little build I made recently with people, using space materials, I made a wonderful little machine that kills both heat and provides power.
Yes, it does both, I present to you.. THE THERMAL ANNIHILATOR!

The requirements, for this amazing machine are a buttload of fullerene and a bit of niobium.
The outside is made of ceramics, while everything inside is made out of thermite, the temp sensor is set to 300 degrees, as it can't go any higher,

but the whole thing should be good to around 1000 degrees.

Super coolant is run through the aqua tuners and cooled down, then sent off to absorb more heat somewhere else ( in my care in my rocket bay )

The aqua tuners use the heat from the coolant to heat up the steam, which runs the turbines, which in turn power the pumps and the aqua tuners.
The turbines run nearly all the time, getting a little backed up with steam once in a while. The aqua tuners run about half the time, but even if they

were running full time, the net result is power positive. The main reason this system works is because of the crazy heat capabilities of super coolant.
This stuff absorbs heat very quickly, and can hold it in large amounts, so it's extremely efficient to run through aqua tuners to move the heat.

 

[Zarquan]

You might want to double layer your ceramics to better thermally isolate it.  Because they use log averages to calculate heat transfer, so steam -> ceramic -> air will transfer a lot more heat than steam -> ceramic -> ceramic -> air.

[suicide commando]

3 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

You might want to double layer your ceramics to better thermally isolate it.  Because they use log averages to calculate heat transfer, so steam -> ceramic -> air will transfer a lot more heat than steam -> ceramic -> ceramic -> air.

the amount of heat that would put out is quite small, and considering the cooling happens right above this, the liquid CO2 dripping down will keep the area cool
 

[Neotuck]

Looks like you are moving cool steam back under the turbines at 2kg/s

Is there a reason you are not making door pumps?  You can move a lot more steam and you don't have to deal with the 20kg limit under the turbines

[suicide commando]

2 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

Looks like you are moving cool steam back under the turbines at 2kg/s

Is there a reason you are not making door pumps?  You can move a lot more steam and you don't have to deal with the 20kg limit under the turbines

The reason is that this was my first iteration of the setup, and I built it survival mode, so I wanted to keep the design as simple as possible ( for now )
A door compressor should improve matters greatly, as it requires less power, and moves more steam per second.

 

[Zarquan]

Also, some people don't like door pumps, so builds that don't require them are good.

[crypticorb]

Looks good, I haven't seen any viable builds that don't rely on door compressors or steam/oxygen conflict to keep steam circulating. You could probably improve the setup a bit if you used one of those methods, but this seems decent.

 

Slightly off topic: am I the only one that thinks that heat dumping into gas with thermium aquatuners will get nerfed at some point? Individually, the turbine, aquatuner, and supercoolant seem legit for their stats, but when combined with thermium it can create an infinite positive power loop that I don't agree with.

[suicide commando]

18 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

Looks good, I haven't seen any viable builds that don't rely on door compressors or steam/oxygen conflict to keep steam circulating. You could probably improve the setup a bit if you used one of those methods, but this seems decent.

 

Slightly off topic: am I the only one that thinks that heat dumping into gas with thermium aquatuners will get nerfed at some point? Individually, the turbine, aquatuner, and supercoolant seem legit for their stats, but when combined with thermium it can create an infinite positive power loop that I don't agree with.

All the parts are reasonably fine and balanced, the only component in that machine that I think is a bit OP is Supercoolant, that is what is making this whole thing so insanely OP. It's high thermal conductivity combined with it's insane specific heat capacity. If the SHC would be reduced by say 25% this system wouldn't be as insanely OP as it is.

Continueing on from the success of my first thermal annihilator, I just constructed a LOX machine based on this technology... and it's a brutal beast that is making me insane amounts of liquid oxygen, as you can see from the picture, 4 electrolysers are NOT ENOUGH to feed the cooling system properly as the cooler has shut down due to being too cold, causing freezing in the bottom end of the tank.

 

Anyone know a good name of this LOX beast?

[Fischer_L]

19 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

Looks good, I haven't seen any viable builds that don't rely on door compressors or steam/oxygen conflict to keep steam circulating. You could probably improve the setup a bit if you used one of those methods, but this seems decent.

 

Slightly off topic: am I the only one that thinks that heat dumping into gas with thermium aquatuners will get nerfed at some point? Individually, the turbine, aquatuner, and supercoolant seem legit for their stats, but when combined with thermium it can create an infinite positive power loop that I don't agree with.

It's only create positive power because of blocking input exploit. With all inputs opened 1 aquatuner doesn't generate enough heat to run 100% uptime on turbine.

[Hellshound38]

39 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

Looks good, I haven't seen any viable builds that don't rely on door compressors or steam/oxygen conflict to keep steam circulating. You could probably improve the setup a bit if you used one of those methods, but this seems decent.

 

Slightly off topic: am I the only one that thinks that heat dumping into gas with thermium aquatuners will get nerfed at some point? Individually, the turbine, aquatuner, and supercoolant seem legit for their stats, but when combined with thermium it can create an infinite positive power loop that I don't agree with.

Well its not really infinite. You need something to heat up or the super coolant will eventually freeze, unless you dedicate power to heating it back up. If they remove unpowered door pumps it would also take very large, late game (rocket mats) setups like this to net power.

 

Furthermore I also think that blocked input should decrease power outpout proportionally.

[suicide commando]

The positive power loop is real actually.. if you use a tepidizer, you can generate enough heat for the coolant to absorb generating a positive power loop that nets you about 500W. I saw someone post a build for it on reddit.

Also, for a steam turbine like this, you will want to use a powered door compressor it would still be more efficient and effective than my 4 pump setup, as a powered door compressor uses 3x 120W instead of 4 x 240.

 

[Neotuck]

13 minutes ago, suicide commando said:

The positive power loop is real actually.. if you use a tepidizer, you can generate enough heat for the coolant to absorb generating a positive power loop that nets you about 500W. I saw someone post a build for it on reddit.

Also, for a steam turbine like this, you will want to use a powered door compressor it would still be more efficient and effective than my 4 pump setup, as a powered door compressor uses 3x 120W instead of 4 x 240.

 

You don't have to power them, even slow unpowered doors still move more steam than pumps

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Zarquan said:

You might want to double layer your ceramics to better thermally isolate it.  Because they use log averages to calculate heat transfer, so steam -> ceramic -> air will transfer a lot more heat than steam -> ceramic -> ceramic -> air.

Insulated tiles just use the lowest conductivity rather than the log mean.

[Hellshound38]

44 minutes ago, suicide commando said:

The positive power loop is real actually.. if you use a tepidizer, you can generate enough heat for the coolant to absorb generating a positive power loop that nets you about 500W. I saw someone post a build for it on reddit.

Also, for a steam turbine like this, you will want to use a powered door compressor it would still be more efficient and effective than my 4 pump setup, as a powered door compressor uses 3x 120W instead of 4 x 240.

Yeah I meant if doors required power to automate at all, It would require powered doors and greatly reduce the net W.

It would take a massive machine to maybe generate less then 500W

 

[crypticorb]

@suicide commando @Hellshound38 You're mistaken on the part of powered doors requiring massive power.

The only time a powered mechanical door requires power is for the single game tick it takes to open, which is an instantaneous amount of power. It doesn't require power any other part of the actual open/close animation.

This equates to about 1/10th the total power draw for a continuously opening/closing door sequence. I did some 10-cycle power consumption tests for several different sequences and they averaged about the same, proportionate to the number of doors.

Unpowered sequences don't require any power at all, and for the last week or so I've been working off a few concepts to make unpowered setups that can sustain enough steam throughput to keep a turbine 100% uptime.

Edit: Here's the results for some of the power tests I did, for several different sequences.

[suicide commando]

Oh I know door compressors, even when powered don't require a lot of energy.. the only reason they're not in this design is as I said, the first iteration, and I wanted to keep things simple as I was building it in survival mode directly, not first designing it in debug/sandbox.

 

[Dupe_Noir]

How much heat does steam turbine delete?

[Iriswaters]

2 supercoolant aquatuners is NOT enough to run two steam engines.  You need 3 for it to stay hot.  Unless the supercoolant itself is being piped in hot enough to add more heat to the equation, this is not going to function.

[CantBreathe]

When I clicked I was literally expecting a picture of steam turbines with the vents blocked.

[Lifegrow]

You need 5 Aquatuners running constantly when using supercoolant on a fully uncovered turbine to get anywhere near enough heat generation afaik. That will push 10kg/s of steam as all 5 slots are open. 20 pumps going full whack? I'd like to see that being power positive  

I think the supercoolant being "op" isn't the driving force of builds like this - and it's why I personally feel a little dirty if I even think about blocking turbine floors  As ever though, each to their own.

I've built a few of these now - the 2nd one is my personal favourite I think in terms of ease of build, and effective steam moving. I like the ratio of 5 wide tiles of steam space above the turbine paired with 6 tiles of door "vacuum" for splitting the pressure when you cycle the doors. Works for me anyway.

Spoiler

 

 

[suicide commando]

5 hours ago, Iriswaters said:

2 supercoolant aquatuners is NOT enough to run two steam engines.  You need 3 for it to stay hot.  Unless the supercoolant itself is being piped in hot enough to add more heat to the equation, this is not going to function.

Sorry, but my Thermal Annihilator says otherwise. 2 aqua tuners processing super coolant will produce more than enough heat for 2 steam turbines to keep running. The hard part is maintaining pressure, not heat.

[wachunga]

2 hours ago, suicide commando said:

Sorry, but my Thermal Annihilator says otherwise. 2 aqua tuners processing super coolant will produce more than enough heat for 2 steam turbines to keep running. The hard part is maintaining pressure, not heat.

Because you are abusing the blocked input bug. You should be clear that what you are presenting only works because of a bug that is likely to get fixed at some point. Without the bug abuse, you will need at a minimum 5.3 super coolant aquatuners and 20 gas pumps running constantly.

[Iriswaters]

 

2 hours ago, suicide commando said:

Sorry, but my Thermal Annihilator says otherwise. 2 aqua tuners processing super coolant will produce more than enough heat for 2 steam turbines to keep running. The hard part is maintaining pressure, not heat.

Weird.  Maybe my setup was leaking heat somewhere.   2 was definitely -not- enough.

7 minutes ago, wachunga said:

Because you are abusing the blocked input bug. You should be clear that what you are presenting only works because of a bug that is likely to get fixed at some point. Without the bug abuse, you will need at a minimum 5.3 super coolant aquatuners and 20 gas pumps running constantly.

Ok, but without that bug, the steamer is trash at being any sort of generator at all. Even as is, it requires more heat than all of the geysers in the average map combined.  And needing 5.3 supercoolant aquatuners is obscene.  Not to mention the gas pumps requiring more than double the energy than thing produces.

So given that the thing is a mess, using a 'bug' that makes it a viable tool(if it is actually a bug rather than an obtuse feature) seems reasonable.

[suicide commando]

25 minutes ago, wachunga said:

Because you are abusing the blocked input bug. You should be clear that what you are presenting only works because of a bug that is likely to get fixed at some point. Without the bug abuse, you will need at a minimum 5.3 super coolant aquatuners and 20 gas pumps running constantly.

Like Iris said, without blocking the input, there is no way in hell you can keep a steam turbine running at that kind of power/speed, especially since it needs time to rev up before it begins producing energy.

[Iriswaters]

Just to be clear, turning the entire output of a max quality cool steam geyser, with 2.5kg/s, 90% eruption uptime and 80% active period, costs about 500 kDTU/s. 5.3 supercoolant aquatuners create over 6M DTU/s of cooling.  

Leaving all 5 vents open, you could probably cool the lava core of the asteroid in well under 100 cycles.  And from there cool the entire rock, until everything in the base starts to solidify, including eventually the super coolant itself.  

It is very obviously not in its final setup.

.

I would go so far as to suggest that 6M DTU/s of heat may be more than it is physically possible for an asteroid to generate or use consistently without the use of exploits, but I'm not really certain how much heat it might be possible to create if you really, really try and use the limits of space.

Cooling 1000kg of 2000C magma to 0C only costs 100M DTU.  That takes less than 17 seconds.  You can cool 36 of them a day.  To the temperature of ice.

Edit: off a decimal place with the magma. So only 3.6 per day.  I guess you can't freeze the whole rock in 100 days.  Still more than the total heat it's meaningfully possible to ever produce.

And that's just one bloody steamer.  Any steamer.  The thing is a hole in spacetime into which energy just vanishes.  Your dupes looked at the anti entropy thermo- nullifier and said "Cool tech.  But does it come in steampunk?  Also, can we make it more?  Like, take 100 of them and pack em together, turn it on, and then run."