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Steam turbine heat production inconsistent


Rainbowdesign
  • Branch: Preview Branch Version: Windows Pending

The steam turbine max power output is capped at 850W and under optimal circumstances the heat production is between 50 and 100 kdtu.

Depending on the steam temperature and steam pressure i have however seen the heat production go up to 300 kdtu and maybe with some experimenting could imagine it to go to 600 kdtu.

This feels quite excessive and unbalanced considering that the petroleum generator has 20 kdtu

With the cap on power generation the heat should depend on power generated not on the steam


Steps to Reproduce
Use any steam turbine with different steams



User Feedback


The way it works is that the steam turbine component has wasteHeatToTurbinePercent, which is set to 10%. The steam turbine cools the steam and gets some thermal energy out of the cooling, which it use to both calculate power production and building heating. The difference is that power production is capped at max power output while building heating is uncapped.

People know this (well some people) and they add doors to automatically close inputs once the steam temperature gets high. Higher temperature multiplied with lower mass can still grant a thermal number, which is around 800 W, hence not wasteful. Making the waste heat capped takes away the challenge of blocking steam input to maximize performance.

It should however be better. For instance SteamTurbine.EnergySim200ms requires 0.1 kg of steam to start, but that's more mass than a single intake can provide (wiki claims intake is capped at 0.8, can't confirm), meaning a one cell intake steam turbine will get a start/stop motion and only work 50% of the time even if the steam is hot enough to make sense to run with just one intake.

Another issue is lack of information to the user. The steam turbine is a decent game challenge, but most people can't figure out what the challenge is without reading about it on the wiki. The game itself should be more informative. A good start would be to inform about the waste heat from production, something I missed for quite a while.

 

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this is not a bug. just as you said 

Quote

Depending on the steam temperature

you just didn´t have found the right solution for this problem yet

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On 7/8/2019 at 3:03 PM, VitaCoke said:

you just didn´t have found the right solution for this problem yet

Actually i did not really search for the solution because one i miscalculated with my mod and my lava has no around 100.000.000kgs of mass under my steam turbines and i am running 9 steam turbines so some extra power loss is no big deal and two i did not know its intentional...

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