Jump to content

New content suggestion: heat pipes


Recommended Posts

    My favorite aspect of this game is building physics-based machines like such as a liquid oxygen condenser to purify polluted oxygen or a steam boiler to purify polluted water so I hope that as you continue to develop the game you will add more space for this kind of gameplay.  However at the moment designing these systems can be quite difficult because moving heat around is rather quirky.  In real life, moving heat is very simple, but in this game to effectively get the heat where you want it to go you really have to know a lot of weird tips and tricks (like using wolframite showers to transfer heat between ambient gas) that are kind of silly.  To solve this problem and make heat management much easier and more realistic, and also to make physics-based machine designs less quirky and more straightforward I propose adding heat pipes to the game.

Heat pipes should:

 * Be implemented similarly to electrical wires: they should be built in the same fashion, have their own UI layer, and should have bidirectional input/outputs between other tiles and the heat pipe tiles.

 * Transfer heat very quickly (thermal conductivity value in the hundreds) between adjacent connected heat pipe tiles.

 * Have an insulated version which is more expensive (maybe requiring both metal and mineral) that transfer heat only very slowly with adjacent non-heat pipe tiles as well as a cheaper un-insulated version which transfers heat reasonably quickly (thermal conductivity of maybe 10-20) with adjacent non-heat pipe tiles.

In addition to heat pipes, we should also have several new heat management tiles that connect to them (analogous to various plumbing tiles):

 * Radiator, which occupies 1x1 or 1x2 tiles, has a single heat pipe connection, and very quickly transfers heat pipes between its heat pipe connector and ambient gas.

 * Fluid heat exchanger (possibly different tiles for both liquid pipes and gas pipes) which quickly transfers heat between the fluid in the pipe and the heat pipe connector.

 * Tile heat exchanger which quickly transfers heat between tile objects (both machines and floor tiles) and the heat pipe connector.

* A heat switch which has two connections, and can be turned on or off based on an electrical signal

* A thermometer which turns electricity on or off (analogous to the current temperature switch) which only measures the temperature of the heat pipe.  This is pretty redundant with the already existing temperature controlled switch, but it might be a nice convenience in some circumstances.

    Just implementing these few things to create a passive heat pipe system would be really useful in a lot of circumstances.  One big one is in physical machines that require a phase change.  Because you have chosen to implement fluid pipes that treat gas and liquid as totally separate things it can be problematic to build machines that involve a phase change.  But with this system you can safely and easily have fluid undergo a phase change at a radiator tile.  But things can really spice up if you add a few more heat pipe connected machines:

 * Heat pump: A large machine (possibly useful to have a large, high-power, low-efficiency machine in addition to a smaller, high-efficiency, low-power version) which uses electricity to push heat from one of its heat pipe connectors to the other.  This machine can be used as either a heater (and using electricity in a heat pump to produce ambient heat is in fact more efficient than simply using a resistive heater in real life) or as a cooler, which is really neat and simplifies the game for the player since you no longer need different machines to heat and to cool fluids, nor different machines for liquids and gasses.

 * Heat engine: A machine (again, maybe two sizes, a small thermoelectric generator and a larger closed-cycle gas turbine generator) which allows heat to pass between its connectors from hot to cold and generates electricity as heat flows.  The electricity generated should depend on the difference between the temperatures of the two connectors.

    With these new tools, we could build lots of new physical machines.  We could blast a heat pipe through between a cold and hot biome and harness the geothermal energy to power our base (temporarily).  Even cooler: we could harness the heat generated by a steam geyser for a much more powerful geothermal generator.  If you added a new tile like a coal burner, we could even build our own physical coal generator which is cooler than the tile coal generator and can be scaled to be larger / more efficient if the player can get a good enough cold heat sink set up.

   The biggest problem with this proposed heat pipe system is that given the current state of the game, this system could probably be exploited.  In particular, since we have tiles like the liquid tepidizer which produce much more heat than should be physically possible given how much electricity we are giving them, so it would probably become easy to build an infinite free energy generator with the tepidizer and heat engine.  Which means that if you do decide to implement this system, you probably have to rework the other heat-handling machines and close all of the heat generation or deletion mechanics in the game.  Personally I would really like it if you could close all exploits in the game which allow players to unrealistically generate or destroy heat.  The one mechanic I might leave in is wheezewhorts; since they are not very powerful and cannot be mass produced they are probably not game breaking.  Since heat pumps can be such efficient heaters, producing much more heat energy out than electrical energy they take in (gaining the extra energy by removing heat from the cold heat sink) I bet you can find a way to balance the game where it is still possible to heat large bodies of water without spending insane amounts of energy in the way you currently have it balanced around the liquid tepidizer.

    One last suggestion:  If you do close the heat deletion exploits you need to leave players with some way to get rid of unwanted heat.  In reality this isn't so difficult, since you can always just radiate heat into the cold expanse of space.  If the duplicants could make it to the surface of their asteroid, they could build a heat exchanger outside and get rid of their excess heat.  I think you can implement this in game by giving us a neutronium heat exchanger, which simply deletes a small amount of heat inside itself in an amount proportional to its temperature (or maybe the fourth power of its temperature if you want to model real radiative heat transfer) and proportional to the amount of neutronium in its vicinity.  This would give players an endless late game way to manage heat, give incentive to explore to the edge of the map, and it is realistic, since people living inside an asteroid in space would be able to radiate heat away into deep space from the edges of their habitat.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Please be aware that the content of this thread may be outdated and no longer applicable.

×
  • Create New...