Produce a lot of steam from a little resource

[deadfa11]

If one wanted to create a machine that used pellets of enriched uranium to turn water into steam, and each single pellet lasts a long time, say 30 minutes, how would you recommend going about that?

I've thought about modding an existing boiler, but of course fuel is hard-coded, so with that approach, the player could use enriched uranium in her regular burner drills, furnaces, trains, etc. And that doesn't make sense.

I've also thought about modding a chemical plant to take water as input, produce steam as output, and use uranium as fuel, but I can't think of a way to have a machine produce 30 minutes of steam on one unit of resource. Same problem with modding an assembler.

One idea I had was the following: giving uranium a durability value and using it in the module slot of the modded chemical plant, and having control code that ticks the durability value down with time. Then the plant could only produce steam when it had a uranium pellet in a module slot, which I hope could also be done with control code in some way. One issue I can see with this: inserters will not currently put items into module slots, so it couldn't be automated without modification.

Any thoughts?

[Coolthulhu]

How about making uranium a fluid? You could then dose it in values below 1 per reaction.

For more realism, you could have a reaction that requires a lot of liquid uranium, but outputs back most of it to simulate the need for critical mass of fissile material. This would require a loopback pipe, though.

EDIT: You could also just have it get processed before the actual reaction. 1 uranium yellowcake -> 10 fuel rods or something like that.

[deadfa11]

I like the liquid idea, I'll give it a try.

[Schmendrick]

The easiest way to do it would be to simply give uranium a high fuel value. An item with a fuel value of 1404 MJ will keep a boiler going for 30 minutes. This would prevent you from restricting it from use in other burner items, of course, and wouldn't allow the player to retrieve a partially used pellet, but it's quick and easy and requires zero control scripting.

[deadfa11]

This would prevent you from restricting it from use in other burner items

Being able to burn uranium in a furnace would seriously damage the flavor value of a mod like this.

[JamesOFarrell]

I've played around a little with this idea and you can get most of the way there but you cant heat the water. You can do most of it with an assembly machine, just have it take a lot of water and 1 fuel and output the same amount of a new fluid. The problem is that it will always be the default temp and it looks like the calculation for power is ((temp - defaulttemp) * 6) which means no matter what you do the liquid will not generate power. You can't do it in the control code because you can't add fluid to a pipe in any way with lua. What you could do is spawn an invisible boiler attached to the assembly machine and keep it fed with fuel to heat the new water but that is a lot of work. Maybe put a request for getting temperature added to the fluid recipe output?

[FreeER]

Maybe put a request for getting temperature added to the fluid recipe output?

That would be useful, however for now I know that DyTech (metallurgy module) has multiple 'lava' fluids that differ (primarily) by their default temp so an assembler can 'heat' lava by converting the lower default temp fluids into a higher default temp fluid. Of course the other obvious request would be fluid manipulation through control.lua as well.

To go back to an 'item' uranium however, it could be done via control.lua that you have a 'fake' fuel uranium which when placed into the proper machine would be transformed into an item with a real fuel value, though that has an issue with stacking, so I'd probably use a container as the boiler interface (what the player sees and interacts with) and an invisible boiler (created via control.lua on interface placement) which is filled via control.lua with the 'real' fuel-valued uranium. Of course this doesn't heat the water past what coal would and so is really only a longer burn time (more energy over time) rather than a stronger one (more energy per tick).

[JamesOFarrell]

Of course this doesn't heat the water past what coal would and so is really only a longer burn time (more energy over time) rather than a stronger one (more energy per tick).

You could take a page out of the DyTech book and pass water through a new assembler which converts it into heavy water, a fluid with a higher max temp.

[deadfa11]

You could take a page out of the DyTech book and pass water through a new assembler which converts it into heavy water, a fluid with a higher max temp.

Hmm, will steam engines generate power out of fluids that aren't water?

[bulldog98]

Hmm, will steam engines generate power out of fluids that aren't water?

Yes.