Rebalance Boiler & Heat Exchanger Fluid Volumes to Account for New Water-to-Steam Mechanics

[macdjord]

I do not see what problem do you have with stopping steam. Let all heat exchangers output to single pipe. Add pumps(one per 11 heat exchangers) to it. After pumps put another single pipe connected to all tanks and turbines. It will work even faster than stopping water flow because steam takes 10 times space in pipes.

Congratulations, you have just accurately described a) what I do now (cut off the steam), and b) why I have to do it that way (cutting off the water is too slow). If you to know why I want to change that, please see any of my previous posts in this thread.

If your use case is the nuclear power plant, here is proof it's not necessary to change fluidbox sizes or to enable temperature reading of heat exchangers or heat pipes to get fast and exact responses. Approach: keep fluid boxes full instead keeping them empty. If the standard state is full, any change to not full is immediate, and the actual size doesn't matter.

Same thing: you've described pretty much what I do right now (though I use somewhat different control logic) but not addressed what I am trying to change or why I want to change it.

With the new fluid mechanics in 2.0, I initially thought I could do away with pumps altogether and have the heat exchangers, steam buffer tanks, and turbines all in a single fluid box.

You can on Nauvis if you use a power switch i feel (depending on your definitons). Since you can now read the temperature of the nuclear reactor, you can make sure it never gets under a certain temperature , you refuel it when temperature is under 700°C UNLESS your steam buffer is above 50 % for example with a decider combinator reading both temperature and steam buffer, and only allowing output when steam AND temperature ( and burning fuel) are low.

Once again, a power switch does not help because it controls steam consumption rather than steam generation. I already have my turbines connected to a power switch; it lets me use the nuke-plant as backup to a solar installation if I wish. But that has nothing to do with my desire to control when the heat exchangers generate steam. Yes, if I turn off the power switch, the turbines will fill up and the heat exchanger will shut down, but:

1. The shutdown is actually slower than cutting the steam off with a pump, since now instead of just having to fill up the heat exchanger outputs and the pipes they feed directly into, I also have to fill up all turbines (each of which also stores 200 steam) and the pipes between them
2. Except that's ignoring the great honking big tank farm that's there in the middle; the whole point of this exercise is to not cool down my reactors trying to fill that thing up, remember?
3. And most importantly, if I turn off the power switch, my factory blacks out. This is what we in the business call a bad thing.

I've seen pretty much always have a few people say basically "there's a much easier solution: just toggle the offshore pump on and off, that's what I do".

That was frequent before 2.0, that was my favourite option, but currently given the new ratio water to steam, cutting off the offshore pump adds delay before the steam production stops ( the residual water represent much more steam). If that delay extend beyond the duration of the night, it can become useless for certain usage.

Yes, and that is exactly what I am trying to fix.

Controlling the water can be done without electricity since offshore pump don't require it unlike regular pump.

If and only if offshore pump is directly connected to heat exchanger. Add water pipes and suggestion change nothing.

In my reactor design, they are connected directly. Each row of 11 heat exchangers has a water pump attached directly to the water-input on one end of the column. Sure, it's massive overkill in terms of maximum water production, but so what? Offshore pumps are dirt cheap compared to the rest of a nuclear reactor complex, and connecting them directly saves space and complexity. It also makes it easier to extend the design, since I don't need to remember when its time to add a new offshore pump.

Even if we assume that that isn't an option - maybe you're not building over water - you're looking at 5 pipe segments for every pair of back-to-back rows of heat exchangers: one at the end of each row, one between the two, and a pipe-to-ground on each end to connect to the next pair. That's 500 water in the pipes, plus 440 in the heat exchangers themselves, divided across 22 heat exchangers, so ~4.2s of operational time, as compared to the ~22.2s for the same setup but with 200-unit water storage.

[mmmPI]

That was frequent before 2.0, that was my favourite option, but currently given the new ratio water to steam, cutting off the offshore pump adds delay before the steam production stops ( the residual water represent much more steam). If that delay extend beyond the duration of the night, it can become useless for certain usage.

Yes, and that is exactly what I am trying to fix.

My point is that your suggestion should be unrelated to that particular matter because it has merits wether or not you accept that people have solution they consider fit to fix this problem.

Here is how i do it now in 2.0+ , with power switch (as a 4rth method to control steam production/consumption) with variation depending on wether it is for nuclear or boiler :

Power switch controlled power plant.zip

(5.2 MiB) Downloaded 1 time

Considering your previous objections :

1)The shutdown is actually slower than cutting the steam off with a pump, since now instead of just having to fill up the heat exchanger outputs and the pipes they feed directly into,
2)I also have to fill up all turbines (each of which also stores 200 steam) and the pipes between them
3)Except that's ignoring the great honking big tank farm that's there in the middle; the whole point of this exercise is to not cool down my reactors trying to fill that thing up, remember?
4)And most importantly, if I turn off the power switch, my factory blacks out. This is what we in the business call a bad thing.

1) Not really , when the point 2) is true, then as soon as the power switch isolate the nuke plant, the steam production stops.

2) Yes that's the main point i thought, to keep everything into a single fluid box to make it simple to control the nuke plant like it was possible to control cutting water input before. That's what i show in the demo setup, how you can use a power switch instead of any sort of pumps, that's how i fixed it for my games,with the same logic as you would have attached to the water input. You need to also fill up some steam tanks anyway, so the buffer in turbines an pipes are negligible to me since it's all in the same fluidbox.

3) i don't see any compelling reason to keep reactor temperature above an arbitrary threshold, i feel that's a "you" thing. To me the important part is that the electricity is reactive , that's why you have steam tank in the first place.

4) No, considering the scope of your suggestion to alter the buffer of steam engine and boilers and heat exchanger , i feel there are plenty cases when it's just fine to use a power switch, you mentionned one and i made a demo setup.

But that has nothing to do with my desire to control when the heat exchangers generate steam.

Yes, imo your desire would be better fulfilled by just asking to wire the heat exchanger and/or boiler instead of that indirect way of altering the entity buffer. Both aren't things i see negative consequences about, i would be in favor of both suggestion as mentionned. But if the reasonning is the one you have , i don't expect it to be implemented. I feel like you are saying : "i can't do that" ( and some people disagree), when really you mean "i can't do it this way" ( and some other people disagree), and you could be saying " i would like to be doing it this way" . Since there is no downside i can see , i have no objection and i won't be one the disagreeing person then.

I feel the positive arguments about how the gameplay can be enriched by adding wire on heat exchanger are stronger because it better suit what you want to achieve in practice in the way of controlling steam and temperature.

[Hurkyl]

3) i don't see any compelling reason to keep reactor temperature above an arbitrary threshold, i feel that's a "you" thing. To me the important part is that the electricity is reactive , that's why you have steam tank in the first place.

(I'm not the person this was directed at, to preempt any possible confusion)

Huh. I hadn't thought about this before. One of my first thoughts on what use such a thing would have actually seems pretty useful to me: by ensuring your reactors are sufficiently hot all the time, it makes it easy to avoid accidentally disabling steam generation when you expand and add new reactors, since you can ensure there is enough stored energy to keep all of them above 500 degrees.

[mmmPI]

3) i don't see any compelling reason to keep reactor temperature above an arbitrary threshold, i feel that's a "you" thing. To me the important part is that the electricity is reactive , that's why you have steam tank in the first place.

(I'm not the person this was directed at, to preempt any possible confusion)

Huh. I hadn't thought about this before. One of my first thoughts on what use such a thing would have actually seems pretty useful to me: by ensuring your reactors are sufficiently hot all the time, it makes it easy to avoid accidentally disabling steam generation when you expand and add new reactors, since you can ensure there is enough stored energy to keep all of them above 500 degrees.

That's a reason, not so much a compelling one in my view, if you decide to upscale your nuclear plant by a x10 factor, you will cool down the reactor beyond 500°C even if you started with them at 1000°C. It doesn't matter that you try to keep them hot at all time. Rather how fast you are going to scale up your power plant.

And it's already possible to add a condition on the fueling system to overidde everything and fuel the reactor when temperature is under 500°C. If your steam buffer are already full and you only added a couple reactor to a very long array already it may cause some waste, and in most case i feel it's unecessary to do, but it's possible.

[Hurkyl]

3) i don't see any compelling reason to keep reactor temperature above an arbitrary threshold, i feel that's a "you" thing. To me the important part is that the electricity is reactive , that's why you have steam tank in the first place.

(I'm not the person this was directed at, to preempt any possible confusion)

Huh. I hadn't thought about this before. One of my first thoughts on what use such a thing would have actually seems pretty useful to me: by ensuring your reactors are sufficiently hot all the time, it makes it easy to avoid accidentally disabling steam generation when you expand and add new reactors, since you can ensure there is enough stored energy to keep all of them above 500 degrees.

That's a reason, not so much a compelling one in my view, if you decide to upscale your nuclear plant by a x10 factor, you will cool down the reactor beyond 500°C even if you started with them at 1000°C. It doesn't matter that you try to keep them hot at all time. Rather how fast you are going to scale up your power plant.

And it's already possible to add a condition on the fueling system to overidde everything and fuel the reactor when temperature is under 500°C. If your steam buffer are already full and you only added a couple reactor to a very long array already it may cause some waste, and in most case i feel it's unecessary to do, but it's possible.

I find it peculiar you paired "Expand by a couple of reactors" with "Ensure you have a steam buffer to cover loss in generation" and "Massive 10x expansion!!!" with "Keep reactors hot so that the system doesn't go under 500 degrees", rather than pairing things the other way around.