The motive I became a libertarian is because it's pretty much the only political idea out there that works in a logically consistent framework and doesn't rely on postmodern/pragmatic slop
To beg for the state to implement draconian regulations in favor of "the environment" is to be anti human. Environmentalism is usually just veiled misanthropic discourse.
What is production, but the use of nature for the betterment of the human condition? Must we not explore a mountainous range for its precious metals, else we "destroy the environment"? "Disrupt the birds"? "Unbalance the local wildlife"?
Most of the so called environmentalists will only come short of advocating for the complete destruction of technology, comforts, and overall high standards of human living in favor of the environment because saying so would be either too obvious, or too painful to admit. There's a more honest type of environmentalist, that advocates for the use of technology to lessen the impact of industry on the environment, but those usually find themselves advocating for state control, unfortunately.
The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a miracle for the human race.
First, I want to note that I investigated this mostly for fun, and I know this has almost 0 practical purpose, since fusion fuel is so cheap anyway.
With that out of the way, when using fusion power, you may have noticed that, if your power demand is lower than supply, the reactors won't actually reach their maximum neighbor bonus, thus giving lower temperature plasma, thus not using the fuel to its fullest.
I've found a reasonable method to (mostly) correct that, without using a million accumulators and making the reactors on a separate grid, that only connects to the accumulators when they're low and disconnects when they're full.
No, that's way too impractical, and frankly, inelegant. I have noticed that the reactors only stop getting max bonus when they get "output full" in plasma. So the solution is simple: only make as much plasma as you need. But if you can't connect the reactors or generators to circuits, then how do you control that?
The solution is quite simple: control how much coolant you inject into the system. You have to very carefully control how much total coolant you input to start with. Call that C. So then you make a condition for a pump to only give coolant to the reactors when total in pipeline> C - X, for some X. You then choose X in such a way that the system is never fully starved of plasma, so you don't get blackouts, but is never filled all the way up either, so that the reactors always have space to output what they produce. From testing I've found that X = 10*(G-1), where G is the total amount of generators, works pretty well. Don't be afraid to tweak this value as needed for a specific setup, though.
Now, this will not quite reach 100% efficiency, because just as the reactors are starting to run out of coolant, they don't instantly turn off, instead they output at a lower temperature. This however, is a very small effect, and you don't really notice unless you advance the game tick by tick.
This method has 1 big disadvantage though: because the reactors can't be on all the time, you won't be able extract the maximum potential from it, instead you're limited to 90% ~ 98% depending on the size of the system.
So doing this is not really a no brainier, since you have to choose between getting near 100% fuel efficiency, but not 100% power plant potential, or 100% power plant potential but bad fuel efficiency when demand is low.
So, in SE, you unlock this weak portable RTG right after solar panels, and the fission reactor, further down the line, is weaker than its vanilla counterpart. So this raises the following question: How much worth it are them compared to basic solar panels?
Well, that depends on the solar power efficiency of the surface, of course. From the wiki, we can gather that, considering that solar doesn't work at night, solar panels have an actual 70% efficiency compared to their nominal value. So we can consider their "usable" output as 21kw per panel, at a 100% solar surface (ie, Nauvis).
Then, considering these generators all occupy 16 slots, the formula to figure out whether solar panels are better or not becomes simple, solar panels are better whenever
21*16*E>G ,
Where E is solar efficiency and G is the generator output. Plugging in the specific values for G, we get that:
So a good rule of thumb is that solar is almost always better than RTG, except in cold surfaces, and any other reactor will almost always be better. Anyway, this was mostly to satisfy my own curiosity, but I thought someone might find this useful.
Good thing, because oil seems to be quite scarce on Nauvis on default settings.
I was watching the new default settings speedrun world record, and the runner pulls out this monstrosity. I imagine this is meta, but it's my first time seeing it, and I'm not sure wether I love it or hate it.
The true nukes mod and rampant are a match made in heaven. You spend the whole game desperately fending off endless attacks, and once you unlock nuclear weapons, you can completely crush the bugs like, well, bugs. Very satisfying
Pain.
Automated demolisher distracting
I see a lot of people here claiming steam buffer tanks are completely unnecessary for nuclear reactors since 2.0, but from my own testing, I found that, that is not completely correct.
Only reading reactor temperature and fuel, and having no buffer, can create outages in extremely high demand situations, due to the exchangers consuming the heat too fast, and the reactors not heating up fast enough because they're on a fuel diet. Of course, you could counteract this by having the temperature threshold be something fairly high (like 700+ degrees), but that then creates a problem of over consuming fuel during low demand.
I found that steam buffer tanks solve this problem: you can insert fuel on a very strict schedule of temperature <500 degrees, but open an exception to insert indiscriminately when the steam buffer gets below a certain point. This way, you get the best of both worlds: 100% fuel efficiency, and capability to actually use 100% of the reactors, if needed.
Of course, this is only an optimization that makes sense when you consider these edge cases, but still cool to think about, imo.