• Terminal in reactor control room for information display, linked to:
  
• A floor mounted sensor in the combustion chamber tracking temperature, pressure, and gas composition (in relative amounts).
  
• A similar sensor that tracks the same variables as above but in a pipe.
  

• As loop pipes have a fixed volume, we could deduce and display the molar gas content instead of just relative amounts (this gets tricky because the atmospheric system relies on arbitrarily sized bignums to describe gas content, which are infinitely divisible, unlike discrete molecules/atoms. We'd have to pick an arbitrary number that coincides bignums with the concept of molarity. Or think of a better idea).
  
  
  
• Pipe sensors placed across critical junctures (like the input/output sides of the TEG, the input/output sides of the combustion chamber, etc) could derive the pressure differential, and along with the above information could deduce the drift velocity of the gas through the pipes.
  
  
• Taking the above information and factoring in the heat capacity of the measured gasses, we could deduce a derived amount describing the amount of energy passing through each juncture. This is one step behind what the TEG itself does, which is display the difference between such amounts in the hot/cold loops: the energy generated!)
  

• Temperature of combustion chamber interior (*****) - Tci
  
• Temperature across hot loop segment passing through combustion chamber (****) - Tcc
  
• Temperature across hot/cold loop pipe segments (***) - Tc, Th
  • This changes when the pipes burst, along with pressure, etc.
    
• Temperature across hot/cold loop generator in/out nodes (*) - Tgh, Tgc
  

• Pressure of combustion chamber interior (*****) - Pci
  
• Pressure across hot loop segment passing through combustion chamber (****) Pcc
  
• Pressure across hot/cold loop pipe segments (***) - Pc, Ph
  
• Pressure across hot/cold loop generator in/out nodes (*) - Pgh, Pgc
  

• Gas content of combustion chamber interior (*****) - Mo, Mp, Mc
  • Molarity of Oxygen, Plasma, CO2 respectively
    
  • or whatever we choose, instead of moles, like dimensionless coefficients
    

(10-09-2017, 12:46 PM)HotCoffeeMug Wrote: big words make brain hurt

also i still dont get it after sundance put it simply but if it helps people to work the engine better but basically changes nothing with how the engine works im fine with it.

(10-09-2017, 03:07 AM)Sundance Wrote: You seem to know what you're talking about when it comes to engines, apologies I skimmed through your post as the engine science is something that never really interested me, which i'll explain below.

I am however, familiar with other nerd shit such as derevitives over time, given my background in physics. My general question is; does the engine and by extension gas physics really something that can be pumped into a formula dt/dn? I read that even under general circumstance (i.e: Not a hellburn) it behaves under it's own accord. Increases over time yes, but whether it's quantifable to the sane mind is another question altogether.

Quote: HELLBURN NERD PHYSICS

This document answers such questions as, How do hellburns work on a deeper
level? Why is the PTL putting out as much energy as a quasar? Why is the
thermoelectric generator still working with all the pipes burst?

There are three critical things that make hellburns work:

* Characteristic gas values (P/V/T/amt.) held in arbitrarily-sized variables
(bignums)

* Atmospheric/Chemistry system ignores standard enthalpy of reaction

* Pipe (hot/cold loop) burst scheme works differently than how it is presented
on-screen

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bignums

SS13 was originally written as an atmospheric simulator by a physicist and is
impressively built. It uses 'bignums' to store the fundamentally important
values of gases around the station, specifically pressure, temperature, and
molarity (amount, volume, however you want to think about it). This has the
effect of making gasses infinitely divisible. In "real life", gasses are limited
in this regard by the fact they are constituted by amounts of atoms/molecules
which are at some point indivisible and finite. SS13 has no such limitations,
and can be compacted/divided to an infinite degree bounded by the server's
free memory (and not by bitness bounds exhibited by fixed-width floats, ints,
etc.)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Enthalpy and Le Chatelier's Principle

Secondly, SS13 has no concept of certain factors relating to specific enthalpy
and standard enthalpies of reactions. This is a little difficult to describe
without using verbose & impenetrable language, so instead here's a though
experiment that demonstrates what I'm talking about:

Imagine you have a bic lighter filled with infinite fuel enclosed in a hollow
sphere made of handwavium, a material that perfectly insulates heat and emits
zero black body radiation. The bic lighter ignites and burns perpetually.

In real life, the interior temperature of the sphere would only reach a finite,
stable point. "Energy", here, is in the form of Brownian motion of gas
particles, which is also temperature. As temperature increases, the
differential (perhaps, potential) for the oxidation reaction to "push" against
the system atmosphere decreases, and eventually you reach an equilibrium where
oxidation products, oxidants, and fuel all coexist.

In SS13, exothermic oxidation reactions aren't as intricately modeled and
energy/temperature is just some scalar quantity which is incremented with a
constant amount when oxidation occurs. The interior of the sphere's temperature
would diverge towards infinity.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Burst Pipes

Finally, the way burst pipes comprising the hot/cold loops work "under the hood"
isn't intuitive and the on-screen graphics misrepresent things: Burst pipes look
like they have large empty gaps in them that would completely break any kind of
flow. The reality (in SS13) is more akin to the pipes just forming a single
crack per tile that leaks only some of the gas, and never expands or forms more
cracks past the initial one. *The takeaway to this is that since there are a
finite number of pipe tiles, then there are a finite number of cracks, and a
finite "leakage" figure describing how much gas is leaving the system that is
achieved once all pipes are burst.*

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Putting It All Together

The second point concerning enthalpy allows gas in the combustion chamber to
reach infinite temperatures. As gas is pumped in and burns, the temperature
increases at a constant (albeit large) rate. In turn, this causes the hot loop
gas passing through the combustion chamber heat exchange pipes to increase in
temperature and pressure at non-constant rates.

Those rates are the absolute #1 most critical components of a hellburn.

There is an efficiency drop at higher pressures in the loops, as in the eyes of
SS13 higher pressures always means less quantities of gasses in the loops. Your
temperature increase rate has to out-compete this loss.

Your pipes will eventually burst. Every single pipe in the hot/cold loop will
burst. The aforementioned shows how this results in a fixed amount of gas
leaving both loops, and your temperature increase rate has to be so high as to
power-through this. Note that the amount of gas lost is initially very high as
there is still a lot of gas in the loops, but as that quickly approaches zero,
this effect diminishes.

Once the pipes burst, you will have an incredibly small amount of gas present in
the pipes. We're talking like, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an
atom. Because of bignums this is OK, but your temperature increase rate has to
overcome the diminishing heat capacities of smaller and smaller amounts of gas
mixing in the TEG from both loops.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'll update this as time goes on, as I realize I've forgotten and/or misspoke
about things, and keep a log below.


kremlin

(10-08-2017, 09:39 PM)Superlagg Wrote: Gotta be something to collect this data with MechComp. Do any of those things actually monitor things outside of packet dorkery? Like an atmos monitor, or something that records the exam text of something?

(10-08-2017, 09:39 PM)Superlagg Wrote: Gotta be something to collect this data with MechComp. Do any of those things actually monitor things outside of packet dorkery? Like an atmos monitor, or something that records the exam text of something?

(10-09-2017, 03:07 AM)Sundance Wrote: You seem to know what you're talking about when it comes to engines, apologies I skimmed through your post as the engine science is something that never really interested me, which i'll explain below.

I am however, familiar with other nerd shit such as derevitives over time, given my background in physics. My general question is; does the engine and by extension gas physics really something that can be pumped into a formula dt/dn? I read that even under general circumstance (i.e: Not a hellburn) it behaves under it's own accord. Increases over time yes, but whether it's quantifable to the sane mind is another question altogether.

(10-09-2017, 07:09 AM)medsal15 Wrote: Can someone explain the thread but with words so that a 5 years old can understand? Asking for my lack of comprehension.

(10-09-2017, 03:02 PM)atomic1fire Wrote:

(10-09-2017, 12:46 PM)HotCoffeeMug Wrote: big words make brain hurt

also i still dont get it after sundance put it simply but if it helps people to work the engine better but basically changes nothing with how the engine works im fine with it.

It's a computer and sensors that tells the tempurature, pressure and gas of pipes.

For the purpose of the splaining you can ignore the math and just think that it's a bunch of doodads that tells you A. what gas is in the pipes and burner room. B. How hot it is, and C. How much pressure it has. Maybe it even includes a nice graph that shows when something is horribly rising or horribly dropping. For instance Line goes up with tempurature is good because you can harness the difference as electricity. Other graphs might tell you whether the pipes will burst, or if someone has no idea what "flammable gas" means because they've filled everything with CO2 and Nitrogen.

I guess the dumbest way to explain what I think this concept is, would be to say that the engine is an excel spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers and this machine is what happens when you click the graph button.

• gas content of every tile, differentiating between tiles that have an active fire on them and ones that don't
  
• temp/pressure/heat capacity/fuel burnt/thermal energy of the gasses on the respective tiles
  
• the amount of gas entering and exiting the chamber, TEG, and pipe networks
  
• the respective rates of change (first derivative) and rate of acceleration (second derivative) of all of these. some things (like how quickly the heat capacity of burning gases is rising/falling will be omitted, because they don't convey any useful information