Recent TEG Changes

[Azrun]

I am super bummed that this has been leaving people frustrated.  I’m sorry if people have been feeling pushed into avoiding engineers.  Sorry to the engineering teams that got stuck with a lemon of a TEG earlier this week.  Sorry to mentor/admin staff for any influx of questions/confusion/rage.  

Intent
When I started playing engineer everyone was doing the same thing every time.  The only variance was how long an argument about pump settings went on for (and if led to some act of aggression).  Then either people stuck around to watch the numbers for brrrrr or they went off to never return.  I wanted to give the engineers something to fiddle with and engage with IFF they want to.  This does mean some of it going to be black box but you get to figure out how it works, if you engage with it.

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My Reality
Changes at the start of this month were just to resolve what I thought was a bug.  It didn’t matter which side inlet/outlet has more pressure just that there WAS a differential between the two and then it was going to pull some factor of that from the inlet and pass it to the outlet.  It made the cold loop work perfectly and forever.

To do that I added a fan/blower to the simulation to pressurize the gas on the inlet.  Now if there wasn’t enough pressure to overcome the outlet you would get at least a LITTLE bit. These changes went in Nov 1st.  The cost in energy for running the blower was set to science fantasy low to not punish people having to relearn the mechanics, or at least that was the original intention.

When I first heard of issues maintaining power on RP servers I checked the maps and was able to get the following powers with 2 furnaces:

• Atlas 1MW
  
• Clarion 360kW
  
• Destiny  300kW
  
• Horizon 500kW (layout of this map confused me and was achieve 989kW)
  
• Cog1 - Very inconsistent as pressure was equalizing too quickly
  
• Cog2 600kW
  

These times were after 15-30minutes, with some tweaks I was able to get even more power from them.  Just because I got those outputs it is an unfair expectation that someone working through this on their own, without having stared at the code, be able to do the same without a decent amount of trial and error which turns into a LOT of real world time.  Temps are going to slowly drop from furnaces and thus the power is going to dip as well over time. Once pressure equalizes you are kind of stuck having to pull gas from the system and then feed it back in or have temps rise somehow.  It sounded like this was generating too much of a spinning plates exercise on RP as you had to ensure pressure didn't end up equalizing.   So RP plate spinning, poor results on Cog 1, and lower barrier to entry  were why I boosted the minimum amount of pressure the circulators would generate.  This was then costed by having the circulator use more power to generate pressure (moving from what I thought was more science fantasy and more into science fiction with an ideal fan).  Sweet I get the costing I want and it should make things easier.  That change went in on the 13th.

After staring at my commit and learning that I can’t even spell “variant” correctly my most recent changes went in.  This was to provide the groundwork for future TEGs!  It was all coming together! You could put fluids in the circulators! You can [REDACTED] and repair the circulators!  There are TEG’s that favor the [REDACTED], just like real life TEGs!  For about 17sh hours there was a bug, with aforementioned TEGs, that could cause the round to start with a non-functional TEG, fortunately Kamades reached out to me after beating his head against a brick wall for an entire RP round.  This got fixed shortly thereafter and now there are some TEGs with some minor power-output tweaks.

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Mechanics:

• You want to maintain a loop of gas flow on either end.  Gas is going to flow from high pressure to low pressure so depending on the map you may have to do something to adjust that flow by either heating it up.  Depending on the map the cold loop is going to be an issue because cooling the gas compresses making it essentially go backwards (but thankfully there are valves that stop that).
  • If AUX ports are available on the outlet side of the TEG you can improve the pressure differential but filling up a gas canister there.
    
  • Freezers can be used to heat up the gas a bit to improve pressure differential.
    
  • The fan/blower should keep you covered.
    
• Circulator isn’t moving!
  • Ensure the APC has power and someone isn’t ruining your day.
    
  • If circulators are running but the TEG isn’t generator power they will drain the cell in the APC.
    
  • Ensure SMES has sufficient power output to charge APC so this doesn’t happen in the first place.  If the pressure differential continues to rise so too will the output of the SMES.
    
• Lube?
  • Use fluids with high viscosity!  Talk to a chemist near you! Bring them a fuel tank or something so you don’t use their precious resources.
    
  • Lubricant dictates how well the circulator functions which then is a +/- to that loops contribution to the TEG.
    
  • Char burns are the best time to play with lube! You should be able to achieve a steady power output and see the impact on adding the substance has on the system.
    
• But I don’t want to screw it up?
  • The TEG is shipped with sufficient lubricant to be equivalent to pre-patch.  That is your baseline.
    
  • Wrench the circulator with the maintenance panel open to open the drain valve.  Be sure to close it when you are done.
    

In practice most stations don’t pull much power, and the excess is just gravy.  Excess power feeds PTL (which is currently costed for Hellburns) or the nightmare of a hotwired station.  Some stations only have one SMES for the TEG so that is even less power as you only have one battery to fill.  Setting up the solars means you should have the freedom to bugger up the TEG ... and worst case vent the gas and start over.  Yell at miners to get you more rocks as needed and use that gas extractor!

Ultimately if you can’t get any power out of the engine there is a problem.  @ me in questions on discord or send me a DM, and if I’m available I’ll try to give some guidance.  I would much rather people have their own “Aha!” moment with some helpful hints or letting you know what is possible, but if you are lost and/or frustrated let me know and I’ll try to point out the problem... or I'll see about implementing a fix.

This is our goonstation to share, so lets keep it awesome.  Thanks for the feedback and please keep it coming.


most of my testing has been on Atlas and Cog2 as those two are the most convenient maps for silly reasons