Atmospheric Pipe Changes Megathread

[TrickyWolfer]

The old medals and goals are outdated and rightfully so got reduced in the past.

The thing is simple: the energy output is used for mechanics, not bragging rights. So energy production needs to be in line among most engines so you can add features to it properly. The TEG breaks, and has broken in the past, this very concept, which is why not many mechanics exist to use the power the engine pumps out.

100 GW is in my opinion around the upper bound of something you should reach of an engine (maybe that's even too much). that's it's right around where the singularity can end up with, with Geothermal and the Nuclear reactor sitting in the back with ~5 GW (Although dunno how it is nowadays with the changed nuclear engine, i haven't worked much with it after the plasma to radioactive fallout change).

The goal i personally would set is distinct goals in mechanics, not bragging-rights like the medals. And these benchmark for mechanics are:
1. Maxcap canbombs for toxins
2. 5 GW for the insta explosion PTL.

For Maxcap canbombs, ghc is sufficient. It's much easier to start with a low plasma/fart mix and much easier to achieve a canbomb-suitable temperature with that. For the PTL, like already laid out, the TEG is able to achieve that. And go far beyond, so that's already a possible if you don't tryhard far enough.

Maybe, just maybe if we get the engines to be roughly producing energy at a compareable rate, we could try to -do- more with that energy.

You're correct, really correct, however, there are some things I have also been considering:

The reason why the PTL kept lowered because it's getting harder and harder for people to achieve a certain power due to continuous balancing that lead to people quitting an already confusing (and complex) job in the station. There were a lot more engineers, so much that mechanics were still a separate job. Ever since the bad TEG updates, slowly engineers were quitting one by one, not because they wouldn't welcome a good balance, but it was pretty poorly implemented (every since the scaling leak was added, it took 3 years for HPD to come in!).

It might just be my personal preference, but let's try not to normalize lowering benchmarks.
I have heard singularities made in massive sizes and due to the new HPD, could make ultra-cooled plasma that could give you terrawatts of energy
I heard nuclears making gigawatts with the correct rod configurations and resource.
Geothermal can easily achieve gigawatts with a savvy enough engineer that could stack them and willing to dig inside the trenches.

These methods were also equally as hard and rightfully so. There are a sub-community of people trying to code-dive and optimize their setups: How many shields and arrays to build around a massive singulo? What's the behaviour of emitters? How many singulo would you need to stack? How to make the ultimate fuel rods for nuclear? What's the best configuration so neutron doesn't end up flying everywhere? How do I read the doppler shifts? How to stack the hotspots without mucking up the station? Given enough time, they too can (and will someday) break beyond terrawatts.

Mechanics is important, yes, there's a ton of engineers that wants to break the game and see how many power they could output. It's part of the game anyway. With how the recent time goes, you'd see more and more updates surrounding the usage of PTL and high energy output i.e. the mirrors to break open things in mining, making the energy beam a literal singulo feeder. It comes naturally within the sandbox environment, so I would say there is little to no need to break a mechanic that was exploited due to the ingenuity of players.

If anything, I do fully support a good balance, but definitely not like this. Not the idea of removing things in TEG just because they make high power by the perceived easy difficulty. The current updates were just making the environment way more dangerous than it should be, as well as reducing gameplays to just welding squatting challenge in an environment where cross-department gameplay is still a pretty massive issue