Atmospheric Pipe Changes Megathread

[TrickyWolfer]

I agree, but here's the catch: these methods don't scale infinitely without you expending recources. Or are even capped. Stacking hotspots? Keep on printing those vent generators. And that doesn't go infinetly higher. Nuclear reactor? Hope mining does their job and the output is soft limited by the reactor exploding. Singularity? Most feeders require manual work and the ones that don't (e.g. PTL, trip wire laser, thermal paper printer) got nerfed/fixed.

The pipeburn? Once set up, it keeps on scaling. Without the welding, all you need to do is keep supplying it with oxygen. And the soft cap here is the pipe failure pressure. I personally don't like time through welding being the upkeep, though.

Okay, I could be incredibly misinformed about this as im not a TEG wizard so bear with me here.

From what I saw of a little bit of what people were doing with indestructible piping on TEGs felt, i guess just absurd. Like I distinctly recall one round, the temperature and pressure of the pipeburn had reached literal infinity and the TEG was producing more energy than most stars. I may be misinformed on that and am free to be corrected but there is really no reason that should be a thing you can do.

I feel like just saying its just because of making "high power" is a bit misleading given how absurdly high the power was getting on some of these rounds (again feel free to correct me on this but i am mostly sure that the whole reaching RW craze was caused by the indestructible piping)

but again, i could be fully misinformed on this so take it with a grain of salt

I mean, that's pretty much what people were doing. And exactly what the pipe-bursting mechanic tries to prevent. It was working fairly well with atmos pipes being non-constructable. Once the HPD was introduced, people abused manifold to create more or less what you describe. It's not quite infinte, but it was so high that it might as well have been.

I'll be honest the only times I ever see pipes explode is:
A) I was lazy and missed a pipe to reinforce with steel before standard burn chamber
B) Someone loaded a second plasma can into the hot loop before stronger reinforcements than steel

Perhaps to make it easier the HPD could accept a stack of sheets and reinforce placed pipes with the inserted sheets.

This thread talks about the very much high end of pipeburns. The kind that go even beyond what's needed for canbombs. So about changes that will mostly affect the pipeburn-nerds the most and noone else.

My main gripe about all of this is just the active nerf of atmospherics due to the perceived "high power". It is very much high-end pipeburn, I stand corrected, however if the "high power" part is the only problem, then there is no need to keep adding nerf to pipes since toxins would also need the pipes (and they don't make much of a ruckus).

People also severely misunderstood the TEG. I've seen countless new engineers trying to replicate RW burns, but couldn't even break terrawatts. It's not only about the manifolds leaking, it's not only about the mix, but the knowledge of pipe configurations and pray to god SS13 jank atmos doesn't screw you right here and there. TEG also boasts to be one of those engines that still needs an external power to function. Death of engineers due to APC hotwired is also a thing. 

All in all, I think TEG itself already has a lot of occupational hazard and challenges (i.e. Heat crawl through uninsulated pipes / Hotwired APCs / Need charges to construct the loop / Figuring out which map has good heat insuls and layout / Pray that your co-workers weren't fixing the vents to prevent heat crawl / enough friends to construct it within reasonable timeframe before getting yelled by cargo). An (almost) unbreakable pipe would be a very welcome feature to prevent the already complicated things a veteran TEG engineer have to put up. Really there's only 1-2 people that I know of that could pull this maneuver, not including me.

I really don't want new TEG players got downturned just because life gets really really hard for TEG engineers nowadays, especially if things breaking beyond 1e10 pressure. The fix I could agree on is definitely the "Stackable pipe reinforcement" to level resource trade-off, or even sell HPDs that could give you those pipes, but fully removing unbreakables is definitely not it, especially when the alternative is still very low.

I like Scaltra's idea on those passive management system, chemically enchanced pipe would also be beneficial.
Thank you Roman for putting out that combination could still bring the pressure up to Terra-Exapascal. it is enough for most of TEG engineers, however, one little problem I have with this method is that we'll be relying too much on mining rolling plasmasteel or whatnot. It's the same as hellburn waiting for OxyB molitz and that would meant these kinds of feats, which was originally reliable and rewarded for veterans, now as unreliable as the current state of hellburn. It is still a good thing to bring up though