Atmospheric Pipe Changes Megathread

[tamakona]

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.

Yo, been busy so sorry I'm late to the conversation. There's been a lot said, so I'm sorry if I'm not able to cover all of them, however I will try to get my points across as best as I can. 

Ultimately, this entire discussion and thread was sparked by a change made to prevent pipe constructing for a specific technique of running the TeG from being "trivial". I've heard other reasons cited but as best as I can research this is the reason that Leah said themself for this change.

I'm gonna touch on this briefly, but I personally I don't think that the manifold loop is as trivial as most people think it seems. There are a couple of details about how the pipe systems work that make it finnicky. To me, invincible pipes are more quality of life than anything; just like most players I am highly averse to welder Sisyphus. Figuring out the details of how the system works, solving the puzzle, and seeing the funny number go up to the classic absurdist levels we all know and love in this game, in my opinion, is the fun. Having to weld pipes does not change that, it just makes the process less fun for no added benefit. Whenever I mention this people are quick to point to the reinforcement system and how it can be expanded, but I will explain later why I do not like the current iteration of this system very much.

Of course, all of that is just my subjective personal opinion, and overall many people seem to be in support of manifolds leaking. And I actually kind of am too, my issue is that by itself it's objectively not a very good idea given the context of the current state of the game. Like you mentioned yourself, it's a very targeted change that only aims to go tell some people "hey, stop doing this!". If the goal was to make pipeline system design more fun by making them more involved, then the leak change should have been part of a bigger set of changes overhauling the system to accommodate that. Your assumptions about pipeburns in the first place are somewhat misinformed; yes they scale really well, but they do not scale infinitely. There is a hard cap (as opposed to singulo which in theory could actually grow forever), and if your goal is to make as much energy as possible instead of reaching a high power output number to be funny, you'd actually slow your growth down on purpose. But if you slowed it too much or with the incorrect method, your engine could actually die from the blowers overdrawing APCs. Second, you are limited by your supply of fuel mix and oxygen. If these run out, no more burn. Granted, the pipeburn is so efficient that in the current setup it's unlikely to run out in a shift. But it's a resource cost that in fact exists and could be adjusted if needed for balance. These are some of the other things that could have been done if pipeburns making too high power too easily was an issue. 

The leakage change:
1. Does not make setups more complex or engaging than they are. In fact, you'd probably run the same setups as before, just with the added super annoyingness of welder Sisyphus.
2. It makes engineering rounds less diverse as you are locked into pipewelding should you choose to pipeburn, or simply not pipeburn. It removes variety and options, full stop. Pipewelding also reduces the amount of time you have for other activities such as station repair or whatever antag gimmick you wanna do or upgrading the engine with mechcomp, automatic PTL and gas inputs and whatnot.

Just to reiterate, I'm completely on board with manifolds leaking. But I think the overall system needs an overhaul and just releasing the one change like this doesnt add anything to the game.

[align=center]The Reinforcement System and Why I Don't Like It.
[align=left]There's a few things to tackle here. First, mechanically, how it works is that you hold sheets, then click on the pipes to weld them on. Hegh?!??!? That's just pipewelding with extra steps! It's the exact same fucken thing, although arguably you at least only have to do it once, but it's the same thing! If people don't like pipewelding how do you expect them to like reinforcement either?

Okay, this first point is a little overexaggerated. I think the welding mechanics overall aren't very fun, which isn't to say I hate it overall, I just think there's a correct way to do it, for example in the good game Barotrauma very good game game that is good the good barotrauma game good BAROTRAUMA GOOD, I really enjoy the welding mechanics. But pipewelding is more of a punishment for incorrect pressure management or pushing the limits of an engine too hard, so I'm not too tripped up about that.

What I really don't like, however, is the sheer reliance on mining and chemistry that the current system has. I think it's too much, and too little, at the same time (and this plays into my earlier point about how big system changes like this should be part of a bigger set of changes instead of one single pretty horrible change on it's own). First of all, while I understand that the objective is to push cooperation between departments, in practice it doesn't go that way. Mining gameplay is very much opening lootboxes, and you were always gonna be able to buy the ores from the fabs anyway. Placing a request with mining does not magically increase the bohrum spawn rate. And don't tell me about the quantum telescope, it picks rocks from a set list; it's also random and you have to go through 10 other red herring locations before you can start scanning at full speed. So what ends up actually happening is that the reliance on mining does not enhance inter-departmental cooperation, you are just loitering around in front of the fab-store waiting for someone else to open the lootbox for you. That's assuming the miner is punching rocks the whole shift, most of the time they've gone MIA at 20 minutes to go make spears. I can't even blame them for that, they get a whole ass forge, they gonna use the whole ass forge, and punching rocks get boring if you're not getting the tool upgrades for it. There's too little incentive for collaboration on the miner's part, and while I have seen some ideas on how this can be fixed, once again they should have been implemented at the same time as the other changes like the leaks.

In the middle of writing this post, I played a round where at about 70 minutes into the shift, chemistry still hadn't delivered the Chief Engineer the GHC they were asking for. I then went up to their counter, asked for methamphetamine, and got 400 units in less than a minute. And no, they didn't already have it, I saw the guy walk to the chem dispenser and make that shit. GHC is probably even worse than begging mining for materials.

ive actually gotten tired of writing so im gonna just post this as is, basically my points are
1. leak sucks, doesnt actually help the game if you look carefully
2. reinforcement sucks, should have discussed it deeper, i think it's a symptom of being a bandaid fix to another poorly thought out leak change years ago
3. we need to more thoroughly and collectively discuss highly encompassing changes like this in the future. i think it's kinda too late to rollback all the changes, but i do believe the current system can be reiterated to improve, starting with making mining-engineer collaboration more interactive and rewarding for both sides. (and also maybe another forum post discussing the topic of how much rng is too much)