Good Idea/Bad Idea

[Splatpope]

There's no pumps in the actual engine system itself, only in the inputs and outputs, so as far as I know, gas flow within each loop is driven pretty much exclusively by pressure (to be more precise, pressure differences at different points in the loop, caused by the one-way gates and the temperature-changing aspects of the system). That's why the visual indicator of loop pressure is a set of turbines - because pressure is a rough indicator of gas flow speed. Because the hot loop is constantly dumping heat into the cold loop, both loops need to be flowing at a sufficient and somewhat similar speed. If the cold loop is flowing too slow compared to the hot loop, then it won't cycle through the coolant pipes as quickly and as often as the hot loop cycles through the heat source, causing the cold loop's average temperature to rise and reducing the temperature gap (and therefore the power output). If the cold loop is flowing really, really slow, then it'll hardly be cycling through the coolant pipes at all and will be almost as hot as the hot loop itself, tanking output completely.

But if the hot loop is flowing really really fast, it shouldn't have time to properly transfer heat through the engine. Really, the optimal setup should be to have as slow and identical as possible flow in both loops. (Ideally it should be infinitely slow but hey you get why it's not worth it)

Also, a thing that annoys me a lot is the usage of pressure as some kind of mass unit in canisters and tanks. It works, obviously, but havign access to the actual mass would make things easier to understand. (And yes I am aware that pv = rT and that linear interpolation lets us calculate the mass of a full canister at temperature X because all canisters seem to have the same volume)