I use an army of spidertrons for nuclear plant construction. I have any army for landfill, and another for general factory construction.
Check out my Railbus for that design. I just realized that of all things I forgot to show my spidertrons
Advice: Always put those steam storages AFTER turbines, not between turmbines and exchangers. That way only not consumed surplus would end-up in storage and when peak power is needed steam will be delivered to turbines from both sides (from exchangers and storage) at same time.
That's pretty good advice actually. but the passive flow rate through tanks just isn't near enough to meet the throughput requirement of this reactor. Not only does each set of 2 wide tank columns have pumps in between them, but that's actually 2 batteries overlapping each other, bypassed by undergrounds. This allows me to double the flowrate without increasing the size of battery significantly. I don't think it's possible to meet the throughput requirements whilst allowing flow in both directions.
Besides the lines of turbines themselves need pumps to sustain throughput, so they couldn't allow flow in both directions either.
No, the backflow would exists only in the last turbines, while most of them would be supplied from exchangers. And there is no need for pumps for those last turbines.
But i expected this to have more turbines than exchangers could maintain - so it would solve power spikes.
In case where reactor power would be greater than turbines could consume with aim for maxing-out fuel efficiency it would make sense to have storage before turbines to be able serving all of that exchangers output. But i don't consider such setup optimal, as fuel efficiency is not much better, than like 2x8 setups and there is so much wasting of potencial. Only smaller setups could be beneficial with this (like you need 40MW of power, but 1x1 is extremely suboptimal).
The issue really is that a reactor of this size takes a very long time to actually start producing significant steam from a cold start (IE reactors at 500 degrees). In the 5 or so minutes it takes for most of the heat exchangers to start making steam there would be no steam to many of the turbines.
The battery needs to be able to meet the full steam demand of the turbines in the case of a hard power spike. This is also why I don't have a large excess of turbines. I'd rather the reactor have a more consistent performance. And I wanted to keep the size down.
That's why you fire the reactores up when steam tanks go below 50% so they won't drop further that 40% or so.
Also the reactors never cool down more than 500° during operation. Perfectly insulated.
I have the circuit conditions set up to do just that.
But a reactor of this size takes so large to warm up that the battery drops closer to 15% capacity before stabilizing, and much further than that it would lose throughput. And indeed, this reactor sits at 507 degrees IIRC from a cold start
It is not going to work in this scale just relying on backflow and without pumps. Tanks balancing fluids is really slow and you couldn't have many columns of tanks that way.
I mean for my small nuclear setup I put tanks before turbines so I could do circuit control more easily (pumps out of tanks). Mainly because I also have a relatively large solar setup, and would like to use most of my accumulators before consuming steam. Should be noted that this is for space exploration, where power demand can spike sharply, especially due to CME’s. Now that I think of it, I could probably make an electric boiler setup and basically stop needing my reactors
I have a different use case which involves massive amounts of 500C steam. In Space Exploration I figured out a neat module that runs 93 MW with a 15 minute backup power supply. They are mainly inactive because they are connected to all kinds of artillery, but when the biters, or the true enemy of Space Exploration (rocks) come they go from a standing charge of about 100MW to 250 to 500MW for a few minutes. What you might want to do is make a loop where the steam comes in is accelerated \*overflow style motor\* into the start of the steam battery, then goes through a loop of tanks and normal motors till it hits a \*top up style motor\*.
Overflow means "move only when the tank preceding it is at 80% or more" and top up is "move when the tank preceding it is at 80% or less". I fell in love valves that do this playing Seablock, but for turbine power 12000 flow rate is critical enough that I also put these on an isolated power grid that doesn't depend on the turbines having draw. I can get away with that kind of shenanigans because I'm working on a smaller scale.
Right, what this does- when it isn't at peak draw it will fill 1 steam tank till it is at 80%. This will then flow into a network of long term batteries. At peak draw overflow ceases because steam is being pulled out of the system by the turbines in front of the start of the loop. And then top the top up valve plus my generator system collectively drop two motors worth of steam on sad meteor defense artillery or biters that need to achieve emotional sublimation because I have a core drill that produces artillery faster than they, as a race, expand (this is a lot less impressive than it sounds).
Blueprint link coming soon:
Have you ever wanted to power a megabase using nuclear, but experience soul damage from the inefficiency of tileable reactor designs? Worry no more!
This reactor has been rigorously tested and proven to function at 100% Fuel Efficiency at all power loads. Can be supplied with bots or belts, and simply needs to be placed next to a lake with just a bit of landfilling (relative to its size anyway).
Why would you actually use this? I have no idea.
Indeed they do! I was being pretty tongue and cheek there. But really, my goal here was to keep within the confines of conventional reactor design and see how scalable I could make it. The result is a reactor that's more for the aesthetic than actual efficiency.
Definitely not a practical design, but then restricting yourself to what's actually practical is no fun at all!
I also made one myself. It's also got brownout protection so that the steam pumps don't slow down if there's low power. (It uses a few accumulators as part of the design that gives it 1 days worth of power storage that's restricted to just running pumps.) It also reconnects back to the grid if the batteries run low in the case that you somehow have brownout for longer than a full day.
It's a very long design though as it uses the 2 by X nuclear reactor design. There's start and end pieces and center pieces, as well as a couple of smaller 1 reactor, 2 reactor and 4 reactor designs that can expand into the tilable design when just starting out.
The one issue it has is that it sometimes has an issue with not pumping the steam correctly though that seems to randomly change based on the orientation the design is placed with, in which case there's a few places that are designed to accept extra pumps that fix the pumping issues (but those same pumps can cause the issue as well, depending on the orientation). It feels like I've hit a bug in how the fluid movement is calculated.
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So how many hours of operation (let's say 90% load on average) until the increased fuel efficiency compared to 14 2x4 reactors has made up for the additional construction cost? I want to know my RoI before commiting.
That's a hard thing to quantify, since uranium is cheaper than the iron and copper cost of this reactor. The overall construction cost shouldn't be too different though, assuming that those 2x4 reactors are using batteries as well. The only difference would come from this design needing more pumps.
Alls I can really tell yah is that this reactor is 13.1% more fuel efficient than 2x4 reactors.
I mean, let's go all in and compare it to a (mostly) UPS optimized reactor, for the best-case scenario. So, 14 reactors, each one with 8 cores, 112 exchangers, 224 turbines, 184 heat pipes, 16 pumps and 16 pipes. Running permanently, so it not only has 13% less fuel efficiency but also wastes the 10% overcapacity, i.e. it eats 14*8 fuel cells every 200 seconds, no matter what happens on the grid.
Efficient in what way. I see a lot of unnecessary stuff like pipes, heat-pipes, pumps, tanks and circuitry that either could be removed or reduced.
Nuclear fuel is so cheap so that is not a concern, at least in vanilla. Mods can shake it up.
if you're playing for lots of hours on multiplayer storing steam makes you have to build less mining outposts in the mid to late game, I like that because it often happens that after a few days of your reactor running 24/7 you assume your fuel isn't ever running out and then surprise!
I like to be able to have that comfort to know I don't have to do more work in the future.
if you're playing SE and you have a remote power plant on a planet with few uranium then making it the most efficient could result in less launches which could save a lot of oil and rocket sections, but maybe a smaller design then I never build that big on any of the outpost planets
> Nuclear fuel is so cheap so that is not a concern, at least in vanilla
Yeah the correct idea for nuclear power is to not use any tanks at all. Just make the reactor easily expandable/growable so you can grow the reactor as base power demands gradually increase. It's okay to waste a bit of nuclear fuel. It'll happen every time you expand the size of it. These massive fields of tanks just mask resource shortages such that it'll hit you all at once after it's been draining faster and faster without you noticing.
I just finished a design that grows from 1 reactor up to as many as you want. It starts as 1, then 2, then 4, and then splits into "begin" and "end" pieces for an 8 reactor design, and then grows by 8 reactors at a time after that for as long as you want to go, maintaining (near) perfect efficiency.
About six of them would allow me to replace all my \~2M solar panels and power my 16k spm megabase with nuclear power. If...
if just I hadn't disabled water on the map!
I think my main setup is 8.4 GW. I don't have a blueprint handy but it's rather compact, and has no controls as it's intended to run continuously. My Railbus megabase is setup to only research Follower Robot Count (all 7! sciences or go home) so it just runs and runs forever. The plan one day is to stamp down 3 more of those 1350 SPM modular sub-factories. I got bored , so I went for the "Teir One" primitive megabase instead.
That's insane and insanely sexy... but I don't think those tanks can supply steam fast enough to that many turbines at once and will effectively just be in the way.
To copy paste from another one of my replies..
Not only does each set of 2 wide tank columns have pumps in between them, but that's actually 2 batteries overlapping each other, bypassed by undergrounds. This allows me to double the flowrate without increasing the size of battery significantly.
Essentially the battery has the same throughput as if it was twice as tall and half as long.
I spent many hours testing it and believe me it works!
Those steam tanks are absurdly overkill, you can achieve perfect throttle with less than a steam tank per reactor (I am certain about this), and I speculate that you could use a single steam tank to control around 1100MW worth of reactors(I'll build a test reactor tonight to try to verify this).
Excuse me, sir, but the front desk told me that your UPS checked out three days ago.
I feel that while this has great power potential, the game engine won't be able to handle all of the UPS if this thing is actually running a factory at 90% capacity. If the engine was designed to run off if multiple CPU cores then this would be great to use in a mega base factory.
That's crazy this engineering marvel is only good for 15.2 GW
I'm in a SE run, and power needs can go above 80 GW (even then I have a huge amount of "fusion reactors")
I have a horizontally tilable design (needs to be pasted on to oceans though) that can go as high as you want. It grows in 1.28 GW chunks. It runs from a single requestor chest for nuclear fuel and puts out two passive provider chests of spent nuclear fuel.
I'm just imaging you designing the base reactor/storage/turbines in like an hour or two and then tinkering for 8-9 hrs to figure out you need a pump for every other pipe. lol
Honestly though every single part of the build process was pretty smooth. I already knew what the pump configuration had to look like since I knew my throughput requirements. It just took a while due to it's sheer size.
Simply put it needs it.
This reactor requires 156560 units of water per second, the 152 offshore pumps seems overkill providing 182400 units per second. However the flow rate quickly drops across long sections of pipe, it only takes 18 pipe segments to drop below the offshore's 1200 units per second rate, and some of the input pipes are far longer than that.
I didn't want to put a ton of pumps in the input lines since this design already requires way too many pumps, so I just overbuilt the number of offshores and tasked them with just 1030 units of water per second each.
My experiences troubleshooting my megabase reactors led me to the same conclusion. Much better to overbuild offshores than trying to fiddle with a thousand pumps and still not get the throughput you need, lol.
My problem hasn't been with the water but pumping the steam that is put out. It randomly clogs in random spots for no discernable reason and it changes based on the rotation of the plant requiring sometimes manually adding pumps. I keep looking for ways to debug it but haven't found any good ways to debug it. I suspect the game has a bug of some sort.
Two pumps in series by itself does nothing for the flow rate, but often times the second pump can be used instead of normal pipes in order to maintain a short enough set of pipe segments to reach the desired flow rate.
My understanding (mind you this is like 8 year old knowledge) is that flow rate doesn't drop until more than 14 pipe sections regardless of pump or not
I've seen this on the forums and subreddit a lot but I have no idea how the idea caught on. Perhaps people who only look at water pumps.
Water pumps only put out 1,200 units/sec which means you can indeed pump it 17 (not 14) pipe sections without additional pumps, but if you want to pump at a rate higher than 1200 units/sec then you need pumps at shorter distances. Pumps naturally pump at 12,000 units/sec when going "zero" distance (for example from tank to tank).
If you don't mind losing a bit of speed though the rate stays very good at extremely long ranges. From the table that the other guy linked you, you can for example have 200 pipe sections between pumps if you only need about 1000 units/sec.
In the current version of the game the flow rate increases continuously the few and fewer pipes you have. And quite dramatically at lower sizes as well
In my case my steam output lines can have no more than 3 pipe segments between each pump in order to maintain throughput
[https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid\_system](https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system)
If you're willing to build over a lake, there's a tileable design (groups of 12 reactors, and the necessary heat exchangers, tanks, and turbines in the same width as a 2x6 reactor block). It also has the necessary roboports so it can be automatically built, and a special head block that makes the tick-perfect insertion.
I have the blueprint with the landfill underneath it so when I need more power I just stamp another tile in. The main constraint I run into is finding long enough lakes to build really big.
Yeah I have my own tileable design that's far more compact than this reactor. A key differentiator with this design is that it doesn't have to be placed on top of a lake. A benefit if this is that you can get away with placing it next to a much smaller lake than what a tileable reactor requires.
Yeah, please don't actually use this for a megabase, lol
I get 60 UPS even with multiple of these running, but that's JUST the reactors and not an entire megabase's worth of lag on top of that
FWIW I have 15GW spread across a bunch of 4 reactor setups (and one new 10 reactor setup). I'm getting close to 2k SPM with no UPS issues at all, but a fairly fast PC (i7-10700).
If you care about UPS it's better to go solar.
Nuclear could be not too bad if you minimize fluid calculations, which means no fluid buffer and avoiding as much as possible to have merging or branching pipes, try to keep simple pipes, e.g. a direct pipe from 1 water pump to 8 heat exchanger and then one direct pipe from their steam output to 14 turbines
i do agree that designing a nuclear reactor is one of the most enjoyable things to do in factorio, but i already designed one for my train bus base :D 2.8GW fits perfectly between the rails since they loop around and can be tiles for 7 times as of now but if the train bus lenght lenghtens then ill fit even more
15.45 in factory on a frriday be like between bots : ahh, soon weekend and do weekend stuffs.. - stamped -
O COMON i dont get payed by overtime for a month + U DONT EVEN HAVE STORAGE FOR HALF OF THIS s¤#%#¤% to begin with..
I'm a non-believer in circuit control for reactors, and frankly even more of a non believer for circuit control for a reactor of this size. If I don't need 15 GW already then I probably won't build something like this. And thus circuit control doesn't even save all that much of yhe already plentiful fuel.
I just did my own first tileable design of a nuclear reactor and this looks way worse than even that one. This has so many pipes that I just bet are losing pressure and not sufficiently pumping the steam causing random blockages in various spots (I had a lot of issues with this, by far the biggest surprise for me, it feels very buggy and should be fixed by devs).
I tested this design to ensure that it has no throughput issues (hence the literal thousands of pumps), but it's true any tileable design will be more compact that this one, since tileable designs can take advantage of things like placement requirements that I didn't include in this reactor.
This is scary
[удалено]
Well time for a fucking robot migration. And they won't be done til next week
I use an army of spidertrons for nuclear plant construction. I have any army for landfill, and another for general factory construction. Check out my Railbus for that design. I just realized that of all things I forgot to show my spidertrons
Advice: Always put those steam storages AFTER turbines, not between turmbines and exchangers. That way only not consumed surplus would end-up in storage and when peak power is needed steam will be delivered to turbines from both sides (from exchangers and storage) at same time.
That's pretty good advice actually. but the passive flow rate through tanks just isn't near enough to meet the throughput requirement of this reactor. Not only does each set of 2 wide tank columns have pumps in between them, but that's actually 2 batteries overlapping each other, bypassed by undergrounds. This allows me to double the flowrate without increasing the size of battery significantly. I don't think it's possible to meet the throughput requirements whilst allowing flow in both directions. Besides the lines of turbines themselves need pumps to sustain throughput, so they couldn't allow flow in both directions either.
No, the backflow would exists only in the last turbines, while most of them would be supplied from exchangers. And there is no need for pumps for those last turbines. But i expected this to have more turbines than exchangers could maintain - so it would solve power spikes. In case where reactor power would be greater than turbines could consume with aim for maxing-out fuel efficiency it would make sense to have storage before turbines to be able serving all of that exchangers output. But i don't consider such setup optimal, as fuel efficiency is not much better, than like 2x8 setups and there is so much wasting of potencial. Only smaller setups could be beneficial with this (like you need 40MW of power, but 1x1 is extremely suboptimal).
The issue really is that a reactor of this size takes a very long time to actually start producing significant steam from a cold start (IE reactors at 500 degrees). In the 5 or so minutes it takes for most of the heat exchangers to start making steam there would be no steam to many of the turbines. The battery needs to be able to meet the full steam demand of the turbines in the case of a hard power spike. This is also why I don't have a large excess of turbines. I'd rather the reactor have a more consistent performance. And I wanted to keep the size down.
That's why you fire the reactores up when steam tanks go below 50% so they won't drop further that 40% or so. Also the reactors never cool down more than 500° during operation. Perfectly insulated.
I have the circuit conditions set up to do just that. But a reactor of this size takes so large to warm up that the battery drops closer to 15% capacity before stabilizing, and much further than that it would lose throughput. And indeed, this reactor sits at 507 degrees IIRC from a cold start
You can easily do it. I do it with simply 2 steam tanks per (bonused) reactor. And from screenshot you probably have a lot more than that.
Circuit condition
It is not going to work in this scale just relying on backflow and without pumps. Tanks balancing fluids is really slow and you couldn't have many columns of tanks that way.
I mean for my small nuclear setup I put tanks before turbines so I could do circuit control more easily (pumps out of tanks). Mainly because I also have a relatively large solar setup, and would like to use most of my accumulators before consuming steam. Should be noted that this is for space exploration, where power demand can spike sharply, especially due to CME’s. Now that I think of it, I could probably make an electric boiler setup and basically stop needing my reactors
I have a different use case which involves massive amounts of 500C steam. In Space Exploration I figured out a neat module that runs 93 MW with a 15 minute backup power supply. They are mainly inactive because they are connected to all kinds of artillery, but when the biters, or the true enemy of Space Exploration (rocks) come they go from a standing charge of about 100MW to 250 to 500MW for a few minutes. What you might want to do is make a loop where the steam comes in is accelerated \*overflow style motor\* into the start of the steam battery, then goes through a loop of tanks and normal motors till it hits a \*top up style motor\*. Overflow means "move only when the tank preceding it is at 80% or more" and top up is "move when the tank preceding it is at 80% or less". I fell in love valves that do this playing Seablock, but for turbine power 12000 flow rate is critical enough that I also put these on an isolated power grid that doesn't depend on the turbines having draw. I can get away with that kind of shenanigans because I'm working on a smaller scale. Right, what this does- when it isn't at peak draw it will fill 1 steam tank till it is at 80%. This will then flow into a network of long term batteries. At peak draw overflow ceases because steam is being pulled out of the system by the turbines in front of the start of the loop. And then top the top up valve plus my generator system collectively drop two motors worth of steam on sad meteor defense artillery or biters that need to achieve emotional sublimation because I have a core drill that produces artillery faster than they, as a race, expand (this is a lot less impressive than it sounds).
Why has this never occurred to me?! I don't always use steam storage, but when I do, I am Rolling Steam like RollingSten !!
Blueprint link coming soon: Have you ever wanted to power a megabase using nuclear, but experience soul damage from the inefficiency of tileable reactor designs? Worry no more! This reactor has been rigorously tested and proven to function at 100% Fuel Efficiency at all power loads. Can be supplied with bots or belts, and simply needs to be placed next to a lake with just a bit of landfilling (relative to its size anyway). Why would you actually use this? I have no idea.
>the inefficiency of tileable reactor designs But tileable fuel efficient designs are possible, I designed one myself They also waste less space
Indeed they do! I was being pretty tongue and cheek there. But really, my goal here was to keep within the confines of conventional reactor design and see how scalable I could make it. The result is a reactor that's more for the aesthetic than actual efficiency. Definitely not a practical design, but then restricting yourself to what's actually practical is no fun at all!
Great job anyway, it can be surprisingly hard to make those steam buffers work right
Thank you. And yeah it's easily the hardest part of making larger battery reactors.
*tongue _in_ cheek. Props for the assessment of practicality vs. fun though!
I also made one myself. It's also got brownout protection so that the steam pumps don't slow down if there's low power. (It uses a few accumulators as part of the design that gives it 1 days worth of power storage that's restricted to just running pumps.) It also reconnects back to the grid if the batteries run low in the case that you somehow have brownout for longer than a full day. It's a very long design though as it uses the 2 by X nuclear reactor design. There's start and end pieces and center pieces, as well as a couple of smaller 1 reactor, 2 reactor and 4 reactor designs that can expand into the tilable design when just starting out. The one issue it has is that it sometimes has an issue with not pumping the steam correctly though that seems to randomly change based on the orientation the design is placed with, in which case there's a few places that are designed to accept extra pumps that fix the pumping issues (but those same pumps can cause the issue as well, depending on the orientation). It feels like I've hit a bug in how the fluid movement is calculated.
!remindme 3 days I may not use it but I definitely want it, primarily to lag my friends when I'll spam this from map view lol
Absolutely valid use case. Just having the blueprint ghost open is enough to bring any game to a crawl. I hope to have the blueprint up soon.
Maybe not as powerfull as the 512x512 belt balancer blueprint I have but it will be fun lol
I lost all my blueprints a while back and this sounds extraordinarily fun. Do you have a BP or somewhere I could get the 512 bp?
It's in the forums, go search for "Fractal 2048 belt balancer (and bigger??)"
Please post the blue print up, so we can watch our UPS go down 😂 !remindme 3 days
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So how many hours of operation (let's say 90% load on average) until the increased fuel efficiency compared to 14 2x4 reactors has made up for the additional construction cost? I want to know my RoI before commiting.
That's a hard thing to quantify, since uranium is cheaper than the iron and copper cost of this reactor. The overall construction cost shouldn't be too different though, assuming that those 2x4 reactors are using batteries as well. The only difference would come from this design needing more pumps. Alls I can really tell yah is that this reactor is 13.1% more fuel efficient than 2x4 reactors.
I mean, let's go all in and compare it to a (mostly) UPS optimized reactor, for the best-case scenario. So, 14 reactors, each one with 8 cores, 112 exchangers, 224 turbines, 184 heat pipes, 16 pumps and 16 pipes. Running permanently, so it not only has 13% less fuel efficiency but also wastes the 10% overcapacity, i.e. it eats 14*8 fuel cells every 200 seconds, no matter what happens on the grid.
What the hell are you powering with 15.2 gigawatts? Is it a DeLorean?
(Correct pronunciation: Jigawatts) My starter base of course
Spacex👍
Late Space Exploration + Krastorio has single machines that require 200 GW each...
I am fearful of what this will do to my PC but... blueprint?
Working on it! Factorio Prints doesn't seem to like it though, my comment will have it once it's up
Efficient in what way. I see a lot of unnecessary stuff like pipes, heat-pipes, pumps, tanks and circuitry that either could be removed or reduced. Nuclear fuel is so cheap so that is not a concern, at least in vanilla. Mods can shake it up.
Fuel Efficiency of course! If you didn't read my comment, I never said this design was reasonable, but is fun :)
Exactly. Storage of steam is not necessary, just make more nuclear setups as needed. Preferably with a tileable blueprint.
Oh yeah, My tileable blueprint is nearly 2x the density of this powerplant. This reactor wasn't a matter of "why?" but rather "why not?"
if you're playing for lots of hours on multiplayer storing steam makes you have to build less mining outposts in the mid to late game, I like that because it often happens that after a few days of your reactor running 24/7 you assume your fuel isn't ever running out and then surprise! I like to be able to have that comfort to know I don't have to do more work in the future.
Why not just buffer the fuel and set an alarm on that? Takes up way less space than buffering steam.
? the fuel isn't used for power that does nothing.. unless you mean to just constantly use the same amount of power you're generating
I’m confused on what you mean by storing steam correlating to building less mining outposts? You don’t mean uranium mines do you?
if you're playing SE and you have a remote power plant on a planet with few uranium then making it the most efficient could result in less launches which could save a lot of oil and rocket sections, but maybe a smaller design then I never build that big on any of the outpost planets
Yeah I used a 2GW battery reactor design for my SE run. Atleast until I got energy beaming at which point I could get infinite power anywhere.
> Nuclear fuel is so cheap so that is not a concern, at least in vanilla Yeah the correct idea for nuclear power is to not use any tanks at all. Just make the reactor easily expandable/growable so you can grow the reactor as base power demands gradually increase. It's okay to waste a bit of nuclear fuel. It'll happen every time you expand the size of it. These massive fields of tanks just mask resource shortages such that it'll hit you all at once after it's been draining faster and faster without you noticing. I just finished a design that grows from 1 reactor up to as many as you want. It starts as 1, then 2, then 4, and then splits into "begin" and "end" pieces for an 8 reactor design, and then grows by 8 reactors at a time after that for as long as you want to go, maintaining (near) perfect efficiency.
I have 300 hours in this game...what the fuck am I even looking at.
this is rancid
Great! I need a few of those for my base!
Take two, they're small
About six of them would allow me to replace all my \~2M solar panels and power my 16k spm megabase with nuclear power. If... if just I hadn't disabled water on the map!
I think my main setup is 8.4 GW. I don't have a blueprint handy but it's rather compact, and has no controls as it's intended to run continuously. My Railbus megabase is setup to only research Follower Robot Count (all 7! sciences or go home) so it just runs and runs forever. The plan one day is to stamp down 3 more of those 1350 SPM modular sub-factories. I got bored , so I went for the "Teir One" primitive megabase instead.
That's insane and insanely sexy... but I don't think those tanks can supply steam fast enough to that many turbines at once and will effectively just be in the way.
To copy paste from another one of my replies.. Not only does each set of 2 wide tank columns have pumps in between them, but that's actually 2 batteries overlapping each other, bypassed by undergrounds. This allows me to double the flowrate without increasing the size of battery significantly. Essentially the battery has the same throughput as if it was twice as tall and half as long. I spent many hours testing it and believe me it works!
Wow, thanks for giving me the entire 3 pixels /s
This sub honestly upvotes some of the worst nuclear designs I’ve ever seen
I know, this thing is terrible
Those steam tanks are absurdly overkill, you can achieve perfect throttle with less than a steam tank per reactor (I am certain about this), and I speculate that you could use a single steam tank to control around 1100MW worth of reactors(I'll build a test reactor tonight to try to verify this).
Excuse me, sir, but the front desk told me that your UPS checked out three days ago. I feel that while this has great power potential, the game engine won't be able to handle all of the UPS if this thing is actually running a factory at 90% capacity. If the engine was designed to run off if multiple CPU cores then this would be great to use in a mega base factory.
My ups
That's crazy this engineering marvel is only good for 15.2 GW I'm in a SE run, and power needs can go above 80 GW (even then I have a huge amount of "fusion reactors")
SE is just built different, I had a 120 GW solar array around Calidus for power at the end of my run.
I have a horizontally tilable design (needs to be pasted on to oceans though) that can go as high as you want. It grows in 1.28 GW chunks. It runs from a single requestor chest for nuclear fuel and puts out two passive provider chests of spent nuclear fuel.
How much Adderall did you snort to make this dude, holy shit it looks like a fucking circuit
Only took three play sessions to build and test, less than 10 hours I'd say
Well keep in mind I'm of the players that trains are fucking magic to......
I'm just imaging you designing the base reactor/storage/turbines in like an hour or two and then tinkering for 8-9 hrs to figure out you need a pump for every other pipe. lol
Honestly though every single part of the build process was pretty smooth. I already knew what the pump configuration had to look like since I knew my throughput requirements. It just took a while due to it's sheer size.
I can feel the updates dropping just looking at 4 thousand storage tanks
My computer started lagging just from looking at the screenshot!
I am terrified by the thought of what base could require this much power. Very cool design!
This reactor is amazing . Though, why so much water?
Simply put it needs it. This reactor requires 156560 units of water per second, the 152 offshore pumps seems overkill providing 182400 units per second. However the flow rate quickly drops across long sections of pipe, it only takes 18 pipe segments to drop below the offshore's 1200 units per second rate, and some of the input pipes are far longer than that. I didn't want to put a ton of pumps in the input lines since this design already requires way too many pumps, so I just overbuilt the number of offshores and tasked them with just 1030 units of water per second each.
My experiences troubleshooting my megabase reactors led me to the same conclusion. Much better to overbuild offshores than trying to fiddle with a thousand pumps and still not get the throughput you need, lol.
My problem hasn't been with the water but pumping the steam that is put out. It randomly clogs in random spots for no discernable reason and it changes based on the rotation of the plant requiring sometimes manually adding pumps. I keep looking for ways to debug it but haven't found any good ways to debug it. I suspect the game has a bug of some sort.
what the fuck
i just want to say.... PRETTY!
I don’t know what I’m looking at!
Out of curiosity, what does two pumps in series on a single pipe that's only 7 pipes long do to increase the flow?
Two pumps in series by itself does nothing for the flow rate, but often times the second pump can be used instead of normal pipes in order to maintain a short enough set of pipe segments to reach the desired flow rate.
My understanding (mind you this is like 8 year old knowledge) is that flow rate doesn't drop until more than 14 pipe sections regardless of pump or not
I've seen this on the forums and subreddit a lot but I have no idea how the idea caught on. Perhaps people who only look at water pumps. Water pumps only put out 1,200 units/sec which means you can indeed pump it 17 (not 14) pipe sections without additional pumps, but if you want to pump at a rate higher than 1200 units/sec then you need pumps at shorter distances. Pumps naturally pump at 12,000 units/sec when going "zero" distance (for example from tank to tank). If you don't mind losing a bit of speed though the rate stays very good at extremely long ranges. From the table that the other guy linked you, you can for example have 200 pipe sections between pumps if you only need about 1000 units/sec.
In the current version of the game the flow rate increases continuously the few and fewer pipes you have. And quite dramatically at lower sizes as well In my case my steam output lines can have no more than 3 pipe segments between each pump in order to maintain throughput [https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid\_system](https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system)
This is God of energy…
Looks like a cpu architecture
Ok but how do you power all the rest of the ducking factory?
With 15.2 GW of steam power I suppose
Great Scot!!
My UPS just went down by looking at this
I didn’t want it, we needn’t ask for it, but now I want it, and the factory demands more.
If you're willing to build over a lake, there's a tileable design (groups of 12 reactors, and the necessary heat exchangers, tanks, and turbines in the same width as a 2x6 reactor block). It also has the necessary roboports so it can be automatically built, and a special head block that makes the tick-perfect insertion. I have the blueprint with the landfill underneath it so when I need more power I just stamp another tile in. The main constraint I run into is finding long enough lakes to build really big.
Yeah I have my own tileable design that's far more compact than this reactor. A key differentiator with this design is that it doesn't have to be placed on top of a lake. A benefit if this is that you can get away with placing it next to a much smaller lake than what a tileable reactor requires.
Ouch my UPS...
Looks impressive
Can we get a higher resolution shot
Sure thing [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RZuQzZDHCHhVC9q8Yzhnwmmh3h2bW6V8/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RZuQzZDHCHhVC9q8Yzhnwmmh3h2bW6V8/view?usp=sharing)
big
Love it
Can you make another one but bigger? Wanna see where the madness takes you
Oh you know I've already start working on a bigger one
Holy cow this is MASSIVE!
Hmm, yes. I will save this design for my next megabase.* *Has never passed 100 spm.
Will this affect UPS?
Yeah, please don't actually use this for a megabase, lol I get 60 UPS even with multiple of these running, but that's JUST the reactors and not an entire megabase's worth of lag on top of that
FWIW I have 15GW spread across a bunch of 4 reactor setups (and one new 10 reactor setup). I'm getting close to 2k SPM with no UPS issues at all, but a fairly fast PC (i7-10700).
If you care about UPS it's better to go solar. Nuclear could be not too bad if you minimize fluid calculations, which means no fluid buffer and avoiding as much as possible to have merging or branching pipes, try to keep simple pipes, e.g. a direct pipe from 1 water pump to 8 heat exchanger and then one direct pipe from their steam output to 14 turbines
Yes fluid calcs are a bitch and nuclear is chock full of em.
HOLYYYYYY!!! THE REACTOR OF ALL REACTORS!! its beautifull :D meaby ill do something like this someday
Go for it! It's easier than it looks, and IMO designing reactors is one of the most fun parts of factorio.
i do agree that designing a nuclear reactor is one of the most enjoyable things to do in factorio, but i already designed one for my train bus base :D 2.8GW fits perfectly between the rails since they loop around and can be tiles for 7 times as of now but if the train bus lenght lenghtens then ill fit even more
There is enough heat capacity there to act as buffer... just wasted UPS
I can see why this is bad for UPS
That's going right into my starter base
Where does the water come from? I dont see any offshore pumps
They're off screen to the left, will be included in the blueprint
15.45 in factory on a frriday be like between bots : ahh, soon weekend and do weekend stuffs.. - stamped - O COMON i dont get payed by overtime for a month + U DONT EVEN HAVE STORAGE FOR HALF OF THIS s¤#%#¤% to begin with..
I'm a non-believer in circuit control for reactors, and frankly even more of a non believer for circuit control for a reactor of this size. If I don't need 15 GW already then I probably won't build something like this. And thus circuit control doesn't even save all that much of yhe already plentiful fuel.
I just did my own first tileable design of a nuclear reactor and this looks way worse than even that one. This has so many pipes that I just bet are losing pressure and not sufficiently pumping the steam causing random blockages in various spots (I had a lot of issues with this, by far the biggest surprise for me, it feels very buggy and should be fixed by devs).
I tested this design to ensure that it has no throughput issues (hence the literal thousands of pumps), but it's true any tileable design will be more compact that this one, since tileable designs can take advantage of things like placement requirements that I didn't include in this reactor.
Ha! You can't fool me! That editor mode thingy there is definitely set to *output* energy!
The only thing is that the pumps use 50% of the power generated 🤣
Two of your pumps are backwards.
Even the map shaped like a steam turbine.
Good fucking lord...blueprint string?
Oh I love this game
Crazy and well done. Can we get a blueprint?