how to make steam engines more efficient

[your opinion is wrong]

is it just me or does steam engines use a lot of materials to run, I want to use the steam props because they look cool, but steam engines just eats up all my resources

basically how do i not make my steam engines not burn 10 mats/s while retaining enough power to do the run the entire ship + steam props

also why does my engine lose max power output goes down the more its used, when its resting it does like 15k, but when im going full speed and turning it goes all the way down to 8k

[NoobMaster69]

using power induces friction therefore reducing RPM and Power
Also make longer boilers for more efficeincy and use ACBs to control burn rate
Lower burn rates = More Pressure/volume per mat (more efficeint)

[jfblake90]

Not really efficient right now. I think I saw a steam balance/rework in one of their upcoming sprints though. Hopefully steam becomes efficient enough in time.

[Eudaimonia]

If done right steam is just as efficient as fuel, so that's not the issue here. When it comes to engines, both steam and fuel, there are 3 variables to consider. Size, efficiency and power. You can have two, never three. Meaning that if you want power and efficiency, it needs to be large.

Steam has a little quirk where the max pressure is twice what it can maintain, and it acts like a buffer where you can build up slightly more power if you're not using it all. This leads to the engine telling you that it has twice the power of what it will be able to sustain at full power draw, it's exactly 50%. So if you have a system that always draws max power like a laser, you'll need a system that displays double that.

Also using 10 mats/s as a baseline is not a good starting point. Sure it might be right for you now, when fighting planks of wood from the DWG. But things in this game scale up quickly, and when you're using capital ships costing 2M resources you're not gonna get by on such a small consumption.

[kumipuukko]

What I found out in my testing in couple last days is that steam engine is definitely NOT as efficient as certain fuel engine setups. Or I certainly want to see a proof for a steam engine on current version that can reach about 1800 PPM with a moderately sane setup (i.e. not burning things at only 1%). I've seen older examples in the internet that claim to go as high, but I can't replicate those results on current version.

That 1800PPM is reachable with ~15 fuel-per-matter refinery efficiency and about 120 PPF fuel engine setup; a relatively big engine, but still workable in a big vessel. Note, that 120PPF from fuel engine isn't exactly the maximum efficiency, but it seems getting higher than that gets very impractical, now that fancy turbo-setups do not seem to work as they used to.

A less fancy (and more compact) fuel engine setups seem to go lowest at around 60PPF, i.e. about 900PPM, which is somewhat comparable to best steam setups I could manage (730PPM). But still can not say "just as efficient".

Caveat for the stuff below; I did not try to scale it up to huge sizes, but what I have read seems to indicate that boilers made from small boiler parts are more efficient than ones made with the bigger parts. In my quick check, there isn't much of a difference in efficiency, possibly like 0.5%. Though I tried mixing larger size pistons and turbines to see how they affect... After all, the steam and the pipes are the same between all sizes..

After playing with steam engines based on results via googling, and then changing various parts while keeping rest the same, I managed to narrow it down to what really seems to work efficiently, and what does not. (At least on the relative small scale system I was testing with.)

The best power I could get out of a steam engine was, weirdly, via hybrid, i.e. using turbine to make energy, and then batteries+electric engine to make that energy into power. The smallish test setup I used gave about 730 PPM that way (sustained demand, of course, and burn rate control at 20%).

If using pistons and the gearbox instead, the same boiler and pipe setup gave only around 550PM (under full load).

If adding the wheel and belt generator on the piston based system, the amount of electric "power" got from the system was so small that I didn't even try to measure it accurately. I estimate something like 100 to max 200. Useless. Turbine would give about 1000. And while it produces that small energy, it takes away from the direct power output of the gearbox... so yeah, there are some balance mistakes in effect.

I tested steam propellers like a week earlier, and noticed that the steam propeller system (reduction gears + propellers to thrust) seems to be much less efficient than using the power to standard propellers, let alone making it hybrid and using electric engines for power and then to standard propellers. Definitely a direct balance error there, as the actual physical "power" should be exactly the same between going through gearbox to standard propeller, or going to reduction gear to steam propeller. The reduction gears have friction (and as if the gearbox would not have), but the numbers don't "add up" even when considering the friction, the difference is so big.

That is, steam propeller system seems to currently have some extra (in addition to friction) inherent inefficiency into it.

However, steam propellers have one benefit to them. Power and thrust per cross-section area used on the backside. The standard propellers can't reach even close to similar thrust/power densities. The larger standard propeller (3m) can do 750 force-units per 1m^2 when staggered, while the two smaller steam propellers (1m and 3m) can do 6000 force-units per 1m^2 (3m one staggered). (The larger ones are not as good, yet still many times better than standard propellers.) But the cost is indeed quite poor material-to-power efficiency, and more complicated arrangement, as the propeller shafts need to go through there somewhere and be aligned with the gears and piston system. Much unlike for standard propellers which mystically get the rotation power teleported from gearbox to prop.

(I also measured the PPM rates in that test, but unfortunately, I can't find the numbers now.. I just remember the end result as something like "few times worse efficiency than with standard propellers".)

All that said, the "effect vs. material used" efficiencies seem to be usually at most about equal order of magnitude, when each system is used in an efficient way, except when using propellers, where the difference is more like one order of magnitude.


So, as answers to original questions:
* It is not just you.
* If you really need the force-density on the vessel's back (or which ever direction you want to push), use steam directly only for the steam propellers, and try to use the smaller sizes. Everything else powered either via turbine-electric-engine, or adding a fuel engine (or even some RTGs). The turbine solution could be viable if there isn't enough room for fuel engine or RTGs, but note that the batteries for the electric engine do also take space (1 battery per 90power).
... and if possible, in addition to the steam propellers, stick a smaller number of standard propellers. Use those standard ones with higher efficiency system while slowly boating around, and crank the steam system up only when you need to go fast. (Though beware, larger steam systems take time to ramp the power output up.)
* The power going down was already explained well by Eudaimonia above. Basically, effective power of a steam system via gearbox is half the no-load power. (Note, the turbine doesn't have this halving effect on the info; what it reports as max electric/second is valid whether it is idling or charging batteries at its maximum rate. There could be a tiiny change, but, could have been just the final slow moments of the system stabilizing..)