Steam turbines and what's wrong with ONI right now

[SKull]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1625468652

Been trying for a while to get these two turbines working by following the requirements the game makes regarding the use of steam turbines. There is underpressure because of the pump I am using to get steam into storage and there is steam in which the turbine is submerged. These are basically the two things the game told me to do with its tooltips and alerts. And still they don't work, because now I apparently need "cold steam", which is supremely unclear. If I cool steam it will no longer be steam. That's the whole deal with steam. And the temp is about 110 degrees, which is almost as cool as steam can possibly get, once again because it stops being steam lower than 100 degrees. Just WTF do you want from me here?

And this is what bugs me about ONI right now. It fails at explaining itself in many situations, leaving people to scour the internet for secret answers or fiddle endlessly in sandbox. But I don't like sandbox. It feels like cheating and I play full games or I don't play at all. And just because you can do something in sandbox does not mean you can do it while playing a survival game, so I prefer learning while playing for real. And in the actual game itself, steam turbines are a frustrating, confusing waste of time as far as I can tell. And if the steam turbine was the only confusing, unclear and poorly explained piece of gear then I might not mind. But it's not. All sorts of stuff is either not explained at all or explained in a manner that just makes you even more confused and frustrated than before. Largely because of the extremely unhelpful alerts and tooltips. Doesn't matter in sandbox. Really matters in a proper game, where it takes many, many cycles to get everything set up to even build turbines at all, only for it to not work no matter what you do.

Be more clear!

[Angpaur]

Originally posted by SKull:

And still they don't work, because now I apparently need "cold steam"

Seems like more apparent here is that you failed to notice the red color of this message ;-)
The red color means that cold steam is a problem, not that you need a cold steam.

[Strygald]

The steam turbine is a weird clunky thing, by the time you are ready to build one you have a clear understanding of how machines work in ONI... or so you thought: liquid/gas input right? liquid gas output right? wrong. It doesn't end there, 5 openings below the turbine so I need to somehow push 10kg of steam per second through this machine.. that's 10kg * 600s = 6000kg of steam per cycle! LOL. oh wait, no I don't because it turns out I can block 4 out of 5 of the openings and just push a much more manageable 2kg/s through it for the same result. We don't know if this is intended or if it's an exploit.

Next, what am I going to do with 2kg * 600s = 1200kg of Steam per cycle?! am I going to vent that much water into space every cycle? am I going to store it in gas reservoirs?(another lol), so I guess the only other thing to do is build the turbine in a closed system.. ok so in a closed system I need to get all the steam coming out the top of the turbine and get it back underneath so it will keep passing through it. Using gas pumps is not really an option since i'd need 4 of them and that would defeat the purpose of the steam turbine being a power generator... sooo... there's a few creative ways of doing it: from using hydrogen to push the steam downward, to using some bizarre puddle of different liquids, to using doors. I settled on doors because it's more straightforward and reliable than the other creative options.

If I hadn't had sandbox to experiment and tinker with getting the steam turbine to work I probably would have ragequit ONI, fiddling with the steam turbine in survival mode would be incredibly frustrating.. takes ages to build the setup, and deconstructing parts of the setup usually involves getting steam and hot water everywhere.

In the end all this effort gives you 2kw of power, same as a petroleum generator.. except ranching 120 molten slicksters for a petroleum generator is much more fun and rewarding, relatively speaking. Turns out the steam turbine's main use these days is for cooling, so at least for this application nobody cares if the thing runs less than 100% of the time.


Here's a design(for cooling) I settled on which might help you develop your own, I like it because it fits nicely in 2 floors of 4 tile-high rooms.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1625567221