which is better, forced air heat exchangers, or passive radiator lines?

[Church.exe]

I'm what I would consider early-mid game on my base and trying to get some power going using the gas fuel engine on mars. Right now my biggest issue is cooling it and while I have managed to get it reasonably cool (cool enough to run uninterrupted for a while before overheating) I still need a little bit of an extra kick to get it to be sustainable. For now I have been operating under the assumption that a forced air heat exchanger (active vents pulling air from inside my base and outside of my base through a heat exchanger) would be more efficient than a radiator pipe (a passive vent on the inside of my base with some radiators on the outside, or even a closed liquid pipe with liquid radiators on both the inside and outside of my base to transfer the heat) but I wanted to ask to see if anyone knew definitively.

[Darzan]

Generally you should not need any kind of vents while heating or cooling unless you plan to use this also as gas exchanger. You only need vents to get pressure inside pipes - more pressure means faster temp exchange. Then again, energy is very cheap and this should not be major concern if you get it working.

[Lim Dul]

For gas generators the best way of cooling is push cold air in and hot air out.

The active Vents have a nice mode, you can set pressureExternal and they will pull/push air that value. For my gas generator, I have 3 active vents in the 1x1 chamber with the generator set to "inside" with pressureExternal set to "30". They are always on and will make sure that the pressure stays at 30kpa (Two vents might be enough, but I would like to be safe).

And I have a volume pump pushing cold mars night air in. I regulating the setting with a PID Controller by Elmotix (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMloTZggXR5uuhAP-YWvK8Q) - but you can also manualy adjust the value. I have currently a pressure of around 20 MPa in the cold pipes and the setting is around 5 of the input volume pump.


Yo regarding your question - the best way for heat transfer is air cycling, :)