Steam pistons offsets!

[Ass Of Wizard]

Does anyone understands how after steam piston fix we need to set the offset for this type of engines?
I tried 3, 4, 6 cyllnders setups with many pistons offset options and still couldn't get a consistent RPM.
I'm also trying to put more pressure on them, like increasing the number of boilers or creating some sort of receiver, but that hasn't worked for me.

[TKTom]

I had the same issue, I would be interested to know if anyone has found a fix.

I suspect that the torque on pistons has become massively nerfed inadvertently and its just a case that they need more power to spin like they used to. However, because of the changes to the gas system and the fact that the boiler is limited to 10 pressure you just can't create enough pressure with the boiler.

There was a "boiler" on the workshop which was boiling straight out of a fluid tank rather than a boiler in order to get enough pressure, however this has stopped working because they disabled spontaneous creation of steam as their "fix" to boilers not working at all.

[Ass Of Wizard]

Originally posted by TKTom:

I had the same issue, I would be interested to know if anyone has found a fix.

I suspect that the torque on pistons has become massively nerfed inadvertently and its just a case that they need more power to spin like they used to. However, because of the changes to the gas system and the fact that the boiler is limited to 10 pressure you just can't create enough pressure with the boiler.

There was a "boiler" on the workshop which was boiling straight out of a fluid tank rather than a boiler in order to get enough pressure, however this has stopped working because they disabled spontaneous creation of steam as their "fix" to boilers not working at all.

There is a way to create pressure greater than in the boiler, you can make a reservoir after the boiler and pump pressure there, then open the valve going to the pistons - a steam receiver, like for example in cars with turbines (for air) in real life. In this way, you can create a pressure of 8-10 bar, but this does not help even for small pistons. can't get past the dead center, which makes me think it's the pistons' offset

[Ass Of Wizard]

It’s certainly terrible that we are forced to test the game for the developers instead of creating working mechanisms

[Nitty_Gritty1]

Already done by someone else, here is the guide:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2510085483
Also, the point of stormworks is to explore and discover things, as well as puzzle out problems. without this element of curiosity, this would be just another boring program.

[Ass Of Wizard]

Originally posted by Nitty_Gritty1:

Already done by someone else, here is the guide:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2510085483
Also, the point of stormworks is to explore and discover things, as well as puzzle out problems. without this element of curiosity, this would be just another boring program.

Thanks for your response, I appreciate your desire to help.
I completely agree about solving problems, explore and discover things, but when the problem is a bug, it's not the player's problem.
It’s very disappointing when you’re trying to solve a problem, you waste time and realize that it’s actually a bug.

I am familiar with this guide, it is wonderful, I used it myself, but after the Space DLC, it unfortunately ceased to be relevant in some places (I hope temporarily). If you try to download the blueprints that are used in the examples, you will see that they do not work now. In addition, I tried to use the offsets that are presented in this guide, unfortunately it did not help

[Shadowcub]

I've had success with this extremely advanced formula for offset: 1 / number of pistons

So four pistons = 0.25 offset

I haven't completed my testing for pistons, but got relatively stable results with this at a pressure of about 5 on a setup of four small pistons. This is when I stopped the test... because I was bored and "working" was a good place to stop and I couldn't find any concrete info of what was considered "good" RPS from before the update. If anyone has any benchmark numbers of pistons from before the update, that would be extremely helpful.

I did try a balanced offset with four pistons (two up, two down) and hit the same brick wall it sounds like you did until I tried the 0.25 offset. I know part of that is because I'm much more familiar with how gasoline and diesel engines work and know next to nothing about steam engines outside of how boilers work.

I did more extensive tests with the turbine and got that running just as well as pre-patch Reddit reports (off the top of my head, I think 166 RPS was reported as in the realm of very good and I was getting a fluctuation between 159 and 172). I think it really is fixed for the most part. It's a matter of adjusting to the new systems. Old guides and video tutorials are still helpful as far as setup is concerned, but I wouldn't go off any numbers from them right now.

Worth noting that boilers don't blow up when they run out of water. This can be cheesed for easy pressure control, though I wouldn't rely on this for an actual build in case it gets patched.

[Anwaan]

It's not the offset. Turbines aren't working properly either. Put some torque meters around and you'll see some strange stuff. using gearboxes I could get the torque up to over 56,000, but could only eak out a measly 8-10 rps no matter how many gearboxes or which way they faced. I even tried using gearboxes to feed torque into another turbine before pushing it out to load. Still caps at 8-10 rps no matter the configuration. My guess is there isn't enough pressure. Someone suggested it might be too much pressure, similar to the way liquid rockets are behaving but I haven't had time to test that yet.

[Anwaan]

Originally posted by Shadowcub:

Worth noting that boilers don't blow up when they run out of water. This can be cheesed for easy pressure control, though I wouldn't rely on this for an actual build in case it gets patched.

They don't blow up now because temperature no longer affects boiler pressure. With the default water, you'll only get 2.5. You have to add more water to get higher pressure.

[Ass Of Wizard]

Originally posted by Shadowcub:

I've had success with this extremely advanced formula for offset: 1 / number of pistons

So four pistons = 0.25 offset

I haven't completed my testing for pistons, but got relatively stable results with this at a pressure of about 5 on a setup of four small pistons. This is when I stopped the test... because I was bored and "working" was a good place to stop and I couldn't find any concrete info of what was considered "good" RPS from before the update. If anyone has any benchmark numbers of pistons from before the update, that would be extremely helpful.

I did try a balanced offset with four pistons (two up, two down) and hit the same brick wall it sounds like you did until I tried the 0.25 offset. I know part of that is because I'm much more familiar with how gasoline and diesel engines work and know next to nothing about steam engines outside of how boilers work.

I did more extensive tests with the turbine and got that running just as well as pre-patch Reddit reports (off the top of my head, I think 166 RPS was reported as in the realm of very good and I was getting a fluctuation between 159 and 172). I think it really is fixed for the most part. It's a matter of adjusting to the new systems. Old guides and video tutorials are still helpful as far as setup is concerned, but I wouldn't go off any numbers from them right now.

Worth noting that boilers don't blow up when they run out of water. This can be cheesed for easy pressure control, though I wouldn't rely on this for an actual build in case it gets patched.

Can you give me a workshop link to your test project please?

Because I'm doing the same with an "extremely advanced formula" and an offset of 0.25 and not getting any impressive result even above 1 rps.

I think that ideally we should work with increasing steam pressure for the pistons, but in fact we don’t yet have a way to increase steam pressure. The idea with a receiver gives a small increase in pressure, but this pressure is still not enough.

Which makes me think that this is a bug and even small pistons require an excessive amount of steam pressure

[Ass Of Wizard]

Originally posted by Anwaan:

It's not the offset. Turbines aren't working properly either. Put some torque meters around and you'll see some strange stuff. using gearboxes I could get the torque up to over 56,000, but could only eak out a measly 8-10 rps no matter how many gearboxes or which way they faced. I even tried using gearboxes to feed torque into another turbine before pushing it out to load. Still caps at 8-10 rps no matter the configuration. My guess is there isn't enough pressure. Someone suggested it might be too much pressure, similar to the way liquid rockets are behaving but I haven't had time to test that yet.

have you tried putting a load on the turbine? generator or use them as an engine for transport?
It seems to me that under load the problem will be more obvious

[crazynachos42]

Originally posted by Ass Of Wizard:

Originally posted by Anwaan:

It's not the offset. Turbines aren't working properly either. Put some torque meters around and you'll see some strange stuff. using gearboxes I could get the torque up to over 56,000, but could only eak out a measly 8-10 rps no matter how many gearboxes or which way they faced. I even tried using gearboxes to feed torque into another turbine before pushing it out to load. Still caps at 8-10 rps no matter the configuration. My guess is there isn't enough pressure. Someone suggested it might be too much pressure, similar to the way liquid rockets are behaving but I haven't had time to test that yet.

have you tried putting a load on the turbine? generator or use them as an engine for transport?
It seems to me that under load the problem will be more obvious

when under load the max rps ive gotten is just under 2 which is on par with pre update but the problem is thats with no gearboxes or anything, the new steam parts have basically no torque except wheels which actually function quite well

[Captain Oveur]

Steam pistons are fudged rn. My steam-electric generator on one ship used to make 300+ electric. Now it barely breaks 20…Yeah, less than 10% the original output.

[Shadowcub]

Originally posted by Anwaan:

It's not the offset. Turbines aren't working properly either. Put some torque meters around and you'll see some strange stuff. using gearboxes I could get the torque up to over 56,000, but could only eak out a measly 8-10 rps no matter how many gearboxes or which way they faced. I even tried using gearboxes to feed torque into another turbine before pushing it out to load. Still caps at 8-10 rps no matter the configuration. My guess is there isn't enough pressure. Someone suggested it might be too much pressure, similar to the way liquid rockets are behaving but I haven't had time to test that yet.

8-10 rps sounds about right. I was able to get an output of 159-172 on large generator with one turbine with no gearboxes. This is the same as what was reported as good prior to the patch (166 output). Steam doesn't really do high RPS from the units. The thing with steam is torque. Both turbines and pistons put out a lot of torque with low RPS and you want to convert that to RPS to use for stuff like props. That will also require a gearbox setup. They do not work like diesel engines, which put out fairly high RPS that you may then want to convert to torque for certain applications.

Originally posted by Ass Of Wizard:

Can you give me a workshop link to your test project please?

Because I'm doing the same with an "extremely advanced formula" and an offset of 0.25 and not getting any impressive result even above 1 rps.

I think that ideally we should work with increasing steam pressure for the pistons, but in fact we don’t yet have a way to increase steam pressure. The idea with a receiver gives a small increase in pressure, but this pressure is still not enough.

Which makes me think that this is a bug and even small pistons require an excessive amount of steam pressure

With some more digging, around 1-1.5 RPS was apparently good before the patch on the pistons. Again, I didn't work with them before the patch, so this is from other folks talking about it. What boiler pressures were getting you to 1 RPS?

I have to do some cleanup before I upload either my turbine or piston test benches because they're kind of hot messes right now in terms of organization. Not worth slapping them up there if they're confusing for anyone else to understand WTF is going on. XD Give me like 24 hours to do that and I'll send you links.

[Captain Oveur]

1.5 RPS was the absolute best you could get without resorting to exploits. Someone claimed to get right around 2, but I could think of no way that was possible without some form of assistance.

After the break and subsequent fix, pistons behave roughly the same as before in terms of RPS, but the torque is absolutely destroyed. Three medium pistons connected through three gearboxes to a medium generator is giving me less than 10% of the power from before the break/patch.

Formerly, pistons were high pressure and low flow. You wanted to push as high of a pressure as possible while limiting the flow with a variable valve. No idea what it currently takes.

Also, boilers still will explode. I’ve experienced it once or twice while testing things (turns out pressure relief valves are useless now).

[Shadowcub]

Originally posted by Captain Oveur:

Also, boilers still will explode. I’ve experienced it once or twice while testing things (turns out pressure relief valves are useless now).

Yes, they will explode from over-pressurizing. But not from lack of water (which although realistic--they won't explode per se; they will essentially burn themselves to death... IRL you absolutely do not want a boiler running dry).

What were some typical torque readouts pre-update? Was 1.5 RPS good for all the pistons or certain ones (e.g. medium)? Did the 2 RPS claim person explain how they did it, if you remember?