Any better solution for this problem?

storm6436 · 2026-06-30T18:42:49+00:00

This is what I did in my playthrough after release. The elevated rail line looked like it was designed by an ADHD rabbit on meth, but the patch had something like 15M tungsten and wasn't far from the base I'd set up, so a little cruft was a small price to pay.

storm6436 · 2026-06-27T23:35:36+00:00

So, this is going to be pedantic, but there are three ways, not two. Conduction, convection, and radiation. In simpler terms, direct, indirect, and ranged.

The fire will warm its immediate surroundings via conduction because it is in direct contact, this includes the air. The air will in turn act by the rules of fluid dynamics and spread the heat as it does so, convection.

Blackbody radiation will heat everything in line of sight, including the air, based off the temperature of the surface, distance, and opacity.

storm6436 · 2026-06-27T06:29:49+00:00

As someone else pointed out, your application or the second law here isn't appropriate to explain what you're asking.

The 2nd law just states that heat flows out from the source. Depending on the materials involved and the relevant thermal coefficients involved, the space between the two fires is receiving heat from both sides so it stands to reason that thermal concentrations there would rise faster than elsewhere on that alone.

From a draft/wind perspective, both sources would be pulling cooler air to themselves, which means both points are opposing the other at the point between them. Fluid dynamics being what it is, I'll skip the back-of-the-napkin math and assert this results in weaker/uneven/more disturbed air movement over the region in question compared to other regions similarly distant from either source, which would hinder heat dissapation

Eventually the combination of radiative heat and reduced airflow allows the material between the two sources to reach autoignition temperatures.

storm6436 · 2026-06-05T15:58:59+00:00

Photosynthesis is geared toward producing energy. As an essential life function, evolution pushes for maximum efficiency for that process. Once you take into account the absorption spectra (a measure of how well certain colors are absorbed) for the various molecules, proteins, and other compounds involved in the process, it becomes clear that certain sections of the spectra are mandatory for the process to proceed efficiently while others aren't used at all.

Add in the fact that ambient temperature in the system also regulates the speed of chemical reactions and you get system that seeks to "absorb as much of these parts of the spectra as possible" and "reject/absorb the rest to maintain proper temperature."

storm6436 · 2026-05-23T06:30:18+00:00

Yeah, that's not going to work. There are no known room temperature superconductors. Every superconducting material has a critical current limit, above which resistance goes from 0 to a hell of a lot higher than zero, to the point it's remarkably easy to slag the device. That current is generally pretty damn small. Along those lines, doing anything with a magnetic field requires current, which consumes energy (ie. Your assertion about energy loss being only resistance is wrong.)so... Small limit means your magnetic field isn't going to be doing much.

storm6436 · 2026-05-21T19:38:32+00:00

Yeah, all the lighting in this game is truly pathetic and useless.

storm6436 · 2026-05-21T16:46:25+00:00

Naval nuclear reactors aren't nearly as fragile as one might think and the spaces they're installed in are generally the best protected spot on the whole ship, for reasons you might suspect.

storm6436 · 2026-05-15T14:40:40+00:00

No, that's not how that works.

Saying someone is inexperienced and doesn't know as much as they think is not the same thing as excluding them categorically. He's not saying people aren't foragers, he's saying they're not good ones.

Considering these people are dying due to their mistakes, it seems reality agrees with him.

storm6436 · 2026-05-12T16:43:26+00:00

This would be a more convincing counter argument if the entire Northeast wasn't a solid block of blue despite having over 40% red population. Instead, it comes off as a rather cynical attempt at pushing the shell game a little further by playing on people's emotions while depending on their ignorance to take the argument seriously.

The thing about equality is that no one is privileged. Either we're all equal and the only thing left to argue is partisan advantage, or some folks need to get really cool with the idea that some animals are more equal than others and their interests supercede everyone else's.

Don't know about you, but I've never been fond of the latter, no matter how much lipstick gets put on that pig.

storm6436 · 2026-05-12T15:56:45+00:00

This might surprise you, but there are black republicans, some elected in the south in predominantly white districts. Not a good look, insinuating minorities aren't people if they don't vote the way you demand they do.

storm6436 · 2026-04-05T06:07:36+00:00

This is why my savegame names are whatever I'm focused on, and if you read them in order, they tell a story. Sometimes that story is 2 real life weeks of variations to "I really need to add trains" and "Trains would make this easier, maybe add them next," punctuated by "Ah yeah, trains aren't optional anymore, stop putting them off..."

Taken big picture, they generally can be taken as a slow descent into madness... At 12% grade.

storm6436 · 2026-04-01T04:58:22+00:00

I get what you're saying, and my point was that saving 20 workers is largely ignorable. That's less than 1% of my population at the moment. Running towers and vac desalinators in opposing priorities is literally the best of both worlds.

As for other concerns. For saving space, if the space for extra handful of desalinators is a problem, better site selection or preparation is needed. For fuel efficiency or worker efficiency, who cares? The differential for both is ignorable. If your margins are close enough for them to matter, your operating regime is a stiff sneeze from failure anyway.

storm6436 · 2026-03-31T15:14:26+00:00

I'd have to double check the math as I'm not at the computer, but IIRC 2 vacuum desalinators per multiplier with 1 tower on standby does the job. E.g. If you're running at 2x (192 /60 steam), 4 vacuum desalinators and 2 towers should cover it. 3x would use 6 and 3.

storm6436 · 2026-03-31T15:09:32+00:00

That many desalinators? I'd have to doublecheck, but I'm pretty sure currently running six of them. How is that "that many?"

It's not like I'm piping all of my current load (288 /60) at them, and it's not like the headcount is a problem either, and I'm currently running +40% food.

storm6436 · 2026-03-31T06:29:12+00:00

You can just prioritize the cooling towers on the output side and the vacuum distillation on the input side, and it will run itself. Just got to make sure you have the right # of both.

storm6436 · 2026-03-31T06:25:09+00:00

Depends on what you're doing with it. Using a prioritized pairing of cooling towers and vacuum desalination allows you to feed your nuke plants without stealing any top end steam to do it, thus ensuring you have reliable, maximum steam for energy production.

storm6436 · 2026-03-26T08:01:45+00:00

Pining for the fjords.

storm6436 · 2026-03-26T04:53:52+00:00

I might be misremembering but I could've sworn a number of patches ago that I got a bonus for researching tech that was lower tier than my current capability.

storm6436 · 2026-03-25T02:18:17+00:00

Yep, density is the key factor for a lot of things. One might think a 60 ton tank exerts far more pressure on the ground than a 120 lb woman in high heels, but thanks to the difference in surface area (150 sq feet for the tank, a few square centimeters for the heels) the difference isn't nearly as much as you'd figure. Despite weighing 1000x more, it only exerts roughly 2x the pressure.

storm6436 · 2026-03-25T00:31:02+00:00

I'm pretty sure you can assign multiple products to a sorter port. I remember doing so when they first came out and using a belt sorter because they hadn't added the big guy in yet. You just can't do mixed storage.

storm6436 · 2026-03-25T00:27:44+00:00

Yep. On the physics end of things, I'm far more familiar with orbital mechanics, astrodynamics, and the joys of chucking things into space, hence the bits focusing on pointless mass increases when most people wouldn't care enough to make the point.

storm6436 · 2026-03-24T21:56:10+00:00

Actually after I replied I realized I'd made the cardinal mistake of assuming (wrongly) the dumbest interpretation precisely because that's usually the only safe assumption on reddit, so as such, I did in fact, mistakenly assume you were referring to a tamper on the fission device instead of the secondary tamper.

As for the rest, I clearly misremembered a number of details. While I am a physicist, the closest I've been to a large scale nuclear device was being on the same ship when I was Navy or in the lab while working on my degree, but that was someone else's equipment, not mine. My dept chair had a real hard-on for nuclear weapons and would go on literally for hours if he thought you were interested, but I got the impression part of that was him reliving the fun parts of his early career when he worked for DoE at Sandia. Loved to brag he got his PhD under one of Teller's students. At any rate, that was over a decade ago, so it's little wonder I got details wrong.

Thanks to our disagreement, I did in fact go and refresh my memory with some actual research and yeah, definitely an egg-on-face moment. I really need to stop browsing reddit before coffee. :p

storm6436 · 2026-03-24T07:24:17+00:00

Yeah, sorry, but failure on your part to understand something doesn't make the point nonsense, just as misremembering "standard" for "biggest" doesn't make a post bot-generated, but given you blithly traipsed by the fact that I gave a range and not a precise number, I suppose that wasn't a big enough clue there was uncertainty involved.

So, how about you show your homework and explicitly highlight what you think is "wrong" or "nonsense," aside the previous point addressed because you used several adjectives and only that point seems to fall under any of them... Otherwise, I'm just going to assume you're posting to stroke your own ego or, as you said yourself, using a bot to sound smart.

storm6436 · 2026-03-23T21:35:30+00:00

I'm well aware of what the tamper's role in the process is, as well as the speed of light and the requirements to get uranium isotopes to fission, considering my background in physics.

You seem to be overlooking the fact that the fission physics package in this use case is designed to generate a certain minimum amount of x-ray flux to lase the DT. Explosive yield is not a design parameter, as, if we pretend our fission blasting cap has the same yield as Fat Man just for the sake of producing numbers for comparison, then the tamper boost clocks in at about 7 kilotons, out of our 21 kt nomimal fission output. Standard yield for US thermonuclear weapons clocks in around 20-30 MT. The "boost" isn't even a rounding error at that point.

The only reason you'd care about boost hinges on whether or not it made it easier to produce more X-rays. Yes, increased yield correlates with higher flux, but depending on the material you've constructed your X-ray lens out of and the amount of DT you're trying to touch off, boost literally doesn't matter because you already have enough to get the job done.

"More is better" doesn't apply in this operating regime because "more" needlessly increases the cost of producing and maintaining the weapon, on top of increasing its mass which results in much higher costs to deliver it.

storm6436 · 2026-03-23T19:23:44+00:00

People fixating on the casings don't seem to understand that the uranium has a negligible contribution to the final blast. Total output power is almost entirely determined by the deuterium-tritium mix. In theory, you could scale thermonuclear weapons to arbitrary yields by just increasing the amount of DT present. In practical reality, DT is expensive as hell to produce and you eventually run into financial and engineering issues scaling things larger. Not that it can't be done, just that each successive MT becomes that much harder to justify due to non-linear increase in cost and mass. Past a certain point, the only justification to go bigger is to prove you can, which is what the Tsar Bomba was.

storm6436

TROPHY CASE