The idea is pretty simple. Stolen from Vintage Story, this suggestion aims to ease heat management of a Crucible with Solid Burning Boxes (albeit it would apply to others too) for early game by making Crucibles follow a logarithmic curve when heated up, mimicking the diminishing returns you get in real life when trying to heat up something that is already hot and the phenomena of very hot stuff cooling down faster than not-that-hot stuff. I do not know if the curve should be universal to all crucibles or dependant on the specific heat, heat transfer capabilites or another variable of each crucible.
So, the hotter the crucible is, the harder it gets for the Burning Box to heat it further.
The “curve” should work in such a way that if the crucible is at a certain temperature and the “HU/t” that it receives is sufficiently low, the temperature would effectively “cap”, making it so you can only get high enough temperatures with more powerful burning boxes.
I think that this would be kinda both annoying and a relief, opening the possibilites of using different burning boxes for different purposes: The maximum temperature your crucibles would reach would be now basically determined by the HU/t of your particular Burning Box and the various heat related properties of your crucible, also acting kinda like a passive safety system.
The function doesn’t seem to be hard to ideate and to implement into the crucibles. Would only consist of a slight tweak of the already existing function of its temperature increase.
It is a technical issue or more of a balancing issue?
Got an idea: What about a HU/t boost mechanic for Burning Boxes where you can “overclock”, boost up their heat power output (And the fuel consumption) via injecting either air, oxygen or KU power, just like if making steel?
The more KU power you put into the burning box, for example, the more powerful it becomes. Its efficiency would be kept the same and the boost would be more of a sort of multiplier, incentivizing the usage of more powerful burning boxes anyways.
I do not know if it should also add the small quirk of not being able to stop with the front face of the block blocked, as it now has another source of air, kind of. You would need to both cover the front and to stop the flow of KU or air into the box.
An alternative mechanic would be to treat heat like any other kind of power transmission system, possesing both a “quality” and a “quantity”.
In electricity, those values are the Voltage and the Current, respectively.
With pneumatics or hydraulics, even if they don’t exist in Gregtech, would be the Pressure and Flow (Amount of fluid/s).
With rotational power, those are the speed and torque. I do not know if in that order tho.
And now with heat you would have to manage its temperature and its HU/s. So now Burning Boxes have a maximum temperature they can deliver that could or could not depend on the type of fuel being fed and the material of the box itself, along with their HU/t that determines how fast can the box heat up a given mass.
For example, a low temperature burning box with high “heat current” could bring a crucible full to the brim with stuff to that maximum heat quite fast, albeit would be limited to stuff like melting meat or lead.
A High temperature burner with low heat current, on the other hand, could struggle with heating the empty crucible itself, but after a while it would eventually melt it down if not stopped.
Would be cool enough or way too complex to be worth it?