So, my change to the durability system is merged and will be in the next GT6 release and is in the current testing release. Don’t worry about your reactor exploding, this change doesn’t effect neutron counts. One thing to look out however, is that the neutron maximum calculation changed, you don’t need to compare it to the “real neutron output” of a rod anymore, but to the amount of neutrons on the rod.
Responding to some feedback:
The uranium fluorite processing chain seem to a tad too much work compared to the other way of obtaining U235, although it is more profitable. Realistically the player only needs one U235, being able to then breed better fuel (when breeding gets rebalanced), so removing the other method of obtaining U235 seems to be the most reasonable way to balance U235. Maybe then the output of U235 from the process could also be lowered a bit?
New coolants like Na-K or ammonia are possible, but I don’t really see much purpose for them. Na-K would be a liquid metal, so it would probably be “breeder coolant”. Realistically it is a terrible coolant for your reactor, while it is liquid at room temperature, it will react violently to water and catch fire when contacting air. In the vacuum of space, that may not be as great a problem, but in your backyard… Not that this wouldn’t make for an interesting coolant, but the effort to realistically and purposefully implement these things as mechanics is simply too great. As for ammonia, I’m not really sold on it as it would just be another gas coolant, although a less realistic one.
Next thing I’ll probably tackle is rebalancing breeding to need breeder reactors. There are generally two ways I could do this:
- Higher neutron amounts needed. We are talking many magnitudes higher here. Neutron outputs onto breeder rods can get ridiculous: When outputting 10_000 neutrons onto a breeder rod, that means 10_000 * 1.5^(10_000 / 500) = 10_000 * 1.5^20 = 10_000 * 3_325.2567 = 33_252_567 neutrons per tick towards breeding process. Only 144_000_000 neutrons are currently needed for breeding thorium into U233, so the process would only take a whopping 5 ticks, a quarter of a second. At 20_000 neutrons you get 221_146_646_418 neutrons of progress, which would still process the rod in only a single tick if the neutron count required would be increased by a 1000 times. Exponential growth is clearly a bit ridiculous.
So lets say we want to balance thorium so it takes one minute at 15_000 neutrons per tick onto it. That is ~2_876_265_888 neutrons of progress per tick, meaning it would be 3_451_519_066_191 neutrons required for the rod to take one minute. I think this system is generally maybe a bit too complicated for the average user. Sure, higher neutron counts mean faster, but it is hard to gauge how much time it takes for a rod to breed with any neutron output at a glace, really needing a calculator. - The second approach would be to rework the breeding system completely with a new stat for breeder rods called “neutron loss”. It describes how many neutrons get lost when put onto the rod. So if you output 2000 neutrons from a fuel rod onto a breeder rod with a neutron loss of 1500, only 500 neutrons would arrive on the rod. Rods would only take exactly the neutrons onto them towards the breeding process, no exponential confusion.
That means a couple of things:
– Calculating how long it will take is significantly easier: just measure the neutron count on the rod and divide the neutrons required by that to get the number of ticks it needs.
– There is no huge efficiency benefit of having multiple fuel rods supply neutrons onto a single breeder rod anymore. Previously that would mean greater neutron counts and exponentially faster breeding, making it also more efficient. But now, since the neutron loss is subtracted from the neutron output of any of these fuel rods, adding multiple fuel rods will only scale speed linearly, but efficiency stays the same.
– Breeding efficiency doesn’t scale up as much, more neutron output from a adjacent rod will always mean more efficient, but the increase less significant the more neutrons are added.
– Neutron counts on the breeder rod will be a tad bit lower (because they got subtracted by the neutron loss)
I’m leaning much more towards using the latter approach, because it makes breeding potentially a bit simpler to understand, as well as better to balance.
Another thing I would like to do is make handling the output of breeding a bit less tedious. Currently, especially with the new changes to the durability system that actually make rods update durability each tick rather than each second, there is not much hope that the new fuel rods produced by your breeder reactor will stack.
I would fix this by added a new intermediary stage between the breeder rod and the fuel rod, the enriched rod. The enriched rod has no durability, so will stack easily. Inside a reactor, the enriched rod will capture and convert neutrons to heat at a 1 to 1 ratio, making it effectively a worse absorber rod. With the change to breeder rods having a neutron loss, the number of neutrons on the rod would therefore slightly and suddenly increase when a breeder rod turns into an enriched rod, allowing you to automatically detect it and remove the rod from the reactor.
This would mean that breeder reactors are slightly less dangerous, as the reaction doesn’t rapidly get faster when a breeder rod converts. Alternatively, the enriched rod could act as a reflector, to get that sense of danger back, but I don’t want people to use them purposefully as reflectors, but maybe I’m worrying to much about this?
To turn these enriched rods into actual fuel rods, I have multiple ideas:
- Turn enriched rods directly into fuel rods upon taking them out of the reactor. This would then also allow having them function as reflectors, as they wouldn’t be so exploitable. Though I will have to evaluate if this approach is even possible on automated extraction of the rod.
- Have some really simple processing/crafting recipe to turn them into fuel rods.
- Have a more complicated processing step, not turning them directly into the fuel rod, but into less than a fuel rod worth of the material the fuel rod would be made of.
What do you all think about this? What processing method for the enriched rod would you prefer? And what do you thing about the possible new breeding system?