Are minireactors working properly?

[ppanda0421]

Hi,

I attached a minireactor to my charging station which consisted of 2 upgraded solar arrays and 8 storage batteries which were around 11-13% power each. I then inserted 3 plutonium cells into the system (resulting in 1500 in plutonium total). I turn the minireactor on and the vehicle display shows minireactor: 149K+ watts /hour which should fill my batteries to capacity in 15-17 minutes. 15-17 minutes later the storage batteries are at 100% but I only have 44 plutonium left. Is this normal? I didn’t know minireactors used up plutonium so quickly! Charging the storage batteries via sunlight would take 24 hours so I would’ve done that instead of using up precious plutonium cells!

Anyone have any ideas? Or what am I doing wrong? Thanks.

Build 8601
Win 7 64-bit

Mods
[
“dda”,
“Medieval_Stuff”,
“More_Survival_Tools”,
“nw_pack”,
“Experimental-Z-Level”,
“boats”,
“blazemod”,
“Tanks”,
“No_Fungi”,
“filthy_morale”,
“StatsThroughSkills”,
“manualbionicinstall”,
“makeshift”,
“modular_turrets”,
“Mining_Mod”,
“alt_map_key”
]

[Axema]

Plutonium cells are like ‘emergency switches’, in my opinion…
Well, atleast you recharged your storage batteries that quickly

[mlangsdorf]

Each unit of plutonium is supposed to provide 100 battery charge equivalents. You had roughly 280,000 battery charges worth of storage batteries to refill, so there’s a bug that they’re twice as good as they should be.

I really need to go fix reactor handling.

[ppanda0421]

Hmm. So minireactors are only good for charging batteries. I thought you could run a vehicle using only a minireactor. Plutonium cells are rare so feel free to push that bug fix to the very end of the ‘to-fix’ queue

Thanks for the clarification.

[Tazeell]

Here I thought they were burning too fast. I was always confused at how fast my reactor died on me. So they are intended to run out even faster? Twice as? Holy crap.

[ppanda0421]

Tazeell,

I think he meant the bug is they produce twice as much power. In my example I had 8 storage batteries so 8 x 40000 * 0.89 (11% charge remaining) = 284800 power to fill. I only put 3 plutonium cells. So 3 * 500 = 1500. Each unit is supposed to provide 100 battery charge equivalent. So 1500 * 100 = 150000. I gained an extra 134800 power. I’m fine with that as long as I get more juice per plutonium unit. Actually I thought they even produced more power than that,

[Vastin]

Each unit of plutonium is supposed to provide 100 battery charge equivalents. You had roughly 280,000 battery charges worth of storage batteries to refill, so there’s a bug that they’re twice as good as they should be.

Heh. As long as we’re being sticklers for reality: per unit mass, plutonium isn’t 100 times as energy dense as a lithium ion battery or even 50000 times… It’s got about 10 MILLION times the energy density.

Energy density | Energy densities of common energy storage materials

Not that I think plutonium cells should provide anything like that in the game - but even if you assume that a plutonium cell is mostly shielding, they’d still be representing orders of magnitude more power than a battery cell.

One other aside is that any sort of real plutonium based power source is going to have a fuel lifetime of months at a minimum - generally years. If you were to try extract energy from it much faster than that, you’d turn your containment system to slag or trigger a criticality. Generally speaking they’d tend to make more sense as a reliable long term, medium draw power source.

Given the technology of CDDA, batteries allow instantaneous draw off a large capacity anyway, so having an exceedingly fast power generation source like the way mini-reactors work right now isn’t actually very useful, unless you’re trying to run a MBT with an entire array of fusion guns and lasers on it.

[Tazeell]

Now that’s a lot more what I expected from these reactors, not a quick poof and done.

[mlangsdorf]

We really don’t know what plutonium cells and mini-reactors are, because they don’t work like any real world nuclear power device. They’re too energetic for RTGs and too small and not energetic enough for fission or fusion reactors.

[Lazy_lizard]

Issue: Overhaul minireactors based on NASA kilopower reactor.

TL;DR Kevin wants to replace the existing minireactor with something that will provide power perpetually (or near enough) slowly but be unrefillable.

[Vastin]

Yeah, an RTG would be a very low draw power system (a few hundred watts or so?) with a useful lifetime measured in decades.

Given the term ‘reactor’ we should probably assume that there is actually chain reaction fission going on in the mini-reactor, though of course how they achieve that efficiently in such a small volume with such small amounts of fuel is an open question. Sounds like an engineering challenge, but probably a simpler one than designing CBMs.

[Tazeell]

Now that sounds like a great change. Good stuff to hear!