Power plants!

[AseaHeru]

I just want the fence so i can have burnt tainted flesh…

[Hawk_v3]

A few quick thoughts and then some more examples of possible usages.

You do not have to run an ENTIRE power plant in order to get power for usage. Let us say that there IS a power grid, and that you do know how to run the plant.

By disconnecting lines that are not between your shelter and the power plant (nuclear in this example), you can have one power plant running one place.

Now, a plant is usually putting out a few gigawatts of power, but you’re gonna be using kilowatts, even with an electric fence, so about a megawatt max output is all that’s needed.
This means that you need to run at most one reactor pool (most plants have a few, I think) and one turbine. At maybe half-capacity if that. Given that you’ve checked the auto-SCRAM system, and nuke plants trip that automatically when things get real bad, then you’re good. With cooling systems meant for four reactor pools, your one pool is basically fairly safe. You need to make ($power_plant_uses+$transmission_losses+$your_uses) power. Heck, live in the plant.

On the other hand. Run up all four pools and all the turbines to standard operation, and LET THERE BE LIGHT.

More Electricity Usages:
Tesla Coils (Big ones)
Powering a Lab, or Military Base and ALL the things inside them that that entails~ (Long term goal, maybe? End up running and owning a Lab and a Plant in your own stronghold.)
Powering a proper radio transmitter.
Running a Desktop Forge.
Operating big doors.
Bringing a chunk of the Internets back online so that you can access specialist information (Like how to run all that lab equipment.)
Charging UPSs for coilguns, railguns.
Oooh. If there are microwave uplink stations for satellites too… Powering the World’s Largest Microwave Weapon. Point that at a town, and while all your bottled water explodes, so do all the zombies.

Thoughts for other things linking in: If the goo spread through the water supply, the current treatment plants obviously don’t filter it out. You and/or other survivors would have the task of rebuilding part of the treatment plant with gear from the lab to start the cleanup process properly.

[KA101]

Thanks for the insight.

IIRC the non-Clean H2O has a chance of being conventionally diseased–similar to the way that bites get infected. Clean Water never gives one food poisoning.

I like the idea of finding a way to filter out the blobs, though. Suspect that it could be taken farther; once one figures out how to filter water for the blob (call it “Pure Water”?), applying that to Hospital machinery would only be a matter of time. It’d be long, difficult, and require NPCs to participate…

but it’s hella better than the current cure.

[TaintedHolyWater]

Fire? Fire is the current cure isn’t it? Burn it until it stops comming back hasn’t failed for me.

[Hawk_v3]

Fire’s a good way of fixing all of Cataclysm’s horrors.

[AseaHeru]

except the lack of health.

[KA101]

Fire? Fire is the current cure isn’t it? Burn it until it stops comming back hasn’t failed for me.

Nah. Fire is the quarantine measure at best, but since the patient is dead afterward one might as easily call taekwondo or machetes the cure. (Fire is easier to administer to a large group, though.)

The Science Lab folks discovered a way to remove zombism from humans & revivified corpses. It’s one of the log entries, though since the read-log-entry routine pulls them sadorandomly you may or may not see it.

As they say, though, the cure is worse than the disease.

[Hawk_v3]

More thoughts around nuclear power plants.

You’re likely to find that, unless safely shutdown before the accident, most nuke plants will have scrammed by the time you get to them. Now, a scram means that a reactor either cuts the links holding control rod cores up, or in some other methods, literally fires the control rods back into the reactor. Scramming basically renders the reac core useless… For generating things, that is.

Shoreside plants use water for emergency coolant, flooding the core with it if needed to try and contain the heat. Inland plants would also feasibly use water, dropping the mains pressure greatly. The mains the Blob got into… What does the massive radiation of a possibly damaged core do to a blob? I sure as hell don’t know, but it would probably be nasty.

Now, moving on to other people talking about nuclear plant control, refueling and suchlike. I have done a little bit of research.

While it’s no longer available for free, there used to be a BWR Nuclear Simulator for the PC. While not fully covering everything in a plant, it covered the main basics, and I picked up control in about half an hour. It took me four hours of practice to have the control rod retraction pattern down, and from that point, I could run the plant from cold to 100% operation fairly easily. It helps that the plants are kinda idiot proof, popping up big lit warnings when things go past safe limits, and auto-scramming when you reach dangerous ones. Though in real life a scram is very expensive to fix, and an emergency operation, in a sim you could scram as many times needed to learn. After all, I doubt a lone survivor is going to try and run a safe shutdown of a plant when he’s the only one at the controls. Scram that reactor pool, fix the problem, bring one of the others up.

Coolant is recycled, and usually completely safe. It’s only if there’s a leak it’s dangerous, and the heavy water in the reactor is sealed.

Fuel rods. There are lots of types, but for… Ease of actually doing things with them, I propose we would use the CANDU reactor type as standard. This is a CANDU fuel rod:

They are 50 cm long, and 10 cm diameter. That would be easily handleable. As for the danger of them?
This is a fuel rod being inspected.

Yeah, I think that says enough. With a dosimeter on your body, you’d be fine, as long as you took iodine and kept an eye on the meter.

Back to the plants themselves. If you find a safely shut down plant, the chance of it having fuel in the reactor is of course, almost certain. Fuel rod stocks are not likely to be many at all. So, you’d need to find fuel rods. While you might get lucky, and stumble on a nuclear repository, it’s far more likely that you’d find fuel for your plant in… A scrammed plant. With those blobs, and if there’s zombies in the core… Well, radiation doesn’t give you superpowers, it kills living cells. Zombies will be fine. The OTHER thing it does is that long term exposure can make the exposee radioactive. Those normal green zombies shuffling around inside the plant? You better hope you have a dosimeter, or you might be getting a very high dose.

Finally. Once you’ve found the fuel, there’s a new problem. Without moderator rods, you can’t pack the fuel up tight and close, because that’s what they’re like in a core. So, transportation will either involve very heavy shields, or you’re gonna need multiple trips.

Disclaimer: I am in no way a nuclear plant engineer, or physicist, and I may have misunderstood what I’ve read, though I would hope not. If you find evidence countering what I present, please, present it!

If people are willing, and like my musings, I’ll present thoughts on the other plant types mentioned, Solar, and Hydro, then look into power and the Grid. If someone would remind me of what year this is set in, I will also present a few other types of powerplant that could be used, some small-scale, others not so much.

[AseaHeru]

You might have to clean some intakes. there are whole companies for doing just that.

[Hawk_v3]

Like, the coolant intakes? From the sea/rivers? Or more internal ones?

[KA101]

No objections to power-plant background on my account.

Cata takes place in the near-future–enough that energy weapons actually exist, but aren’t mainstream. I think there’s an actual year somewhere but don’t know it off top/head.

[Hawk_v3]

I am aware this is a fair bump, but I said I’d detail more of the plant possiblities, and this is the second of four.

SOLAR PLANTS

Types:
There are three main types here, two can be done small scale, and one of them can only be large scale.

Photovoltaics.

Flat panels that turn sunlight directly to electricity. These are a common sight these days, so might be found on some houses as there is no reason why fleeing people would take this kind of permanent fixture with them. This can also be scaled up to mass areas of sun-tracking panels.

Solar Water Heating.

This too, is getting more common these days, and is usually a series of sealed black tubes connected to a pipe, or a parabolic trough pointed at a black painted pipe. The maximum temperature that a SWH system can get to is about 200 celcius, though consumer systems have temperature monitors and suchlike to cool off the heat. Again, this is possible as a mass system.

Solar Furnace.

Large scale only. A massive array of mirrors pointing at the top of a tower, which contains either water, or molten salt to boil, or heat and run to a heat exchanger.
Generates a lot more power, because of the size, and also the centralised tower meaning that there is a larger, more efficient generator plant than a decentralised consumer SWH plant.

Plant Ideas In Detail.
Photovoltaic:

Found in some houses, a full system consists of the following parts. Eight Panels, one Inverter, four batteries. Batteries can overload and become useless for storing charge, and emit toxic fumes. Panels are affected by acid rain, though some may be intact. Inverters can fail if there is no load to drive, the batteries are full and there’s power coming in. You can salvage these to run some things, though buildings may only have one working component. A single panel, inverter and battery is enough to drive a light. Adding more increases power generation, but this system is very vulnerable to acid rain. Slicing up a tent and using it to cover the panel will save it, but will stop the panel from generating anything. These systems are built usually to catch the sun directly, and will only work properly if built facing correctly, which may require an intermediate step of a glass sphere and a paper strip to find out the line of the sun through the day.

Large scale plants will need panels replacing, the industrial inverters repairing and the capacitors and battery arrays repairing and replacing as well. If tracking control, or tracking motors are broken, your power will only generate for an eighth for the day.

Solar Water Heaters:

Very much the same as PVs for a house system, except the components are three panels of four sealed tubes each, and a heat exchanger, or a water tank, which will need to be filled, and a pump and control unit. Some very rare setups may use a Molten Salt tank, and a heat exchanger as a heat “battery”.

This could be used for a form of central heating, and also in places with enough water and plumbing for a Hot Bath, which is a great morale boost.

A Large Scale plant of this type is unlikely to exist without being hand-built, as though it can get hot enough for generating power, or hot water, this type of plant is usually the below.

Solar Furnace:

A large boiler, high in the air in a tower, which is focused on by a hundred or more mirrors over a large area. This generates a lot of heat, and otherwise works by turbines and generators as any other steam-turbine plant. Of note:
Mirrors are likely to be broken from acid rain, or zombies. The plant itself needs solar tracking motors on all the mirrors, or it will never generate power, and a working control system, which requires, as all plants would, an INITIAL power source to be able to activate and use it. The boiler needs water source, probably from the mains, and Blob will jam it right up. Don’t be on the tower if the mirrors are frozen in a focused position, as if even half of them catch the sun, it’s gonna get very hot up there, very quickly. Getting one of these plants running is a matter of finding the mirrors, and getting filtered water. Acid proofing might be craftable by a high level chemist, and a filter by a high level chemist/mechanic.

Thus ends the musings I have on solar power, and next time is hydro.

[KA101]

You have my permission to necro the thread any time you like; thanks for the update.

I’d like to know why you feel “blob” infested water would auto-fail the system. Bear in mind that the infestation is undetectable in groundwater and can pass existing sewage-processing systems. I’m pretty confident that despite referring to it as the Blob, it wouldn’t actually manifest itself as a non-water substance.

(At the risk of spoilers, it might be more accurate to call it the Marloss, given what it does, where it comes from, and what it achieves. But “blob” is faster and avoids spoilers.)

[Hawk_v3]

Because otherwise, it’s a very easy power source to run with no downsides, and no real limits. If you acid proof the panels, and have water flow, it makes power.

Why not, then, in the interest of balance, make it harder to do so?

After all, again, extreme heat may affect this in interesting ways, and otherwise, one of these plants is near-free power.

[KA101]

Some alternate barriers to starting a solar-furnace:
Having to climb the tower, fix goodness-knows-what in precarious conditions (Cumbersome safety gear or DX check every other turn or so, fail and fall), knowing that if you wait for enough light to see w/o your flashlight that you’ll have (say) 10 turns before taking 10 damage/turn from the heat?

Mechanics rolls to synchronize the mirrors?

Initial startup power, as the synchro-motors ain’t gonna run themselves? (Assuming that water will flow through the generator without powered pumps…)

Probably my biggest concern about making the infestation a barrier is that my understanding of the lore conflicts with it being suitable. I can appreciate wanting to make a self-sustaining power plant difficult to achieve; no disagreement there.

What I want to avoid is setting up an arbitrary barrier: namely that the Substance which completely escaped public detection in the groundwater, passes right through sewage plants without impairment or fouling the system, and otherwise is perfectly transparent to human life* (everyone’s infected, including the PC) somehow makes the solar-furnace fail. How would that work, and why would a player guess that it’s an issue?

If the player can reliably filter* the Substance from water, filtering it from the bloodstream is only a matter of time and resources. That high-level chemist/engineer would have found the foundations of a long-term cure. To me, that seems more important than establishing an essentially free power supply, though both would be endgame objectives.

*Either Clean Water retains the infection, or existing means of Cleaning water remove it. Respectfully suggest that if the infection can be boiled out, it either wouldn’t gum up a system relying on boiling water, or would be comparatively trivial to remove. (More of an engineering than a chemistry challenge?) If an electrically-powered Water Purifier can make water suitable for use in the power generator, then all one really needs is a large enough startup jolt, then the plant can purify its own water.

[bubbadoo14]

Well with power on the mind I think I would like to add my two cents to this. My parents have set up an electric fence before and it lasts forever with a single car battery (We live in a rural town and thats the cheapest way to contain horses). So I think that with some mechanics you can remove a car battery from a car or Rarely find them in garages and houses. Also for balancing the wires used for it might be hard to find, and also weak. I was thinking it can easily be destroyed by zombies, but it will kill a few who try? IDK I am not a programmer (tis’ but a dream of mine to code)

[Hawk_v3]

That kind of electric fence is meant to contain things, not utterly fry anything that touches it. For a lethal fence, you would need thick gage cable, a resistor to prevent power surges blowing the upline things, and a chunky fuse in case it gets short circuited (rather than going through a zombie.)

[Hyena_Grin]

I was just thinking about this in relation to larger cities/etc (once upper storey Z-Levels are implemented)

It would be kind of interesting (if complicated to code probably) if you could get a power plant running and it would light up the attached city. Suddenly lights are on, interiors start to warm up, fridges start to work, and fresh water starts to run from taps. Of course, all of this would be sporadic; there would be parts of the city that remain dark. But it would make the otherwise terrifying urban environment attractive.

In order to keep a plant running you would need to periodically supply it with fuel. Coal plants need coal (from the mines) and Nuclear power plants need plutonium (which is less easy to find but lasts longer). Obviously fixing and running power planets would require significant mechanical and computer skill.

As an attached concept, perhaps a new terrain object could be implemented: Power lines. In order to get power from a power station to civilization you need power cables. These would be pregenerated by the map but many of them would be knocked down/broken, disrupting the flow of electricity to smaller towns etc. You could build poles and run cable from existing attached lines if you want to fix broken lines or run power to a makeshift shelter.

This would of course mean somehow designating individual rooms as either having electricity or not (this could be both building-specific and randomized, as fuses could blow or internal cables could be damaged), and bulbs have a limited lifespan. You would need to be able to find/replace/build bulbs to replace burned out bulbs. Although overhead lights are kind of expected, due to the ascii format it might be better to introduce ground lighting (such as lamps) which can be built/moved as furniture. Space heaters and other electric heaters could be built/moved as furniture as well. A lamp/heater that is turned on will light/heat the room only if the room a) has been designated as having working access to electricity and b) is being provided with electricity from either a generator or a power station.

Additionally, buildings could be given a fuse-box which can be repaired using specific tools and spare fuses found either in other fuse boxes or in hardware stores. This can restore electrical access to a building which is dark despite having access to power. Generators can be hooked up to fuse boxes in order to provide the entire building with power (Normally a generator only provides power to electrical objects within the same room).

Anyway, I realize that’s a lot and it probably won’t get implemented (any time soon, if at all), but I’m just brainstorming.