I know how energy and irl coolers work, alright, but the vehicle cooler is effectively useless when you want to cool off and it produces the hot air and the cold air in the same spot. It also doesn’t help that the hot air seems to be slightly more than the cold air, leading to it basically being a slightly less effective heater. Thought I’d give my character a break in summer, nope, just hotter air for you buddy.
I don’t know if it’s possible to do so, but if the tile in front of the part(the side facing the ‘vehicle’s’ front) could produce the cold air and the tile at the back could produce the hot air then it’d go a long way to make the part useful while still keeping to realism.
It would still be useless as soon as you started driving. The problem is, even if the vehicle is fully closed, the air is still moving through it as if it was just a motorbike or the like. So each turn it would produce cold air, yes, but it seems cooler produces it at the beginning of a turn, and at the end of a turn your vehicle, and, consequentially, you are already 5+ tiles away from the patch of that slightly-colder air.
Unless air temp calculations are changed to actually treat vehicle interior as, well, interior, vehicle cooler is absolutely useless.
While that may be a necessary thing for it to function well while driving, I was planning to use it as a passive cool air generating station in my base. I used to praise it for how it allowed you to make an entire room freezing and store your food in there, and how it helped during a mi-go place raid to deal with the heat inside it, but that was back when it only produced cold air and no heat byproduct.
Does your vehicle have a muffler? IIRC, having one spawns exhaust smoke from the muffler tile instead of from the engine tile, maybe the vehicle cooler is supposed to leverage the same code?
Mufflers were indeed the solution. Thanks. Knocked out a bathroom’s window and push the 1x3 contraption in there, cooler in the room, impassible board in the middle for minimal leaks, and muffler outside the room where the heat goes. Now I can store insane amounts of food in my new freezer room and not rely on the piddly little volume of the minifreezer.
Is there a way to enclose the vehicle such that the air does not move around? I have a wooden door (brown +) mounted on the vehicle and the vehicle is surrounded by rock walls. But the hot/cool air still mix, so I get a useless 4’C at the cooler (instead of 6’C).
In evac shelter basement, if vehicle is positioned such that the cooler is mounted on NW staircase tile, with the cooler mounted 6 tiles to the right, then the cooler drops temperature to -5’C and the muffler increases the staircase to a comfortable 17’C. But this is unreliable, as the staircase does not prevent the hot air from spreading around the basement (though for now only eastward - wind?).
Bottom line, I have to figure out a way for vehicle FULL_BOARDs to actually block hot/cool air from mixing. Or perhaps make code so that one can connect two vehicles with a double insulated hose-one with cooler and another with muffler. Maybe a new part called heat exchanger. This would allow one to close the doors to stop the air from mixing (though I’m not sure if this works).
Even more curious, if the exhaust pipe and the cooler are in the same position, according to the second law of thermodynamics, heat cannot spontaneously transfer from a low-temperature object to a high-temperature object unless external influence and help are exerted. In the refrigeration cycle, heat is transferred from the inside of low temperature to the outside of high temperature. In this process, electric energy is consumed and the compressor works. According to the law of conservation of energy, the heat released by the condenser is greater than that absorbed by the evaporator. So… The temperature will get higher, and the opposite will happen in the game. In addition, the cooler doesn’t work when you’re away, and my food thaws in the room:tired_face:
yeah, no muffler seems to result in a really bad heater.
the cooler doesn’t work when you’re away, and my food thaws in the room:tired_face
Well… I’ve noticed something similar with freezers. The total power of 2freezer+1water wheel vehicle is -10W, and after leaving them be for a few hours, the batteries seemed to have more charge than before. This is very troubling if true. More testing might be necessary.
Honestly, I’m thinking about just doing a “fuck it” and disabling heat output altogether. There’s no way I’m fixing all of this on my own in any reasonable time frame, and I don’t want all the time for playing games turn into fixing them.
Update: The basement freezer is now 20 tiles long with cooler at the top & muffler at the bottom. It reliably cools the top to -5’C, which is enough to freeze tainted fat. Both cold and hot air seem to have a ~10 tile limit, so they only briefly touch in the middle of the vehicle.
Now I effectively have a 4000L freezer (4 tiles at -5’C). 53 minifreezers at a cost of just 120W of power.
