Stirling Engine - Stationeers: Introduction and basic setup

More Power to you Update is here!
Here's a quick vid to show how to set a up the new stirling engine to generate power from all that excess heat you have lying around.

[@GamingGuy256636]

@Matther Caradus I did not know you was part if Stastioneers Dev team.

[@MizterMoonshine]

Love the game and your work

[@s.sradon9782]

Is this practically viable for mars to recycle waste furnace heat and should I enclose the generators in an artificial atmosphere? thanks, love your vids, very well narrated which is all that matters to me.

[@HUNmerlin]

have you tried out whether a stirling engine is more efficient than a gas fuel generator in terms of fuel consumption?

[@matthewcaradus1609]

GFG has Theoretical efficiency of 20% of combustion energy assuming you get complete combustion. Stirling has a maximum efficiency of 15%.

[@MrDrWahnsinn]

Why would an environmental temperature of room temperature be best for the engine? Shouldn't the engine run more efficient the colder the cold side is? Also, is the Stirling Engine ingame a normal Stirling engine or a modified version that operates on a carnot-cycle?

[@matthewcaradus1609]

Generally a machine is designed to operate within a certain temperature band, there's a bunch of other moving parts in the generator side of the engine that you could argue would not be happy in very cold or hot environments. Well that's my justification for a what you might say is an arbitrary design decision anyway! We don't model an actual sterling cycle in the code as there isn't really any need as we can just as easily simulate the outcomes instead.

[@gloverelaxis]

man I don't know how to tell you this nicely but if you're *on the dev team*, it's part of your team's job to teach how to do this inside the game's UI and aesthetic / mechanics design, not in a youtube video. this is a symptom of a broader paucity of care for UI design and tutorialisation. i appreciate that there is, at least, this video which i found after multiple web searches, but I only had to search in the first place because the ingame explanation, model, and even mechanics are acutely confusing and unintuitive. - there's no visual representation of the "hot side" and "cold side" (no red-blue gradient, or fire/snowflake icons, or glowing bits, or gradient of motion...) - it's not clear why the machine exchanges heat from the input pipe with the ambient room environment, instead of with fluid in another pipe (which is how your "actual" heat exchangers work in the very same game) - it's not clear why you need to inject an operating gas at all - if the gas is never leaving the system and there's basically a universal optimal gas to use, why not skip that meaningless busywork? at the very least, why not reuse the same mechanics you already have established for closed-loop refridgeration fluids like we see in the passive heatsinks and air conditioners? you could just use a regular gas pipe input/output for the operating gas instead of the awkward and inconsistent one-time canister injection, and then its total thermal mass / maximum pressure becomes something players can upgrade/tune (i.e. players could make the most of an even larger temperature differential if they increase their operating gas volume, simply by adding pipe segments or tanks). then, players could even *programmatically* change the amount and even chemical composition of the operating gas appropriate to the heat they're sending into the engine. good sandbox game design is all about minimising needless complexity in individual components and maximising the depth of interactions between systems/mechanics.

[@cosmic5386]

Not to useful for power when you have solar and fuel gens but it could definitely squeeze out a little power from furnaces or generators

[@Derzull2468]

You most often need to cool furnace exhausts, why not get free energy while at it?

[@YoutubeAccountName]

"Ideal gas law" How does any comparison to ideal gas law works, when temperature and pressure of gas are not related? XD

[@TheFawkesGaming]

Except they are? Take any concentration of gas ingame into a sealed environment and increase the heat. As the temperature rises so will the pressure of the container/ room, and likewise the inverse for decreasing the temperature.

[@YoutubeAccountName]

@@ashleydstone8623 Yeah, real gas. Can you do an actual heat exchanger/thermal pump in game now? Because last news, even with the exchangers added, you couldn't compress a gas, to raise it's temperature, then use radiator to cool the compressed gas outside the base, and then re-expand it inside the base, so it "picks up" more heat. Like a split AC works.

[@matthewcaradus1609]

There's a bunch of different ways to model an ideal gas. All our processes at the moment are IsoThermal meaning we hold temperature as constant. What you're referring to is an Adiabatic process (which we've considered implementing). The question remains as to whether we should limit that process to a couple of devices or apply it to all out pumps. Remember this is still a game so the focus is keeping things fun and engaging so that's always our first consideration when adding new mechanics.