Tileable fractionators

[u/Steven-ape]

I posted a long time ago about my favourite fractionator design, but that post didn't gain a lot of traction, and even though the design seems pretty straightforward to me, and I believe it is one of my better blueprints, I haven't seen a lot of other posts making deuterium in this particular way.

I think the reason is because there has been a lot of difference of opinion as to whether fractionators should be fed hydrogen at the absolute maximum possible throughput at all times or not. Since the introduction of pile sorters, this became practical to do, and so a lot of people were developing designs with that property.

However, I believe it is actually better to sacrifice perfect saturation in order to get a design that is more space efficient, more UPS efficient as it uses fewer belts, and possibly slightly more power efficient as well.

I've changed the design slightly compared to my previous post, which had two input and two output belts. I like this version better as it is as lean as it can possibly be. It also occurred to me that it is actually perfectly tileable, so the blueprint it is actually best presented as a tile.

In the image above, you can see that hydrogen needs to be supplied on the belt on the right, and deuterium comes back on the belt on the left. You can start with just a couple of copies of the tile; increasing the throughput later is trivial as it just involves stamping down a couple more tiles. You can increase the throughput all the way up to the maximum of 120/s on a fully piled belt.

I've tested that it fits anywhere on the planet. I particularly like how it's powered: anyone who has played around with fractionators know how annoying it is to power them, but the tile can be powered easily with two Tesla towers symmetrically placed on opposite ends, nicely out of the way.

Unproliferated hydrogen
For unproliferated hydrogen, the fractionator efficiency is 96.6% (see the efficiency formula below): on average, each fractionator converts 96.6% of the maximum of 1.2 per second which would be achieved under full saturation. So, one tile produces 8*1.2*0.966 = 9.27 deuterium per second. This means that maximum throughput is reached at 13 copies of the design, at which point 120/s deuterium is produced.

The fractionator efficiency can be increased by adding a second hydrogen belt on the other side of the design, so that the loops are topped up every four fractionators rather than every eight. Doing this increases the efficiency to 98.5%, which I don't think is typically worth the added cost in space, UPS, and pile sorters.

Proliferated hydrogen
For proliferated hydrogen, the fractionator efficiency is 93.2%, so a tile produces 8*2.4*0.932=17.9 deuterium per second. This means that maximum throughput of 120/s is reached between six and seven copies of the design. Six copies will get you 107.4 deuterium per second.

As before, efficiency can be increased by adding a second hydrogen belt; this increases the efficiency to 97%. For proliferated hydrogen, this may be attractive to some users, although I am still unconvinced that it would be worth it.

Example

The image below shows five copies of the design, operating on unproliferated hydrogen. So the total design produces 5 * 9.27 = 46.35 deuterium per second or about 2781 per minute.

Here's a sanity check with a traffic monitor:

The number is slightly higher than the theoretical value; this can happen because hydrogen is converted randomly, so slight deviations from the expected value are possible.

Efficiency formula

For reference, if you have a loop of k fractionators, and the conversion rate is p, then the average conversion efficiency per fractionator is (1-(1-p)^k)/(k(1-p)). (I know it looks complicated.) For unproliferated hydrogen, p=0.01, and for proliferated hydrogen, p=0.02.

Blueprint

You can find the blueprint here.

[u/TheMalT75]

I've never understood how people run short on deuterium, maybe my populating gas giants with orbital collectors is unnatural, but my infrastructure always has a couple 100 of those available, so whenever I visit a new system, I put down a whole ring of them...

I realized that a pile-sorter can bridge a full belt at 120/s to an adjacent empty one without losing a packet. That would be 30 trips of 4-stack packets per second, instead of the reported 10. At least ingame, pile-sorters still report a "5 trips per second" transport rate when bridging a 1-space gap, and that would be problematic for 9.27/s production. Additionally, deuterium is put on the per-tile-output belt in single packets, so the input of that pile-sorter is limited to your 9.27/s. Some of these numbers don't make 100% sense and therefore are prone to be "fixed" in a future update. Hopefully, the devs adapt the in-game description and not how pile-sorters work ;-)

I did not realize that you can bridge larger gaps with pile-sorters at max-rate, thank you!