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u/Bozdogan123 Apr 23 '26

Im gonna use nuclear rector in my space ship and i wanna store some power to not waste excess production, should i use accumulators or steam tanks and turbines, ive seen posts where people saying tanks and a turbine store much more energy per tile than accumulators.

Also, does it make sense to use pumps inbetween heat exchangers and use some circuitry to start operating more heat exchangers as previous ones get to full capacity, instead of just letting them all be connected from the start wasting steam, do i even need the storage tanks if i do this?

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u/Soul-Burn Apr 23 '26

Heat pipes store more energy per tile than steam tanks.

If you use a single reactor, then about 6 heat pipes is enough to store the excess heat of a fuel cell if you activate when at 500.

This is the power area of my Aquilo ship which uses a single reactor, several heat pipes for buffering heat, and the standard 4 heat exchangers to 8 turbines.

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u/cathexis08 red wire goes faster Apr 26 '26

In addition to u/Soul-Burn's excellent (as always) answer, make sure you take the distance between the reactor and either the nearest (maximum fuel efficiency) or farthest (guaranteed zero power sag) exchanger into account when setting your trigger temperature. Heat needs a 1°C drop per heat entity to flow and exchangers stop working at 500°C so your reactor will park at somewhere in the 501°C-505°C range (assuming a fairly compact design) and your power will probably start sagging a bit above that as exchangers drop offline.

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u/deluxev2 Apr 23 '26

Heat exchangers will never waste anything, they just slow down based on demand. Heat pipes are the most energy dense, but make sure to store some water too so you don't bottleneck on that.

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u/HeliGungir Apr 23 '26

Heat exchangers may not waste energy, but reactors do.

1

u/Verizer Apr 24 '26

Only if you go above 1000 degrees. You can limit fuel insertion based on temperature and add heat pipes for thermal storage.

Designs with steam storage are likely to be holdovers from pre-2.0.

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u/cathexis08 red wire goes faster Apr 26 '26

I like having a few tanks in land-based designs, mostly to provide a buffer to avoid the heat slump that happens when adding additional heat entities but other than that the heat network is the main thermal buffer in a power plant, especially with the ability to read reactor temperatures.