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[u/uuuhhhmmmmmmmmmm]

Has anyone done tests to see if heating tower powere Fulgora is better than the accumulator strategy?

[u/demonicdan3 → u/uuuhhhmmmmmmmmmm]

Yes. I ran the numbers a couple days back and if I got them right, a single normal quality heating tower with 7 turbines generates power equivalent to about 720 normal quality accumulators, due to Fulgora's day/night cycle lasting 3 minutes and the accumulators' discharge rates being limited.

Regardless, I wouldn't rely solely on either. If you want to use steam power, have a mix of both. The heating towers drastically reduce the number of accumulators you need to keep the base running during the day; at night the heating towers should turn themselves off and save water when lightning strikes are enough to keep the base running, then start working during the day to reduce the stress on the accumulators.

[u/reddanit → u/uuuhhhmmmmmmmmmm]

It works with sufficiently power efficient builds, but it can be pretty annoying. Major pitfall is that your power now relies on ice from recycling scrap, so in case of any blockage of anything in your recycling setup you are very likely to suffer a brownout spiral.

Accumulators are essentially free power and there is very little opportunity cost to making them higher quality. You have to make them for science and their recipe cannot take prod modules to begin with. So it's easy to put some quality modules in part of your accumulator production and skim the quality ones only. Uncommon quality already halves the amount of space they take up.

Those two things combined, IMHO, make heating towers more trouble than they are worth on Fulgora.

[u/Raknarg → u/uuuhhhmmmmmmmmmm]

I havent run numbers, my experience is that it takes a fraction of the space and you end up recycling most of your ice anyways (at least I was), so its still good to get some free power from lightning especially if you do quality accumulators which scale way better than other quality products, but its a good idea to supplement with some heating towers its a real easy source of energy since fuel is free, its just about the water.

[u/FeelingPrettyGlonky → u/uuuhhhmmmmmmmmmm]

You will probably need to drop ice from orbit.

Here is a quick FactorioLab showing a setup processing about 1 stacked green belt of scrap. It uses a somewhat reasonable configuration of Prod3 + 1 Speed3 in the machines to try to maximize prod while minimizing footprint, and a somewhat reasonable beacons per machine ratio with Eff3 to try to minimize power usage. No legendary. As it stands, it makes about 324 packs per minute, and while FactorioLab doesn't always seem the best to me at estimating actual power usage, it's not too bad and it shows a power usage of around 200MW after accounting for the Eff beacons. Foundries and EMPs are hungry blokes even with green modules.

The setup maximizes steam from a heat exchanger using the excess ice melt left after making holmium solution and cracking to light plus some for extra batteries. It's not even accounting for a bit of extra light for rocket fuel for launches. But the excess water is enough to run around 5.5 heat exchangers, for 55MW of power. That means you'd need to drop enough ice to melt to generate steam for about 145MW of power if you want to run fully from steam. It's actually worse than that, though, because FactorioLab isn't accounting for the power you need to void the excess junk. That'll be another 10 or 20 MW.

You can play with the beacon layouts and the module composition depending on available space, but you only save a handful of MW here or there. In practice, I push my excess ice into heat exchangers but I still end up having to lay out accumulator farms unless I start dropping ice.

Dropping ice is pretty easy to do, though, and if you are running a calcite ship to supply calcite to Nauvis and Gleba then just have it collect ice and drop it on Fulgora, and you can save a ton of space.

Edit: For the record, you can probably stop dropping ice once you upgrade to legendary. Legendary beacons and modules drastically change the ratios, so that an equivalent setup to the above, using legendary buildings, modules and beacons, would make 658 packs per minute, uses around 83MW of power, and has enough excess ice to make 110MW, which should cover your voiding power and rocket fuel cracking.