Patch: Damaged Power Plants

[lordpalandus]

Patch idea

[CK9]

The tokamak damages itself over time because of the heat that is required to form the hydrogen plasma.  Interestingly, the tokamak that was built could only produce 80% of the power that was required to make it work.  I don't remember what they named the next generation of it, but it had a better power output.

 

[lordpalandus]

Why then would it be overtime damage? As I understand it Tokamaks (irl) run around 80 to 110 Million degrees Celsius. It'd think that the damage it'd do to itself would then degrade at a much faster rate and it would automatically blow up if it reached 50% or lower HP (15 seconds of leeway if it was underattack)

[CK9]

Take a thermodynamics class and it might become more clear.  

All materials have a different rate of heat transfer.  The air between the walls of the torroid and the plasma alone would delay the damage.

[lordpalandus]

How does the air prevent a reaction from boiling over? That is between the torroid (the thing that produces the magnetic field right?) and the plasma (the ionized hydrogen... more likely deuterium or tritium though)

[CK9]

the torroid (my spelling here is bad, lol) is the shape of the plasma container.

Air, believe it or not, is a decent insulator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_capacity...heat_capacities

[lordpalandus]

Oh I know air is a great insulator for normal purposes.. but 80 million degrees celsius??? Thats about 5 times hotter than the inner core of our sun (Sol) How can simple air provide decent insulation up to that heat level?

[CK9]

The heat capacity creates the initial delay.  If they wrap the torroid in something, that provides additional delay.  Ceramic tiles are used to delay heat damage in iron smelting and in space shuttle returns

[lordpalandus]

Yes yes I understand that but thats within the normal range of heat temperatures. The maximum temperature those tiles would ever reach is what... 5000 degrees celsius?

But at 80,000,000 degrees celsius or hotter, that means that anything that comes into contact with that much heat would go from being a solid, skip liquid and gas and go straight into a plasma state nearly instanteous (about 1 millionith of a nanosecond or so)

[CK9]

Keep in mind that the plasma is restricted by magnetic fields.  All the heat is in the plasma, and the magnetic fields prevent too much radiation of heat.

[TH300]

I'm against removal of the over time damage effect for toks, simply because there needs to be an incentive to research/build other power plants.

I am against decreased power output, because that will (in some situations) require the player to constantly repair a tok if power level is marginal.

[lordpalandus]

That was the general idea. It prevents the player from leaving the tokamak or other power plant damaged for any period of time.

Think about it really. The more damaged a reactor gets no matter what it is, the harder it is to produce energy and the more likely sometime cataclysmic will happen if you don't repair it.... unless its a solar panel of course.

[Lugia3]

I wonder why the tokamak itself doesn't vaporize. I don't know how they work, but if the hot contents were not suspended via an electromagnetic field it would meet a violent end. Hell, even then I would think that the heat transfer through EM radiation would vaporize the tokamak.

[lordpalandus]

Which is kind of why I wonder how it can hold up so well against weapons fire. What I mean is that if you let a tokamak go down about 70% damage by itself it will often auto-destruct. I wonder how enemy vehicles can bring it to 0% before it would self-destruct due to too much damage. If it can kill itself without weapons fire on it at 70% max HP, it makes ya wonder.

[Hooman]

Once it gets down to a certain level, there is a probability of it blowing up. It could blow up right away, but that's unlikely. However, due to the slow decay, there is quite a few probability checks before the hit points get too low, so the chance of it blowing up while still having a decent amount of hit points can be fairly substantial. When the building is under attack though, the damage is done in a short period of time, and so there isn't much time for many self detonation checks to be performed. This means the building might not spontaneously blow up for quite some time. The direct attacks are usually more likely to destroy the building then the self detonation checks in that case.

I believe the probability of self detonation was fixed. So if you cripple a power plant, and then leave without killing it, it will probably have the same expected life span as one that was left to decay to just below the level where self detonation checks start occurring. (Provided it doesn't make it all the way down to 0 HP first).