Steam Engines Full Guide (From the Depths 2021)

some people steam engines complete guide everything you need to know this video is going to be long enough so let's just start if you already know a bit about steam and or don't want to sit through the hour long tutorial this is going to be here is the real quick version and you can always check in the timeline for more infos if you have any questions boilers generates steam the bigger the boiler the more steam per cubic meter it can create turbines convert that steam into electric energy the longer the turbine the more efficient it gets however too long will generate too much friction and you will lose the efficiency small turbine great power density big turbines great efficiency medium sealer binds kind of should at both turbines great perfect the piston engine better piston engines generate engine power however they can also generate battery power buy a flywheel with a shaft generator attached to it piston engines use as few shafts as possible and attach as many pistons to as you can to set shaft don't use single expansion use multi-expansion engines when you use the steam and feed it back into the pistons double expansion good density bad efficiency quadruple expansion good efficiency bad density triple expansion kind of the middle of both single expansion or five times expansion don't do those they are too much of a compromise in terms of diminishing returns try to make your stages as equal in size as possible however if you have to make those stages in equal in size put more pistons into the earlier stages this is the best shape for a 7 times 7 times x power generation engine small piston engines are the best because they have the best form factor that means they are the easiest to build with efficiently however large engines can get you absurd amounts of efficiency flywheels reduce rpm and thus friction so definitely add a few of those to make your engine more efficiency however the longer the shaft the less effect they have propellers directly attached to a shaft aren't worth it in my opinion use crank motors instead always run at max pressure if you don't run at max pressure you are under utilizing your engine always run at maximum load if you don't run at maximum load you are wasting a ton of energy on friction you can compensate a little bit by adding batteries or another fuel engine or a smaller steam engine for smaller loads since an engine is supposed to be run at load also make sure to test it at load for this use ecm drummers to use up engine power or pax to use a battery before we start there are a few things i need to clear up namely power per material burned in the progress of this video i will refer to it as efficiency basically you don't want to throw a marauder into the furnace every second just to power a light bulb the other term is energy per volume which is a 33 right here how which determines how big the engine has to be in order to create a certain amount of power the game uses two units of power which you can see in the bottom right here you have the engine power this one cannot be stored it gets produced and consumed at the same time and then there's battery energy which can get stored in the batteries obviously and can get converted into engine power if the if if needed by an electric engine why and when should you use steam steam engines excel at providing power to constant loads such as a laser system for example they are better in every way than fuel engines however they can get very inefficient if run incorrectly and if run at anything but full load so for at varying loads it is much better to use a fuel engines you can compensate for varying loads by for example including batteries and an electric engine or a fuel engine what i mean with loads is anything that consumes engine power like shields railguns particle accelerators your propulsion systems lasers etc so steam engines are supposed to be run at full loads so we need to test them at full loads to do that we use uh sensor scrabblers these guys here you can find them in the defense tab and they are great because you can just uh set their power use and uh you just spam down a few of them set their power use to maximum in order to use up all of the engine power you might produce you also need to empty your batteries and so on to in order to do to do that i have uh spammed down a ton of particle accelerator cannons right here and an acb block that makes them fire constantly they use up all of the battery energy i'm generating and are also the reason why i turn off the sound also don't forget to press f5 to give yourself infinite resources okay now that we got all of the theory out of the way let's start with the basics you what you will need is a boiler the boiler generates steam 1000 steep for each one material period the size difference is only a difference in how much material it can burn doesn't give an advantage in efficiency that steam then goes into pipes and those pipes can lead either through to a steam jet turbines turbines directly convert the steam into electricity for your batteries pistons will take that steam and convert that into rotational energy and then you have either a gearbox which converts it into engine power or a flywheel with an attached generator which converts that into battery energy and lastly you can also have a transmission to then turn a propeller however you can also turn a propeller with a crank motor one thing you have to understand about pistons is how much steam they use is directly dependent on the pressure so we have here an input pressure of 10 which means that this piston these two pistons can can make almost 3 000 can use almost 3 000 steam these two pistons have an input pressure of four because they are staged they are using the recycle steam that comes out of those guys and can only use 1780 steam so the higher more the pressure the more energy will generate in general you always want the boiler to run at maximum pressure at which point the boiler will automatically regulate itself down like right here you can see we are running at only 10.9 materials per second out of the maximum of 37. so in general you want your a boilers to be able to uh burn more materials than necessary but only a little bit to get a perfect balance [Music] let's start with the first component boilers there's three sides of boilers like there's also three sides for everything else small medium and large it doesn't really matter which one you use because they all convert one material into 1000 steam so they don't change the efficiency also uh it all goes through the same pipes so you can use a large boiler with a tiny turbine or a tiny water with an ulcer turbine whatever you fancy the only thing that's different between each of them is uh how much material they can burn and how much energy they can generate also those two guys all need a external controller that's an extra block with the big ones your controller and your boiler are in the same block so you don't need this extra block out at the front so in summary large boilers are more dense in volume than medium or small ones next up turbines turbines convert steam into battery power you can see here i have a small boiler just one segment that is directly attached into different lengths of turbines and those turbines are attached to small turbine generators you don't need a pipe between the two they can just be fed directly each turbine consumes a fixed amount of steam no matter the length that means you can see here and the third power that makes steam processed every second is 500 and that 500 is true for every small turbine so even the this guy also 500 this way also 500 for medium turbines this value is 5000 and for large turbine this value is 30 000. the only thing that changes with the length of the turbine it's is the efficiency of the conversion so uh this compact turbine has an efficiency you can see it right at the bottom here has a conversion of 53 so it's very inefficient this guy right here has a conversion of 90 and this uh super long right here has a conversion of 99 so you can see here this guy the smaller one has 250 battery energy per second the medium guy has 355 battery energy per second because they both eat the same amount of steam but just from being more efficient this guy generates more power than this guy so the ultra long one should generate even more power right well wrong this guy produces 300 power however the medium guy produces 350. how is that well all moving parts like turbines but also pistons etc have friction so they lose energy by moving this ultra long turbine gets increasingly diminishing returns on its efficiency but every block adds friction so there comes a point where the bonus efficiency is less than the friction added by adding another turbine block which is why this small five block turbine is the most efficient turbine you can have friction scaling is not linear by the way as you can see here if we compare these two turbines the one on the left has a pressure of nine the one on the right has a pressure of 4.5 so the one on the right consumes exactly half of the material of the one on the left however the one on the left has 300 energy and the one on the right has only 120 much less than half why is that well if you look at the friction the one on the left has a friction loss of 75 the one on the right has a friction loss of 67 so the one on the right despite burning half of the material doesn't really get an advantage in terms of friction because friction doesn't move linear like the friction does get higher with higher rpm however you get like a base level of friction that is just constantly there so whatever engine you're using be it turbines or be it piston engines try to always run them at maximum because while you will have the most friction loss the power output scales stronger than the friction loss so in the end you will have a higher efficiency turbines can be attached to both sides of a small turbine generator and also like i said boilers don't need pipes they can connect directly to the turbine so this tiny little setup is a very easy way to generate uh 1 500 power unfortunately the interface here is a little bit wrong you have 100 energy per volume however it only recognizes one of the boilers so really the efficiency right here is 500. turbine engines also come in medium and large variants the medium ones uh get the massive boost in efficiency over the small ones the small ones being very dense the medium ones being very efficient and the large ones because they get this absurd amount of steam conversion rates keep the efficiency but regain back a lot of the density making them really the best option for large-scale battery generation through turbines turbines are great they are a valid option they are much less complex than piston engines they are very efficient and while still being okay in density of course my piston engine that i'm having here is better in both efficiency and density and then this huge turbine but not by much so if this video has been complicated enough you can go out there and build turbine engines that's completely fine but if you want to get the best that steam can offer you need piston engines and you need to keep watching this video there are a few steps in building a good engine and a few things you need to know first thing is that you need to minimize the amount of gearboxes and crankshafts 401 obviously because you will just have fewer blocks in your system and also because you will have fewer blocks that create friction because friction loss are the reason why steam engines get inefficient you also want to maximize the amount of pistons you fit onto each crank because once again fewer blocks that create friction those numbers of 250 pale on comparison to the turbines which have numbers of six or seven hundred well we can make our engines more efficient because as you can see here those pistons have big arrows one pointing in one pointing out the arrow pointing in shows where the steam uh boiler has to connect to where it feeds the engine in and this is the outlet where the waste steam goes away however we can use said waste steam like right here we we pick it back up turn it around and feed it back into a second pair of pistons this is called staging or multi-expansion and dramatically increases the efficiency like this guy has an efficiency of 430 while this guy is an efficiency of 270. you can do this multiple times like we can use the output of those pistons once again to feed into more pistons and again so we have uh staging we have a single stage two-stage three-stage and four-stage piston engine in general uh the fewer stages you have the more dense or the smaller your engine will get while an engine with more stages will be much more efficient but will also be bigger i personally consider two or three stage engines to be the best because of diminishing returns the single or the four stage engines just lose out too much in terms of efficiency or density with only very little gain and what they're optimizing for there's two ways of designing the stage transition you can either have all of your pistons in a row take the steam from the from the first pistons then move it over one block and move it down and then feed it into the next pistons or you can do it with a design like this where you take it but you don't turn it to the right but you feed it straight and only then you move it down to the right and into the next entrance this means however that there is always a gap between uh between each stage however this block here is now freed and that means you that you can add a second set of pistons that uses the exact same piping system than the bottom pistons which allows you to uh integrate multiple engines together as you can see in this piston engine right here you can see that we use this technique to combine to combine pipes and you can also see uh the separation between each stage right here where there are no pistons for the ratio a design like this is pretty bad because it has only two pistons in the first stage and four pistons in the second stage you don't want that you want either each stage to have the same amount of pistons or if you have to change the amount of pistons because like for example you are limited in length put more pistons into the earlier stages like for example this guy here has six pistons in the first stage five pistons in the second stage and four pistons in the third stage there is a slight gain to be found in a system like this where you have more pistons in the earlier stages however this is battling for the last one or two percents so really just go with equal amounts and just uh just when when you have an odd length only then switch over let's talk about size what you've seen here until now we're all small engines which is what i have right here however there are also medium engines which look like this with uh just uh bigger pistons and also large engines which are these massive things right here in general like with the turbines small engines will have higher density lower efficiency and large engines will have higher efficiency but lower density with medium engines kind of being the bastard child of both of them they are the most awkward to build with they don't have any coherent form factor and they don't give any significant improvement compared to either of those like what you have here is a small piston engine it is just a perfect it has a perfect layout all of the boilers are internal all of the pistons match up etc etc and then you just have these guys which are medium piston engines where you just have like the flywheel stick out you have the the crankshaft uh has to stick out uh by one block to the side uh you can't really use all of the internals because you just have so much internal space and uh don't need all that many boilers because the pistons cannot use that much engines i'm just not a huge fan really of uh of medium piston engines they aren't that good like in theory medium engines should be more efficient than small engines but simply because small engines are so much easier to optimize and easier to build with my small engines are still more efficient than medium ones and more power dense like the only only way i would really see a medium engine being good is by using the exact same cross section as i use for the small engines but scaled up this would work however uh the small engine is in entirely enough to power my extremely power hungry one million railgun laser craft so i really don't want to know what craft you want to build that would justify using this monster of an engine i'm going to talk about huge engines real quick so they are fairly easy to build [Music] there are two types of pistons we have the ones that i use right here which are the serial piston and that means that they automatically generate staging that means that the steam you feed the steam in through the first piston and this now it creates the first stage it then vents out into the second one which then creates the second stage which then goes to the third stage fourth stage and fifth stage and right here out of the back that is where all the excess steam is vented so what we have right here is a five stage steam engine once again huge engines are very comfortable to build with they are extremely efficient though unfortunately they are not very dense but also they are very pretty to look at over here we have a second huge steam engine which takes the other pistons which are the parallel pistons you can see here that they have two pipes one big one one small one that is because uh the the small pipe you can also see here in the arrows is input and the large one is output and so you can chain those together just like those however everything that's here on the left side is all input and everything that's here on the right side is all output if you chain multiple of those together those all create one stage if you want to stay change the stage you have to connect one pipe from one of those output arrows move it over and then put it into one of the input arrows so what you're looking at right here is a two stage huge steam engine like i said huge steam engines are extremely comfortable to build however this guy is worse in every stat compared to my small steam engine which we'll talk about later a few things to mention though before we start building hybrid piston and turbine engines i think it was a thing in earlier updates where you could use the hue steam and feed it into turbines however right now it's just not worth it because turbines create a ton of back pressure into the system meaning that those pistons cannot run optim optimally turbines themselves run best at high pressure so if you still have gaps in your system and you have enough steam left over you can build turbines it's a very good idea i will try to connect them directly to the boilers instead of connecting them to the output of pistons that just decreases the efficiency of the whole system that issue with back pressure also applies to boilers so just don't ever add boilers halfway into your steam engine because while it might sound like a good idea to just add steam somewhere the back pressure will mean that these pistons will run even worse than without this steam boiler and you just ruin and you just completely ruin the efficiency of your engine so just don't do that another blocker i need to show you are flying wheels flywheels are awesome if you look at our stats right here as soon as we place it our rpm go down our kinetic energy loss goes on and thus our power generated goes up what the flywheel does is it reduces the rpm while keeping the generated power stable and itself not really causing much kinetic energy loss so the reduced rpm will mean that you get less loss from friction and those also uh become a more efficient engine however just like with the turbines if you had too many of them the diminishing returns will eventually outweigh the benefits on such a small engine like this the difference is very noticeable however on a huge engine like like this well the difference is like 10 energy points this guy now has the same rpm 63 as this guy however it is dramatically less efficient and has dramatically more kinetic energy loss because it just has those uh pistons that aren't connected to anything they they are just there for the drag by the way this is also my biggest complaint about four plus staged end engines it's just that the pistons at the back will add only minimal amounts of uh of power while also adding uh large amounts of drag until eventually it just becomes worthless another use for flywheels are the attachment of small shaft generators which also dramatically reduce the rpm however not in a good way because they add a lot of friction they are used to convert the engine power that this shaft generates into battery electric power it is a fixed percentage like as you can see right here we have 778 gearbox power generated an 840 battery energy generated however we can always just add more of them to the engine and they will gradually increase the fraction of power that gets put into batteries however once again with diminishing returns and with dramatically more friction added with every unity built what happens if say we don't need any engine power we only need battery storage well in this case the well in this case the shaft will start spinning faster and faster and thus also the generators will produce more and more until eventually either the shaft reaches max rpm or uh you you produce so much battery power that you reach equilibrium once again once you have your engine set up and everything is as it should be i recommend that you go here to the maximum rpm and change this number to your current rpm so we are currently looking at 130 out of 180 which is 72 so we just limit uh the maximum rpm to exactly that value and this means that if we ever run below load the rpm won't skyrocket instead the boilers will regulate themselves down to consume less power which means that you can easier maintain your efficiency even if even at lower loads because if you didn't have that maximum rpm limit then uh your rpm would just shoot off to the maximum in this case 180 meaning that the boilers will have to burn more and burn harder in order to just keep the engine running with the friction as for steam propellers there's two ways of doing it you can either have a piston set up going through a transmission into the propeller or you can use crank motors or crank motors are slightly less powerful but they are just so much more convenient to place that i just prefer them if you still want to use a steam setup make sure to limit the power output right here if you remove that your engine will feed all of its power straight into the propeller and will not try to share between the propeller and any uh and the general engine power of your ship the transmission has a gear ratio by default it's set to one but you can put it up to two uh which basically just straight up doubles the output of your propeller however crankshafts have this as well like once again by default it sets to one and literally there is no nothing stopping you from just hitting it to two and just getting so much more out of your propeller and if i disconnect here you can see that this propeller is still running at maximum rpm this guy is losing a tiny bit uh he's lost about twenty percent power just for the sake of convenience personally i i prefer crank motors but that's up to you your choice also do note that the motor power used for a crank motor is actually fixed it's independent of the maximum rpm factor which means that a crank motor usually is a slightly more powerful than necessary to power its small propeller but will be uh underpowered to power the large propeller so it's usually better to just go one crank motor bigger for uh for example from the three meter propeller take the three meter propeller from the medium crank motor because even though it has less thrust than the smaller propeller the crank motor will be able to actually provide that thrust whereas the small crank motor will fail here also i've been told that the devs are looking into changing this maximum rpm factor thing i don't know what they will change it into will it be set to 2 by default will it not be able to climb that high at all i don't know how they will change it but i will keep you up to date okay time to build an engine i guess finally the engine i'm about to build is purely for power generation not for propellers i'll talk about those later we will build this guy here which is my standard seven by seven by x whatever length you wanted engine which uses this cross section right here but i'll show you what it's made of you start with a gearbox and a crank crank obviously you want to attach as many pistons as possible to the skill box so we'll put two on the side and one in the center as well those pistons need steam so we'll put piping around here and while if the piping is here already we can just add another set of pistons facing upwards those pistons naturally need their own crack and gearbox these cranks ideally are also fed by a set of three pistons per crank so uh we'll just add those pistons right now and finally we can add a layer of pistons on top with another crankshaft and gearbox on top now those pistons right here in the center all pull their input steam from the center block right here however they each have individual outputs but by uh building it like this we can uh we can gather their output steam in just two locations instead of uh each piston having its own uh its own output location which saves us two block in the hole the pistons right here in the corner also need their own output pipes obviously and this is our basic setup now you have a few free spaces right here which we can use to add boilers but we'll do that later now we want the output here to flow further down the engine so instead of using a four-way pipe here we will use a three-way pipe you will turn on and off mirror mode a lot because uh you will want to build the outer sides with minimal remote but the central ones not because uh like it has this diagonal uh placement of those pipes how do we build a stage well first of all we have to uh cap off the input pipes like so then we want to take the output pipes and relocate them so they move to the same position as the old input pipes okay cool now we'll add fly wheels because uh i have already explained the benefit of flywheels uh with the crankshaft is because in this position obviously there cannot be a pistons because we are switching stages also there are places free around those fire wheels to attach any amount of shaft generators depending on the ratio of engine power and battery power that you you will need on the final ship and that's pretty much everything we need right now we can already switch over to the the prefab tool and just pick up a slice from the middle bit and start putting those down and then we can take a prefab from from the stage switcher and throw it in there as well just make sure that you take the block right before the stage switching as well because i obviously need to cap off the input pipes and so you need to uh take that cap with you and placed on another handful of central modules an end module as well and there we go there we have it now everything that's left is to uh put the boilers in the middle and also remove the last block on the output pipe so that the steam can vent freely because if there was a block right here that would mean that this steam cannot leave which would create a backlog of pressure and the engine wouldn't run however if you move remove this block all of the the steam can vent into this one free block it just needs one block to bend into it doesn't check if there's any more so you can have a wall right here cutting everything off and the steam engine can work just fine now there are still holes in this engine however those are straight holes that go all the way through which are perfect to place some boilers in there so let's do that as well okay so now we have a bunch of boilers here and a bunch of input pipes asking for steam so all we have to do now is to connect everything up with pipes and so with all our pipes connected we can already see that the engine starts moving if you hover over the pipes you can see the pressure in there uh slowly building up and also like you can see that on the second and third stages the pressure drops do yourself the favor and check uh if there and check all of the pipes and all of the pistons if they have uh the correct pressure um just just to see if there are any leaks or something happening if you check this pipe you can see that we are only running at 8.2 uh pressure out of 10 that means we're not running at full potential that means we're giving away a potential so we need to add more boilers in order to get up to those that magic 10 pressure and there we go we just reached maximum pressure the boilers automatically regulated themselves down to burn slightly less materials per second than maximum so if we now press q you can press q on any of the blocks i just like to press q on the pipes because like the steam boiler will give you the boiler information you have to switch tabs to get to the information while on the pipes you get to the information directly this engine has a powerful volume of 94 and a power per material burn of 573 meaning this is a fairly uh which means that this is a fairly dense engine with ok efficiency the great advantage of these types of engines is that you can just take prefabs of any slice and you can just mix and match them as much as you want like right here out of this engine i built like this is a two-stage version this is a three-stage version and this is the four-stage version there still is a ton of to talk about as you can see by the size of this platform and the amount of engines that are strung across it i will make a second video as soon as i understood everything that there is to understand and also as soon as the devs fix some bugs that are still involved in steam engines however it shouldn't affect anything that i talked about in this video special thanks to eudaimonia i think that's how you pronounce it who taught me a lot about steam engines and fact check the whole video but i guess it's a mutually beneficial relationship really since this video will hopefully at least save him a bunch of time explaining to people over and over how steam works this video was a ton of effort to make i don't know how long it took me to learn steam but that doesn't matter because i did that for myself but just to put it into perspective making this video from the point that i actually understood steam to uh producing this video it was roughly 15 maybe even 20 hours of actual work that i had to put in like building this demonstration based double and triple checking a ton of different factors and then doing all of the recording i had about two hours of footage that i somehow had to compress down into a watchable length because i know orderwise and i don't just want to upload like hours and hours of uncut content no offense border wise i love your stuff but like it sometimes really is a chore to watch through and not everybody has the time so i had to edit all of that stuff down and uh to do a couple of uh off-road reshoots and re-recordings and oh my god it was just yeah so anyways i would much appreciate it if you could just leave it like on the video and if anyone asks about steam engines just uh share them this tutorial and also tell them to check out the rest of this youtube channel because i in my opinion i upload some pretty cool content around here and any bit of attention and support would be much appreciated thank you so much and see you in the next one

Channel: Liv's Lab

Views: 19,578

Keywords: From the Depths, Tutorial, Guide, Steam Engine

Id: ZjLPYYjudg0

Length: 36min 41sec (2201 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/C0C0TheCat]

Tnx man helped a lot! Never really understood steam. Now i do, great tutorial.

[u/secret_raccoon]

Thank you! One of the few systems in this game that I still don’t understand lol

[u/Brykly]

Great, now I think all my steam engines are crap and have to rebuild them.

This is not sarcasm. This is genuinely great news.

I'll also give my own shout out to Eudaimonia over on the Discord. Eudi is good people.

[u/SloRules]

How bad of an idea is it to use valves and acbs for switching between 4x 1 stage piston and all variations until 1, 4 stage piston?

[u/Routine_Palpitation]

I prefer source over source2 personally

[u/[deleted]]

Thanks mate I've been trying to build a Railgun/Laser turret for my destroyer but it just chews through energy too fast this'll help a lot.

[u/Cold_Dusk]

dang this is a good one, I had so much trouble figuring out some stuff in regard to steam, glad someone made this.

[u/Envoy-Insc]

Nice, now I can learn steam engines!

[u/Iumasz]

Good timing, I was planning to figure out steam engines soon, will likely use your video for it.