User talk:Amylizzle
The nuclear engine is the primary power generation method on Clarion. It uses radioactive materials to generate heat, which is used to heat gas, which turns a turbine, which generates power.
The nuclear engine is relatively simple to set up, but there's a lot of room for experimentation to generate huge quantities of power. However, bad design or mismanagement can be catastrophic, resulting in a total meltdown.
Fundamentals
The Turbine
The key for power generation here is the turbine. It takes a volume of hot gas, generates power, and cools down the gas. Unlike the TEG, hotter gas isn't the goal - anything above 3000C will be vented into the room! - the goal is to make lots of gas hot, not a small amount of very hot gas. It's also important to keep the turbine operating at 600 RPM, since that's when it generates power most efficiently. If your turbine is spinning very fast and generating no power, it's because you need to slow it down. You can do this by changing the Stator Load, or the Flow Rate.
Stator Load
The stator load of the turbine is how much resistance should be applied to the turbine. More resistance means more power generated per revolution, but also more thermal energy needed to maintain the RPM.
Flow Rate
The flow rate of the turbine is the amount of gas pumped through the turbine per tick. In most cases, you want it to be equal to the reactor's gas volume. More on this later.
The Reactor
History
Goonstation has had two different versions of a nuclear-powered engine over the years. Neither has left prototype stage.
The first prototype nuclear engine was part of pre-modernization Mushroom Station, located in space west of Mushroom's Engineering deck and accessible by a retractable air bridge. If you had an admin spawn in the necessary materials and tweak certain variables, it was actually possible for the thing to produce power, while also releasing a deadly gas depending on the rods. Otherwise, it served no function but was still a nice place to stash bodies and loot you didn't want found. When Mushroom was partially modernized, the nuclear engine wreck got axed.
The second was intended to be the power source for Manta, like the real-life nuclear submarines that inspired it. The public playtests of the map showcased two huge turbines and a reactor core lifted straight from the original nuclear engine in Engineering, which were all at the time nonfunctional. Eventually, the engine would have used pipes carrying fluids and centrifuges processing nuclear ore (which at one point accidentally replaced the pathogen centrifuges in Pathology, when the nuclear ones still had a ChemiCompiler sprite). However, the mapmaker grew impatient, and the WIP nuclear engine was substituted with a singularity engine.
Many of the associated components live on, as setpieces all across the Debris Field and Adventure Zone.