Reactor design: make mechanics and engineers cooperate for sub optimization #13132
neirenoir
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One of the first things most engineers do when given the chance is to write a custom reactor controller to optimize fission rates and turbine output. It's not really necessary because the automatic controller mode is good enough at keeping up if your sub has some auxiliary battery subsystems, but the thing is the entire manual fission rate and turbine output minigame the engineer tutorial focuses on so much is barely needed (and quite dangerous to use). Manual operation of the reactor is mostly used only in the very niche situation of a shoddy sub not having enough power output and the engineer being out of FPGA, or fuel rod insertion. This is fine for the arcade single mission gamemodes, but reactor management quickly becomes a solved problem in campaigns, which seems to be the direction Barotrauma is starting to take, according to the Treacherous Tides patch notes. And, let's face it: campaign mode is awesome.
While adding more depth to reactor management may not be as urgent as adding more depth to the medicine gameplay, I still think it's worth considering letting people design their own reactor core layouts in a minigame that would involve both mechanics and engineers engaged throughout an entire campaign playthrough.
The very simplified mechanics of real life reactor core design
In real life, there are a gazillion types of reactor designs, each with their own quirks and tradeoffs. One needs to consider the entire design of the reactor and probably the facility when designing one, but a realistic nuclear engineering simulator is probably not everyone's idea of fun. However, we can use some of the principles real nuclear reactors use in their design as inspiration for a minigame based around optimizing a Barotrauma sub's reactor.
Rods, coolants, moderators, meltdowns, neutron flux... oh my!
Fission reactor cores usually consist of a set of highly radioactive fuel rods that heat each other up, strategically surrounded by inert metal control rods that prevent them from causing an uncontrolled chain reaction that would heat the reactor too much. In Barotrauma, the "fission rate" control probably represents the elevation of some hidden control rods.
Each fuel rod produces around it a field of free flowing neutrons, known as neutron flux. The higher the neutron flux is in one area, the more the fissile materials in that area will react, which will in turn increase the neutron flux, which can quickly spiral out of control into a core meltdown if not managed. Core meltdown is one of the three major issues you can have with a nuclear reactor: unlike the vanilla behavior of a reactor in Barotrauma, a core meltdown usually does not cause a giant explosion (although it may indeed cause explosions depending on the reactor design). Instead, it does exactly what it says: it causes the core to melt, the fuel rods "leaking" into the primary coolant circuit and wrecking havoc on the walls and control rods of the system if heats up too much. This is how you get the "Elephant's foot": the fuel rods and the walls of the core are liquefied, and the reactor spills its very cursed and poisonous guts all around the place, eventually solidifying into a material that can kill you if you merely look into its direction.
To avoid this, reactors have a fluid or gas circulating through its fuel rods, the primary coolant, which helps managing the temperature of the fuel rods and also extract thermal energy from them. In most modern reactors, the primary coolant is water at very high pressures, and it is this high pressure what truly causes the explosions during meltdowns! Meltdowns do not cause an actual nuclear explosion in the nuke sense; they are more akin to a huge dirty bomb, leaking radioactive material into the environment, which is exactly what happened in Chernobyl. There are other factors that can also contribute to causing explosions in a reactor, like hydrogen buildup, but the result still is a large dirty bomb contaminating the area surrounding the reactor. Not all reactors use water as their primary coolant, though. Different coolants have different moderation (we will go into that later) properties and tradeoffs, and this could be implemented as a game mechanic.
The two cooling circuits
Many reactors in real life make use of two different cooling circuits: primary and secondary. This is very advantageous, as it lets the reactor use different coolants in both places, on top of keeping the core and its radioactive materials confined to their own place and isolated from the actual power-extraction components. The primary circuit is responsible for generating heat and dumping it into the secondary circuit through a heat exchanger, and the secondary circuit contains the turbines and more aggressive cooling strategies (that's what the large nuclear power plant chimneys are for!) that help the heat exchanger keep the ideal temperature to let the primary circuit's heat escape through it.
Barotrauma's "turbine output" roughly simulates how easy it is for the secondary circuit to let its coolant cycle. Realistically speaking, if the secondary circuit and its turbine were to obstruct the flow of the coolant, it would also cause a (non-radioactive) explosion pretty quickly, but failure in this system would also cause the primary circuit to start heating up, eventually causing a meltdown.
As you can see, there is an opportunity here to have engineers design of the reactor core, while mechanics could manage the maintainance and tuning of moving parts of the system (the turbine, the pumps that make the coolants circulate, the integrity of the heat exchanger, etc).
Matrix based reactor core configuration
If you have ever played some of the nerd mods for Minecraft, you have probably tried out IndustrialCraft2, NuclearCraft, Extreme Reactors (the simplest of them all), or HBM Reactors. All of these implement some or most of the mechanics mentioned above in one way or the other, but what all of them have in common is that your reactor core is configured through a 2D grid (3D in case of NuclearCraft, but we all feel flat here). Here, you insert the fuel rods, the control rods and other fun pieces to maximize the output of the reactor and its fuel efficiency while keeping the operation safe (or not).
IC2 and NuclearCraft have the most involved reactor design mechanics here, specially the latter. You insert the fuel rods into a grid, and these produce heat and a very abstract version of neutron flux. Neutron flux mechanics are abstracted by introducing a mechanic in which fuel rods next to other fuel rods or neutron reflectors increase their fission rate and thermal output due to neutron flux shenanigans.
A grid-based reactor design would also make it easy to program and simulate the ticks of the reactor, its neutron flux, and thermal/coolant flow.
How does this tie into Barotrauma?
If the justification for more complex reactors in Barotrauma is tl;dr, this is the only section you need to read.
Reactor core design
Imagine the reactor as an item storage container: it is a matrix with rows and columns of cells where you can place stuff. The twist here would be that the position of each item within this grid would matter. Imagine also a coolant inlet and a coolant outlet special cells at opposite sides of the matrix.
What about the mechanics?
While a nuclear reactor has many moving parts mechanics could tinker with, I am not sure how in-depth could this design be. Most of the stuff they would be occupied with would be deciding how much power to cycle back into the reactor's security systems (i.e. secondary circuit pump speed, which could drain total reactor power efficiency but is necessary to keep the ideal temperature), the "gearing" of the turbines (the current turbine output slider)... but they could also have their own smaller secondary circuit grid! They could decide on the configuration of turbine components, passive coolers, active coolers, coolant flow and the likes to ensure the secondary cooling circuit can properly keep the temperature of the primary cooling system by reducing the temperature of the secondary circuit steam until it reaches a liquid state again. Cool it too early, though, and the turbine components will not be running at full speed.
Backwards compatibility
I don't think it needs to be said that this probably would break a lot of reactor control systems in subs that include them, but the current electrical interface of reactors can be preserved. We still have fission rates (controls how much effect do control components exert over the core), we still have turbine outputs and, of course, we still have meltdowns. This change would probably add more outputs and some inputs to the reactor interface, but it wouldn't necessarily remove anything, which would make old subs using vanilla reactor controls still work with the new system.
But isn't this too complicated?
Maybe. It does sound like the Neurotrauma for Engineers. To be fair, it could be a mod (a C# one, probably, since it overrides a lot of hardcoded mechanics), but it's also a way of keeping the engineers and mechanics engaged throughout a campaign without necessarily having them play whack-a-mole with constantly breaking systems. In a way, the "class fantasy" of mechanics and engineers is to keep the sub operational and in peak condition, possibly optimizing its systems so the sub can transcend its Mark 1 specs. The incorporation of exotic alien materials and/or alien artifacts in the operation of the reactor also increases the longevity of the reactor maintenance minigame, as both mechanics and engineers can look towards tinkering with these resources that are mostly found in abundance only later in the campaign.
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