RTG and Stirling

RTG and Stirling

Two small generators whose output is a function of state rather than a flat number: the Radioisotope Generator fades with the half-life of its pellet, and the Stirling Generator makes power from the temperature difference between a hot machine and a cold face — cooling the machine as it does.

Radioisotope Generator (RTG)

How it works

Drop an Isotope Pellet in. The RTG consumes it, notes the moment, and from then on produces rtgNePerTick × 2^(−elapsed ⁄ half-life): 30 NE/t fresh, 15 NE/t after 20 in-game days, 7.5 after 40, and so on. The GUI shows the current output as a percentage of fresh, the day the pellet is on and the days left until it is spent.

Once output falls below rtgCutoffPermille of the fresh rate (5 % — about 4.3 half-lives, or roughly 86 in-game days at the defaults) the pellet is spent and a Spent Isotope Pellet appears in the output slot. If the output slot is full the RTG waits, dark, until it is emptied. Insert the next pellet and the cycle restarts.

• Sealed and fuel-free once loaded: no heat, no running pollution, no failure ladder, and decay runs the same in every dimension — it is the generator for an airless moon base.
• Overdrive presets and Speed modules scale the output.
• Energy leaves every face; pellets are accepted on every face; spent pellets can be pulled from any face you set to output in the Side Config tab.
• Never load-shed by NeroTech's throttling.

Recipes

Item	Recipe
Radioisotope Generator	Iron Ingot, Nero Coil, Iron Ingot / Circuit Board, Machine Frame, Nero Coil / Iron Ingot, empty, Iron Ingot
Isotope Pellet	1 Uranium Pellet + 4 Glowstone Dust (shapeless)

Spent Isotope Pellets are never crafted — they come out of the generator.

Disposing of spent pellets

A Spent Isotope Pellet is safe in a chest, but destroying one as a dropped item pollutes: when the item entity is destroyed — burnt in fire, thrown in lava, dropped on a cactus, caught in an explosion — it records a burst of rtgSpentPelletPollution (200) per pellet into NeroTech's regional pollution at that spot, the same kind of burst a NeroTech fusion containment breach vents. A stack of 64 is 64 bursts. The burst triggers on destruction only: water does not destroy item entities in vanilla (a pellet dropped in the sea just floats), a pellet that despawns after five minutes vents nothing, and falling out of the world removes the item without vanilla's destruction hook, so that vents nothing either. The pollution is regional and never attributed to a player.

Config keys

Key	Default	Range	What it does
rtgNePerTick	30	1–10000	Output from a fresh pellet (NE/t)
rtgHalfLifeDays	20	1–365	In-game days per halving of output
rtgCutoffPermille	50	1–999	Output (permille of fresh) below which a pellet is spent
rtgSpentPelletPollution	200	0–100000	Pollution burst per Spent Isotope Pellet destroyed as a dropped item

Stirling Generator

How it works

Every tick the Stirling Generator looks at its six neighbours, finds the hottest NeroTech-family machine (any NeroTech machine or NeroPower reactor) and reads how far above its ambient temperature it is — the gradient. It then draws a share of that gradient as heat, gradient × stirlingDrawPermille ⁄ 1000 (10 %) per tick, capped at stirlingMaxDrawPerOp (8), and never pulls a machine below its ambient level. Every unit of heat drawn becomes stirlingNePerHeatUnit NE (15).

A cold face matters. If any neighbour is water, ice, packed ice, blue ice, a snow block, powder snow or a NeroTech Radiator, output gets a +50 % bonus. Without a cold face the usable gradient is halved — the engine has nowhere to reject its heat. The GUI shows the gradient, the heat drawn last tick and whether a cold sink is attached.

Planet efficiency. With planetEfficiencyEnabled on (the default) the cold-face bonus grows with how cold the local ambient is — NeroTech's planet ambient for that spot, which follows the Nerospace planet (or NeroTech's thermalAmbientByDimension table) plus the biome: bonus × (1000 + clamp(−ambient × 5, 0, 1000)) ⁄ 1000. On a cold planet at ambient −80 the +50 % bonus becomes +70 % (40 % larger); at ambient 0 or warmer — the Overworld's default — it stays +50 %; the scaling tops out at double the bonus (ambient −200 or colder). The ambient is re-read every 200 ticks. With the key off the bonus is flat everywhere.

Because it removes heat from its neighbour, a Stirling Generator is also a passive coolant with a dividend: parked against a running Fission Reactor it lowers the reactor's heat and pays you for it. It has no slots, no fuel, no heat of its own and no failure ladder; presets and Speed modules scale the output.

Recipes

Item	Recipe
Stirling Generator	Iron Ingot, Piston, Iron Ingot / Nero Coil, Machine Frame, Piston / empty, Copper Block, empty

Config keys

Key	Default	Range	What it does
stirlingNePerHeatUnit	15	1–1000	NE produced per unit of heat drawn
stirlingMaxDrawPerOp	8	1–1000	Hard cap on heat drawn per tick
stirlingDrawPermille	100	1–1000	Share of the gradient drawn per tick
stirlingColdFaceBonusPermille	500	0–1000	Output bonus with a cold face
planetEfficiencyEnabled	true	—	Scale the cold-face bonus with the local ambient (see above)