Steam generator improvements

I have two improvements I would love to see:

• The steam generator mechanics are terrible. It requires an exact amount of heat that only matches up with a fully populated liquid heat exchanger to produce steam, otherwise it spits out water, relying on a fluid regulator to keep it flowing. It should instead have internal water storage and take whatever amount of heat you give it and generate as much, and only as much steam as it can from that heat.
• The liquid heat exchanger should be reversible, allowing you to create hot coolant from non nuclear heat sources.

These two changes would allow some much more interesting mechanics:

• You could run a steam turbine from 1-5 heaters attached directly
• You could have a farm of heaters generating hot coolant to concentrate and transfer the heat into the steam generator
• It actually gives a use to the radioisotope heat generator, which can participate in your heating plant

Quote from Chocohead

That I out right oppose. Heating coolant is stupid, since it is designed to cool uranium fuel rods, not transfer heat.

Why shouldn't there be a way to transfer heat?

Quote from Chocohead

You can anyway, I can't see why just using lava wouldn't already do what you've suggested.

You can use lava, but not heaters ( burning renewable fuel ) since their heat output does not match up with the heat the steam generator required, and as noted in point #1, they currently go fubar unless you give them an exact multiple of 100 heat. The second point was intended as a way to address the problem of limited number of faces on the steam generator into which you can inject heat. Another possible solution to that is to have a multi block steam generator like railcraft. Then if you need to attach 8 heaters, you just build a larger steam generator. The reversible heat exchanger is probably easier to code though.

Quote from Chocohead

I didn't say there shouldn't be, but heating up coolant is a silly method of doing it. Having long metal pipes to conduct heat, but have noticeable losses and warm up times in doing so make much more sense and feel more IC2y.

In real life they pipe around the hot coolant rather than use metal heat conductors... I figured this was trying to model a real nuclear reactor so piping coolant instead of just attaching the heat exchanger directly to the containment dome would be appropriate.