Reactor planner buggy?

  • While playing around with the reactor planner I noticed a strange oddity in this design


    If you look at the top row, the 2nd and 4th cooling cell, as well as those cells at the bottom with the free spot adjacent, they are marked as cooling cells although there isn't anything around them to cause them to heat up. Additional information shows that they are receiving 0 heat, yet they are included in the cooling calculation.


    Is this a bug in the tool or is this some secret nuclear engineering that I wasn't aware of?

  • The plating is what marks the top three and bottom five as active coolants. Now, Al's info thread says:

    2. Reactor Plating
    Reactor Plating serves multiple functions:
    It can store 10000 heat and will (though 10 times slower then a coolant cell), cool itself down as well.
    More important, it can transport heat to adjacent components. If a reactor plating is heated up by something, it will instantly divert the heat among all surrounding coolant systems. Even to other platings (which will again divert the heat, however, NOT to other platings anymore).
    Additionally, each piece of plating will increase the Reactor Hull's integrity, causing it to to take more heat before melting.


    I suspect the calculator may be overestimating the distance the plating spreads heat. Honestly, I'm not sure what's going on, but it's definitely weird.

  • What happens here is reactor planner incorrectly ampplying hull plating behavior to coolant cells. When plating absorbs heat from uranium cell, it can spread that heat into all surrounding components. It can also pass heat to another plating (level 2 plating), which can spread that heat to nearby components. Coolant cell in planner is acting like hull plating and passing its heat to nearby components. It is, however, very unpredictable as very different results can be achieved when playing with planner.
    I also used all my ms paint skillz to create image showing how it is and how it should be. I'm not sure if this bug is present in game too or not.
    (the top coolant cell should not be getting any heat, but it does)