Ugh, i even had to register so i could describe my disappointment when i realised how vastly superior the gold vent+component vent set up is to everything else.
After browsing the forums i also realised the problem with the absense of MKII-IV reactors. So i decided to juggle some numbers to help see what could be tweaked. I haven't read the forums much, as i kinda learned most of the reactor stuff on my own, with tthe help of the planner tool.
As result i might be using wrong terms when describing some basic parameters. But here's what i have come up with when playing around with numbers:
The most important value i used for the reactors is heat reduction per cell of space used, lets call it CE - cooling efficiency. One old adv. plating + 4 cells has CE of 4/5 = 0.8 . One reactor heat vent (than brown one) has CE of 5, and so on.
In addition, i will be using SE - storage efficiency. Its works the same, but for containing heat, not venting it. All of the old components have SE of 10 000, so its simple there. SE of any old setup is 10 000.
The new system is more complex, and this value becomes important when trying to make reactors focused on cooling cells. The vents and exchangers dont have very low heat storage, so the set ups based on vents tend to have very low SE. Not like they need it though.
1: The old system.
In the old system, the cooling was done wirh adv. plating+coolant cell.
The exact nuber is probably lower, but let's say there are 3 cells per 1 plating in the reactor. Thats 3 heat dissipated for 4 cells, so CE is 0.75
SE is 10k, as each module has it at 10k, so the average stays at 10k.
CE = 0.75
SE = 10k
2: The OP Vent combo
Lets grab the Reactor 9 from the good reactors list:Mark I EA 4.66 eff, 280 EU/t. I like it because it is efficient AND powerful, and the cost doesnt matter in the very long run.
46 slots occupied. 640 Heat vented.
CE = 13.91
SE = 1228 (yeah, pitiful, but why would you care, it doesnt accumulate heat in any of its components).
So, as you see, the cooling system is about 18 times better than of the old reactors.
As you can also see, the cooling is in fact so efficient, this system is stronger than if you filled all those 46 slots with advanced vents and magically fed them the heat. The superiority of the overclocked vents is just purely insane. And the cost of 16 excess heat it generates is easily compensated with a simple pattern.
This design is very optimised, so lets round the CE down to just 13, or even 12.
Even without making new set ups, you should see that without the overclocked vents and the component vents, you cannot possibly go over 12 CE, as thats how much advanced vents produce. And that 12CE is, in fact as unattainable as 1 CE in the old reactors. You still need to spend some space to move heat to those advanced vents. So i'd say the realistic high CE for reactors with no gold vents is around 9. The gold vent setups are at least 40% better, often over 50% better.
The gold vents are plain OP, as has already been stated. There are 2 reasons for that: they are able to vent loads of heat, more than any other reactor, and on top of that they ALSO pull lots of heat from the reactor hull. That's like this components biggest weakness is actually its advantage!. The idea for this vent is good, but cranking the numbers so high made it way too strong.
Here are some ideas what i'd like to see it fixed:
Make 4 component vents not enough to cool one vent. Suddenly checkerboarding these stops working. Set the excess heat pulled to 20 instead of 16, or something. Component vent surrounded by 4 hot components is the 2nd best cooling tool, second only to the gold vents. Making them harder to use them together would help alot.
Just generally nerf it. I see nothing wrong with that. Setting it to 16/36 sounds nice, but i think it would still be superior to other options. 14/32 sounds like the best option tome. 18 overheat per tick, ability to work as a great vent AND heat puller, sounds fine and not OP to me.
This does make the gold vent inferior to the component vent, but without this easy checkerboard set up its very hard to actually get the component vents to work at max capacity.
Cooling has improved a lot, heat containment - not so much.
As you see from the old vs new system, CE has grown by factor of 18. Lets say the the vent gets nerfed and the average CE would be 9. That's 12 times more than the old system.
So, cooling has become 12x better, storage only improved by under 6x
I say "under 6x" because they do not pull heat on their own and have to depend on heat exchangers, that take space. I'd evaluate that cooling cell-focused set ups would have SE around 45-50k at most.
So yeah, as you see, the heat containers have simply been unable to keep up with the active cooling improvements.
An illustration: one slot of a machine with 9CE cools 90,000 heat per full cycle. And right now we have set ups with almost 14 CE. The Cells already evaporate at 60k.
The suggestion here is simple: buff the hell out of them. I would see no problem in seeing them also have some meager heat dissipation, like 1/2/4, just so that i dont need to manually cool them in my MKII-1 reactor after a full cycle. Limited heat transfer also sounds fine, just not much, so that the heat exchangers are still needed for decent efficiecy.
Reactor heat capacity has not improved at all
Alright, active cooling is 12x better now, passive cooling components are 5x better, And the reactor itself? According to the planner, it is now fixed at 10,000 no matter the chamber count. Oh, so all the values have grown by 6x, shit cools down 12x faster, so people make set ups that heat up 12x faster as well, and the reactor heat containment? Oh, its even lower than before.
Heat plates you say? Lets check heat plates vs reactor heat vent: lets you produce 2000 more heat over the course of a cycle, and thats before meltdown, you actually need only 1,400 more heat to climb to 70% now. So yeah, this thing saves you 1400 heat.
Just as the plating, the reactor vent doesnt care where it is placed. Except it cools 50,000 heat heat for you over the cycle. The heat plating is the reactor vent's passive counterpart. Yeah, except its 25 times worse, so it can only be possibly useful in breeders. Well, and MKV's. That's liek the only thing where passive cooling is ahead.
My suggestion? Well, the cooling and heat storage have been redone, why not redo the actual reactor body? Buff its max heat to 50,000 , maybe even 80,000. Buff the plating to give 5k/10k/15k heat capacity to the reactor. Adjust the heat values for breeders accordingly, maybe nerf the EU/t output. I mean, non-SUC are now many times stronger than before, its only logical to nerf their output as well.
I am sure the MKII-IV will start popping out, and if everything is done properly, with ALOT of diversity.
tl;dr
Nerf gold vents by 40%! Buff cooling cells by 100%! Buff the reactor body health and plating by 500%-700%!
