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mekanism / Mekanism-Feature-Requests

All enhancements and feature requests for Mekanism (for current and future releases) should go here.
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Add a fuel cell #400

Open AJ13th opened 2 years ago

AJ13th commented 2 years ago

Describe the feature you'd like

Insert a "fuel cell", a one-block generator!

Uses hydrogen and ambient air and produces power, heat and water ...how a fuel cell works: with electrolysis (already implemented: Electrolytic Separator) and cold combustion (added with: Fule Cell)! It would be the perfect complement to the gas-burning generator that works more efficiently with ethylene! The fuel cell could work more efficiently with hydrogen! Before the fuel cell can use the ambient air, the ambient air must be filtered! Perhaps in the crafting recipe you can take into account the filter (e.g. "coal" or better "activated coal") It shouldn be a new high-end generator, it's about an alternative to the gas burner! In case someone doesn't want to burn traditional gas! for example mother nature to love!

Describe alternatives you've considered

Using the (with hydrogen) inefficient gas burning generator!

Additional context

No response

beholderface commented 2 years ago

Unless the recipe was much cheaper than the gas burning generator(which is already fairly cheap, even including the infrastructure to fuel it), there would be zero reason to use your proposed fuel cell over a GBG. It takes 80 FE to produce 1 mb of hydrogen in an electrolytic separator (energy upgrades don't change the consumption here). A GBG produces 80 FE from 1 mb of hydrogen (max burn rate of 256 mb/t, for a total of 20480 FE/t). This is already 100% efficient. Unless the fuel cell was made to be greater than 100% efficient, which raises significant balance issues (and IMO would just be stupid), it would be impossible to get a net gain on power, meaning this could only be reasonably used when you've got a production line that's making hydrogen as a byproduct that you're not using elsewhere. You could crank the max burn rate up a ton, but 256mb/t already burns through an ultimate tank in 100 seconds(in practice a GBG would take a bit longer than that since the burn rate goes down as the internal tank empties, but still), which is pretty dang fast. It wouldn't even be viable as a portable source that you can put down wherever, since an ultimate tank of hydrogen produces 4,096,000 FE at 100% efficiency, which is less than half that of an ultimate energy cube.

Sure, it would be different thematically, but that's pretty much it for reasons to use it at any stage of the game where you have excess hydrogen.

AJ13th commented 2 years ago

Well, it's actually quite simple! Then you would have to adjust the parameters of Gas-burning Generator! In addition, the fuel cell should not be better, but equivalent! Only with the difference of the different materials that are used! The gas-burning generator is more efficient at burning ethylene and the fuel cell is more efficient at "burning" hydrogen! The power & heat output can't be the same! Except that the fuel cell also spits out water!