Reactor Inlet

alaindustrial:reactor_port

NuclearImplementednuclearreactormultiblockshieldingfluid-transportsteam

Summary

The Reactor Inlet solves the problem every sealed building runs into: how do you get a pipe inside without punching a hole in the wall? An ordinary pipe laid through the shell would be exactly that hole the room scanner reads any block but the permitted seven as a breach. The inlet is one of those seven: outside it a pipe connects, inside it another does, and the wall itself stays whole — the controller still counts the room as formed.

Since stage 3 it is no longer a decorative cube. It now has a fluid port, and with it the one number this stage exists for: an inlet passes = 50 mB a tick and not a drop more.

What it does

A crossing, not a store. Its capacity is exactly one tick of its throughput, so it behaves as a hole in the wall rather than as a reservoir: the pipe outside fills it, the pipe inside empties it, and nothing can accumulate. That is what makes the 50 mB/t figure real — a segment can never hand on more than it holds (the same mechanism that makes a cable's buffer its throughput, the lesson of.

Both directions, and one block rather than two

Water goes in and steam comes out through inlets of the same kind. There will be no separate "steam outlet": two nearly identical blocks with different holes would double the recipes and the textures and make the player remember which way round to place them — for a decision they never actually get to make. What an inlet carries is decided by what is plumbed into it.

The inlet does not filter. The "water only" rule lives where it is honest — on the reactor column itself: a pipe carrying the wrong fluid should stall against the machine that cannot use it, not against a wall.

Practical consequence: one inlet serves one direction at a time. Its tank holds a single fluid, so the water line and the steam line go through different inlets. A fully plumbed reactor at the HV ceiling means six inlets in and six out.

How many inlets you need

An inlet carries 50 mB/t; a fluid pipe segment carries exactly the same (= 50). So an inlet and the pipe run feeding it are one 50 mB/t line, and they can be counted together.

Every working room needs water, down to a single column: while the reaction runs the shell sheds no heat, and a reactor without water climbs to the accident. The table is for a reactor on water sitting near zero on the gauge. One that gets its water back after a drought also drinks a twentieth of the heat it has stored — up to 250 mB/t on a full gauge — and that surplus shrinks as the temperature falls. No extra lines are laid for it: if the water runs short, the gauge simply comes down more slowly.

That is what the block means for play: the bottleneck sits in the wall. Every extra line is another shell cell given up to an inlet, another run from the pump, and another craft costing four shielding plates. A reactor cannot be plumbed with "one pipe from the ocean".

The room stays sealed

The scanner sees an inlet as casing — it is a shell block, after all. Everything the wall around it has, it has too: the formed and edge states, the seamless art of a finished room, shared-face culling. The one thing it does not do is count as glass; it is outside the limit.

So any number of inlets may be placed, and the shell loses nothing by it — neither toughness nor scanner standing. Only the price limits you.

Energy

EU/FE does not cross an inlet, and stage 3 did not change that. A cable run up to it from outside simply stops at the wall, exactly as at casing. Nor is it needed: the room's only producer and consumer of energy is the controller, which sits in the wall itself and pushes EU/FE outward from five of its own faces. There is as yet nothing inside a sealed room to carry power to.

The insulated copper cable in the recipe is a legacy of the original idea ("one block for pipe and cable alike") and a progression gate — not a working conductor.

Block properties

The numbers match the rest of the shell: the inlet must not be the spot where the shell is easiest to open.

Like casing and glass, the inlet switches to a bezel-less texture once the controller accepts the room (see "The seamless look"). It matters more here than elsewhere: this is the one shell block with a distinct pattern of openings, and in a finished wall that pattern has to read as part of a panel rather than as a separate crate.

A saved fluid id that no longer resolves (a mod removed, a fluid renamed) empties the buffer instead of throwing: one tick of water is not worth a world that refuses to load.

Recipes

Craft — ×1 at a time.

S P S S = shielding plate ×4
W C W P = fluid pipe ×2
S P S W = insulated copper cable ×2
C = reactor casing ×1

The recipe explains the block by itself: casing in the middle, pipe and cable along the edges, shielding plates in the corners. A piece of wall with both conduits already built into it.

Progression

Tier: none. Requires: shielding plates and reactor casing, a fluid pipe, an insulated copper cable. Unlocks: water into the room and steam out of it — that is, the whole of stage 3. Without an inlet no water pipe gets inside, and a working reactor without water does not cool at all: the shell sheds no heat, and even a single column climbs to the accident.

Related

Reactor Casing — the rest of the shell, the geometry and the crafting chain. Reactor Column — what stands on the other side of the wall and where the water goes. Steam Nozzle — where the steam goes once it is outside. Steam — the second fluid an inlet carries. Reactor Controller — what counts the inlet as wall and reports the boil rate. Fluid Pipe — what connects on both sides. Insulated Copper Cable — the other half of the recipe.

Crafting

Shaped Crafting

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Reactor Inlet