Aquilo heating: what needs heat and how much

On Aquilo most buildings freeze unless they touch a heat pipe or heat source above 30 °C. An assembler, chemical plant or lab needs 100 kW of heat, a belt 10 kW and an inserter 30 kW, while underground belts need 50 to 200 kW each. One heating tower gives 40 MW of heat.

Heat each building needs

Heat pipes only lose heat to buildings that need it, so long heat pipe runs are cheap. Underground belts and pipes to ground are the expensive part: route belts and pipes above ground next to heat pipes where you can.

Heating towers

• 40 MW of heat at normal quality (100 MW at legendary), burning 16 MW of fuel: 250% efficiency.
• They burn fuel all the time, even when the heat is not needed, so do not overbuild them.
• They burn almost any fuel: solid fuel or rocket fuel made from Aquilo's ammonia is the usual choice.
• For electricity, heat exchangers and steam turbines run off the same heat: one heating tower drives 4 heat exchangers and about 7 steam turbines.

40 MW covers the heat of about 400 assemblers or 4,000 belts, so keeping a factory block warm takes only a tower or two. The bigger heat user is usually power: heat exchangers on the same heat network turn the rest into electricity.

Other Aquilo rules

• Most buildings need a concrete floor on ice; stone bricks do not work.
• There is no iron, copper, stone or coal: ship them in. Lithium brine, fluorine and crude oil come from pumpjacks, ammoniacal solution from offshore pumps.
• Solar is almost useless (1%), and robots use five times the power.
• To get there you need rocket turrets, advanced asteroid processing, heating towers from Gleba, asteroid reprocessing from Vulcanus and electromagnetic science from Fulgora.

Ready-made builds: Aquilo blueprints.