@kmc2000 made a new reactor a while ago and from what I could tell a few people (including myself of course) have some opinions about it and feedback for it.
So far I’ve only seen mentions of this feedback in the in-game OOC channel or discord conversations and I thought I’d make a talkpoint here so we have a collected place for said feedback.
Also a poll for you to rate your experience with the AGCNR:
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The issue I have with it is, while we have documentation on how it works, we don’t have anything on how to set it up, while I feel that some engineering mains may be able to figure it out, I just couldn’t make heads nor tails of the thing.
Without any modifications to pumps, following the “guide” on the wiki currently as it is, the RBMK will explode due to overpressure before it reaches the 60% reactor power that the “guide” says to wait for, and this was without the moderator enabled, so not sure if moderator would make it explode quicker or slower.
The RMBK is just a StormDrive that has been made way harder to control. It also misses a display to show if the rods are depleted or not , and the current inputs (moderator , coolant).
If it would help , i think the RMBK should instead mass-produce heat at a very efficient rate , lets say 50000K , which can then be hooked to TEG’s to create power . Instead of it being a ripoff SD.
I like the fact you can grill on it, besides that I uh… seen it blow up a bunch of times.
Well, I figure I’ll add in my 2 cents, for what its worth. This will be a wall of text, so be warned.
The TL;DR of the suggestions are: lower the alarm thresholds, reduce the amount of space required for an RMBK to function and condense controls/ increase the tolerance of the reactor at critical levels.
First, something I’d like to see that would be easier to code in: lowering the alarm thresholds.
Currently, the alarm thresholds are a little too high. They do not give you enough time to recognize the issue, troubleshoot it, and fix it in such a manner that it will stay fixed for most times. I suggest that any coolant pressure above 75% trigger warnings. This should hopefully give enough time for the engineers to get there, figure out why the pressure is spiking, and deal with it.
Likewise, an alarm warning triggering when the power is 85% and rising would probably prevent a few issues.
General commentary:
The way I see it, the RMBK has two main issues aside from the alarms, I’ll mark thoughts of how to fix them.
For mappers:
It is very power/space inefficient, it requires an absolute ton of space to function, between the heat exchangers, the cooling rod pools, and the RMBK/RMBK functional piping.
Thoughts on how to fix:
-A special, compact heat exchanger tied specifically to the RMBK, that is more efficient, but actually needs to be linked to an RMBK to actually function, potentially make it a factor of gasses and/or power for efficiency levels.
-Making temperature transfer a factor of the rod depletion (more depleted means it gets hotter), while reducing the overall cooling requirements, to a level that does not require a gigantic series of coils unless the rods start to get highly depleted.
-For general gameplay;
The RMBK is incredibly vulnerable to tampering or attack. It could be said that it is more stable than the Stormdrive. This is true during non-combat operations. During any sort of combat, it absolutely needs to be babysat to have even a fraction of a chance to shut it down in time to save the ship if the huge section of engineering it occupies takes a hit, and it is reasonably likely that such will not be possible anyway. It has the nickname “Chernobl” for a reason: if something goes wrong, it goes very wrong, very fast, and spews radiation everywhere.
Thoughts on how to fix.
-Condense all the control consoles into one console like it is with the stormdrive. It is much easier to rebuild one essential control/monitoring console than it is to rebuild 3.
-Increase the level of time that you have to react to a critical failure condition by making the thing more resilient at its critical levels.
-Fix the previously mentioned issue with the level of space that the coils occupy. The sheer size of the thing ensures that it is reasonably likely to get hit in battle. Pretty much any hit to the RMBK in its current state will ensure it goes critical.
Hope this was at least semi-useful.
End of wall of text.
Few things!
The RB is intended to be huge. The coils could definitely be reduced in size, though the intent with this thing is that it’s a huge amount of power from a huge reactor setup. The SD is there as a space efficient semi magic powerbox, the RBMK runs off of real physics 
and thus, like the 1970s british nuclear power reactor it’s based off of, it requires a lot of complex plumbing.
As for it being a ripoff stormdrive… meh? I guess. I was originally going to make it use heat, but then atmospherics has heaters anyway, so I figured they’d just end up tacking heaters onto a pipe and generating power that way, if this isn’t realistic, lemme know.
As for solutions, I could actually add another line. A heat exchanger powered line to heat a driver gas off of the reactor’s heat to then drive a series of turbines, which would also give the reactor another heat bleadoff point.