Realistic Reactor Glow

by ouk_ouk

The glow of working nuclear reactor has the proper color now!

Tweaks
2 months ago
0.16 - 2.0
10.7K

i Centrifuge Glow?

5 years ago

I strongly suspect how the centrifuge glows is also not realistic, is a brightly glowing green. It would be nice if you would take care of it at times. It could also be a small update for this mod.

5 years ago

I don't know what would be a realistic color for centrifuge. Probably still green but much dimmer/barely visible?
Anyway, this mod is about the reactor and it's cherenkov radiation.

5 years ago
(updated 5 years ago)

I know this is a different mod, would only be two flies with one clap, a little less work at the end, maybe, but ok, so with your guess you might be right, or also that this is completely white shimmering. I just looked at something, but there's nothing solid about it.

5 years ago

Honestly, uranium hexafluoride is the form of uranium used in centrifuges, and it's basically a silvery-white color. No green really would be involved at all. Uranium ore itself isn't green (pitchblende is black, although torbernite is green-blue), typically, nor most of the intermediates used in the production process. The green colors in the game seem to be just mainly because uranium "feels" green. The actual colors in a centrifuge are probably quite boring, not glowing at all, and typically not seen since hexafluoride is an extremely nasty substance that needs to be contained.

1 year, 3 months ago

I don't think there's any need to change the centrifuge glow. The bright green hue popularly associated with radioactive metals is the color of radium paint (or perhaps more commonly, the slightly yellower variant in the fuel rod seen in The Simpsons intro). Actual radioactive metals just look like metals, which is uninteresting, and radioactivity itself is almost impossible to see until levels get so high that it starts affecting equipment, such as the grainy quality in the iconic photograph of the "elephant's foot" at Chernobyl. I think it is good to have a visual glow to represent radioactivity for the player, and the bright vanilla green is not only what players will readily recognize, it is also more likely to pair well with other mods. (Space Exploration, for example, uses centrifuges for processing other things, and the glow color is determined by the recipe.) And if we want to get all realism about it, uranium ore, like other ores, comes in many colors and most of them are drab and don't stand out much from other ores. It takes a trained eye to tell uranium ore apart from just basic rocks, as I noted in a Cody's Lab video involving actual uranium mining in a real uranium mine. Like most reactive metals, uranium can be used to make pigments and colored compounds of several colors, with bright yellow-greens being perhaps among the best represented in our industry and antiques scene.

New response