i know its kinda sucks to make new stuff
But i feel even with tier 3 steam turbines, dont produces much power, entering the gigawatt scale, its start to get very complicated to scale things up, for exemple, 4 tier 3 nuclear reactor produces around 1 gigawatt, but needs 60 heat exchangers and 120 turbines.
Should be interesting to add some "overcharged" heat exchanger and turbines, adding some modules, engines or something.

Not related but still bothers me a bit.
where is the copper? how steam engines and turbines produces energy without any coil? its not immersive.

4 tier 3 nuclear generators producing a gigawatt sounds high...
they produce 90MW each, have a 200% neighbour bonus so that's 270, and you have 4 of them, so that's 1080MW, or 1GW... wow.

it is designed to be 5 Heat Exchangers per reactor, which becomes 15 with your 200% bonus, and then 2 turbines per heat exchanger, so... 60 and 120 does sound right.

But those numbers were basically taken based on boilers, a HE is worth 2 boilers of the same tier, and a turbine worth 2 steam engines of the same tier... but I do know that heat exchangers are a bit of a pain to set up, so, I'll consider something.

every tier works on higher temperature, but 765°C is already a pretty high value, more than that becomes very unrealistic. I thing the simple solution is just to multiply the input/output of HE and Turbines.

For now im using "Schall Machine Scaling" with a max output of 7.5 GW on 80 stupid big turbines.

Yeah, the original tiers were a bit different, it stops at 765C because going above 1000 kinda breaks things, though a tier 6 with 915C is possible.

But, yeah, rather than just going up a tier, I'm looking at alternatives for the "Mega base", which would get rid of most of the puzzle side of placing heat exchangers, and you should just be able to put them in a grid... but not really reduce the required amount of them by all that much. it will be a significant difference though.

Still need to think about how to do the steam turbine side though.

HE working like the Fluid Generators? that sounds very interesting...

But for me the problem is not the grid, i can place like 20 turbines in a row.
I dont have any images of my old energy setup, but this is my current one using Schall mod.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/325425297337876480/711326959111766047/Energy_Setup.jpg

I have no accumulators on this map yet, but i normally use my Wind Turbine mod for the main energy source and a large accumulated energy on accumulators to handle energy consumption peaks and low energy production (wind turbines are kinda unstable), when accumulators go too low, the emergency energy setup goes online, the setup is like the image, but with your mod, its basically a few HE saving Steam on Storage Tanks and a lot of steam turbines. My last setup on 0.17, had the capacity to produce 19 GW energy to fill 1,5 TJ of accumulators every 5 min. The problem was placing 2000 steam turbines and feed all of them.

I think increasing the amount of storage inside the turbines would help transferring steam to more turbines in a row and/or turbines that consumes more than 60 steam/second.

Just my opinion, im happy with anything you decide to do.

just found the old save.
Here is some images.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/325425297337876480/711365785427116082/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/325425297337876480/711365957725061160/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/325425297337876480/711366202294796288/unknown.png

Each lane has 25 steam turbines
The entire setup has 2k turbines

Yeah, I know the issue.

The point of making them grid-able isn't to reduce the numbers... the point of making a LARGE gridable one (same size as a reactor) is to reduce the number of them. so, a single large grid heat exchanger would be equivelent of 5 normal heat exchangers, so instead of needing 60 for your 4 reactors, you'd need... 12. (Would be 1 per reactor, but then with the 200% bonus each, it becomes 3 per reactor)

I don't just want something that looks bigger, but rather something that looks like several have been put together in such a way to optimise the space usage.

EG: on the turbine, the part that does the main work (most of this is the spinny blades on the top) is only about a 3x3 area, the 1x3 block on either end basically exist to step up the steam pipe, then step it down again on the other end... so why not chop that part out, saving a 2x3 tile area, and have, for example, a 3x8 sized steam turbine (with 2 actual turbines in it) that works as well as 2? maybe even a... 3x17 size one that's 5 turbines in one, then put 2 of those side by side (Fairly sure they physically fit in that space) for a 5x17 entity that works as well as 10. That means you'd need 1 of these per large grid heat exchanger, or 12 total.

Still just ideas right now though.

You are thinking to scale everything to 1:1 ?
1 reactor = 1 HE = 1 Turbine ? or 2 Turbines?
Including size? 5x5 ?
If that is that case...
Making a single HE of 4 in a grid like this, cutting a bit in the middle to fit 5x5, seems fine
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/325425297337876480/711644564980629514/HE.JPG

The Turbines..... hmmm...
They already are 3x5, overlapping 2 of them on top of each one by a single square, fits fine, overlapping 1 square side by side doenst work, maybe scaling down a bit.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/325425297337876480/711644715065540739/Turbine.JPG

Dont know if what you are trying to say, But this is a lot to change.
I really like the idea
1 reactor feeding 1 HE of the same size feeding 2 turbines of the same size, and grid compatible.
I would also change the neighbour bonus to +50%, +100% is way to overpower,
+100% , 1 = 1 / 2 = 4 / 4 = 12
+50% , 1 = 1 / 2 = 3 / 4 = 8

About the turbine sprites.
The horizontal rotation, cutting the front and the end, leaving just the middle of the turbine, is almost 2,5 squares in length, mirroring it would fit 5 squares and have a good looking sprite.
Something like this: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/325425297337876480/711650999378640958/yrKvNWLIvvQO.png

I just have some concept art right now, but...
3x3 HE with the power of... somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8 standard HEs: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dbxfgufcmdikaq5/3x3%20heat%20exchanger.png?dl=0
3x5 HE, probably 2 per reactor: https://www.dropbox.com/s/kbvnkipds2br73m/3x5%20heat%20exchanger.png?dl=0
5x5 HE, 1 per rector: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0wo5onqegbzlv5n/5x5%20heat%20exchanger.png?dl=0
(red line is heat pipe, blue arrows are water, green arrows are steam)

And, Art of a 2x turbine by Kirazy (with sideways pipes edited onto it by me) as a concept for the multi-turbine: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b04ie6352rk7vuh/unknown2.png?dl=0
now imagine those in a 2x5 array, giving you a 5x17 tile entity.
I guess we'll have to get a bit more creative with the vertical turbine.

Nice!
I liked all, but i still think the 5x5 is the best idea, you can form a very square grid together with the reactors.
About the turbine...
17 tiles is a bit weird, we should try something multiple of 5. Like 10/15/20.
Also, if we manage to make it square size, will not need vertical sprites.
Im not oppose of the idea of scaling down bit the sprites to make a more "shallow" turbine, real steam turbines are not that big in diameter but have a good length.

The way we worked it out, it was +3 tiles per additional turbine (Looking at the horizontal) so it goes...
3x5, 8, 11, 14, 17. a 6 turbine run would be 3x20.
then one above the other with a slight tile overlap makes 5x20, but that's 12 turbine's worth, when you only need 10.

A 5x5 would be 2 horizontal turbines next to each other, but then if you look at the pipe layout plan, you'd have 2 pipes on the left and ride sides, and only one on the top and bottom sides, so either you're stuck with that non-rotating layout, or you still need a vertical orientation.

In any case, something interesting to note, Look back at the horizontal orientation turbine: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b04ie6352rk7vuh/unknown2.png?dl=0
Notice how wide the turbine blades are? that's barely 2 tiles wide, meaning if you put them side by side it's about 2 and a half tiles total.
It will probably be a bit beyond my editing skills, but I'm sure Kirazy could put those on top of the vertical turbines to allow 2 side by side.