Just tested this. The math is wacky. You know its wacky when there are yottaKelvins involved.

Wrt physically realizable implementations with this module, they all strictly under-perform the thermocouples b/c one does not simply make a decent Brayton cycle powerplant that only has a single stage compressor. Reusing the turbopump module would be fine if this were Rankine cycle (compressor operating on liquid coolant), but the game doesn't sufficently model phase transitions/phase diagrams for that. For Brayton cycle we need multistage compressors to achieve decent compression ratios (real Brayton cycle engines typically >10) and compete with thermocouple; but best I could get in game was 1.6 (ultra cold Xeon)

Regardless, actual performance improvement is less than 10% over the best thermocouple powerplants if we restrict to physically realizable designs. In that light Q-switched seems reasonable. I'd be curious to see how reactor mass/cost/volume compares, but radiator mass and cost dominates anyways so I can't imagine it mattering. (2/2)

Sadly this is far beyond "imbalanced" and is outright physically broken. Specifically the module seems to output nonsense if the coolant goes supersonic anywhere. Your example rejects heat at a temperature higher than the reactor temp. If we assume you're getting the Carnot efficiency on your heat engine and solve for reactor temp that implies a reactor temp > 3388k which the game *should* be objecting to. I was able to take this even a little further with Xeon coolant and have the module let me build a reactor that effectively had a core temp over 7000K. Beyond me why there isn't a sanity check that the power output doesn't exceed the Carnot efficiency. (1/2)

Woah, thats really cool!

Very cool thank you

I can make ships with this type of reactor. However, if I restart the game all turbine reactors will have disappeared from all ships I put them in... is there any fix for this?

thanks

Really interesting!