Not that this is a serious critique of your mod or anything, but I would like to tell you how I see the vanilla recipe of the fusion cell, and that it may make a lot more sense after a closer look:
Tritium IRL is extremely rare, and most of its supply in the ocean was created by nuclear bomb tests. It’s definitely a rare and exotic resource, not something you can get at scale from water. The best way to produce it is to irradiate certain isotopes of other elements, so that they decay into tritium. And lithium-6 is one of them. So the lithium in the cell actually generates tritium when placed into an already active reactor. This is what most fusion research projects IRL plan to use.
Now, the reason ammonia is used in the recipe is actually the same reason as in your mod: You are getting deuterium from the ocean, just an ammonia ocean instead of a water ocean (; Ammonia is easier to electrolyze than water (takes less energy), and contains more hydrogen per unit of mass anyway. So it’s a better choice when you have an ocean of it for free.
The holmium is unrealistic, yeah. But the recipe for lithium from lithium brine uses it, and it’s pretty obvious that that recipe is an electrolysis process. So under the assumption that in the Factorio world, holmium can be used as an aid or catalyst for electrolysis, maybe that’s what it’s doing in the fusion cell recipe: Helping electrolyze the “heavy ammonia” for deuterium.
So, I think the fusion was deuterium-tritium all along. Also, I think it’s totally practical compared to fission:
- You get like 5x more energy per rocket.
- But only if you were previously sending uranium ore and making+recycling fission cells at the destination, with legendary productivity modules. Because if you send finished fission cells, fusion cells are actually 25x denser per rocket.
- It doesn’t require water and takes up less space (good for space and Fulgora).
But it’s your mod, it can be about whatever you want.
