I was only looking for some validation posts because I was annoyed at a couple of the more unrealistic reactions you have going in NMS. Like being able to get salt from combining dihydrogen and oxygen (instead of receiving the obvious water, which doesn't even exist in the game as usable item/component). Then I stumbled upon this research paper, read it completely (unfortunately the discussion section is longer than it needs to be due to them repeating most of their results in it) and now (by looking it up before writing this post) learned that you can form salts with hydroxide ions.
So while the process is much simplified and not always intuitive in the reactions in game (and the Salt icon says NaCl despite no sodium or chlorine having been used in the "refiner", just H2 and O, even though Na and Cl exist in game), that particular combination for the refiner now makes at least some sense to me.
A couple nice highlights from the paper:
To the question “What did you feel about the presence of chemistry in No Man’s Sky?” in which players had 5-levels to choose, from 1- Frustrated to 5-Excited, 46% selected the level 4, 23,8% the maximum-level and the lowest two levels combined for less than 6% of the answers.
To the question “Did No Man’s Sky make you feel motivated to know more about scientific topics?”, 57,9% answered “Yes”. And to the question “Did No Man’s Sky help you understand some concepts about chemistry?”, 35,7% answered positively.
In the end, we asked “When you think about chemistry or listen to words like ‘chemistry’ or ‘chemicals’, is usually a good or a bad thought?”, and 87,3% of the respondents answered “Good”.