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The SPOM is death, all hail the liquid hydrogen engine.


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Self Powered is just bad, you want that hydrogen elsewhere.

 

Wish I had known that, because saving the hydrogen for the rockets would have been nice, takes me ages to make hydrogen.

 

Think I'm going to declare the AETN death too, why waste hydrogen on it when a steam engine<->aquatuner build is way better solution. It even creates a bit of power to reduce the cost of it, where the AETN is purely a cost.

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1 hour ago, Miravlix said:

Self Powered is just bad, you want that hydrogen elsewhere.

 

Wish I had known that, because saving the hydrogen for the rockets would have been nice, takes me ages to make hydrogen.

 

Think I'm going to declare the AETN death too, why waste hydrogen on it when a steam engine<->aquatuner build is way better solution. It even creates a bit of power to reduce the cost of it, where the AETN is purely a cost.

I stored excess hydrogen from SPOMs till 1000+ cycles and I have about 25kg, is it not enough?

I guess I have to start to power my electrolyzer separately now?

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I'm not sure why this is still a discussion.  These things are unrelated.

SPOMs are for use in the early and mid game, while you are establishing the core framework of your base and getting your industrial pathways up and running.  They are very effective at producing Oxygen under those conditions, as they generate more power than they consume on average, requiring only water as input.  This allows you to funnel all other resources into more complex systems like your first oil harvesting setup.

SPOMs are not meant as a permanent installation.  They are long-term temporary.  Once you have an industrialized power station of NatGas, and access to a significantly larger volume of both Refined Metals and a substantial quantity of Wheezeworts, you should take some time to create a dedicated Oxygen factory.  You no longer need the self-powered portion, as you should have power to spare at this point.  Industrialize your Electrolyzer setup, sending the Oxygen where it needs to go (like your Exosuits and your core base), cooled as necessary (AETNs or other means) and do with the Hydrogen whatever you need to.  At this point, you might use a bit for power, but you'll also need it to fill any gas based heat exchange systems, like Regulator Loops and Wheezewort Chambers.  Store the rest.

Late game, you shouldn't have or need any SPOMs anymore.  If you do, you need to rethink your base design.  By the time you are building Hydrogen Rockets, 100% of your Hydrogen produced in your Oxygen Factory is at your disposal.  If it's not enough, all you need to do is find more water and build more Electrolyzers in such a way that the Oxygen gets vented directly to space, ensuring 100% Hydrogen creation.

Correct use of SPOMs should see no overlap between these 2 phases.

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2 hours ago, Neotuck said:

I remember @Lifegrow calling the SPOM a "noob trap" a while ago

It sparked an argument with other players

Turns out he was right :p

Yeah because n00bs thinks it's a great idea to have the headache of having to store small amount of hydrogen built up over 100s of cycles until a point in the game where you could just build 10-20 electrolysers and mass produce hydrogen on a massive scale.

Some people are just not very smart. SPOMs solve an early game problem. Hydrogen production for rocket fuel is a late game problem where you already have access to space age materials and probably near infinite water and power resources to tackle it with.

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I neither have infinite water nor infinite power (though we do get "free beer" power with solar, but it needs a lot of space and most of my map is rocket launch platforms.

 

No Hydrogen Geyser, 3 natgas geysers that runs dry before they recycle (So using as much as I can 6 NG Power plants). One Oil Well that can't support a single pump, one oil geyser 300C+ oil, but at less than half the rate of the oil well, so I can only run 1 petro power plant as I run out of oil with two.

 

I have a carbon geyser and a PO, both not really helping a lot with anything, but keeping a few slicksters and puff's happy, but neither allow the truly massive farms you need to really make them do something..

 

It's possible that unlimited power could be created with steam engine, but in a survival game that is a ton of cycle build and do over if I make a single mistake.

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11 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Then why are you even concerned about it? If you can't sustain a hydrogen production for rockets then no amount saving up will make a difference. It's like peeing your pants to keep warm in winter.

Now, this is a person who knows what he's talking about, the voice of experience. :D

By the time you reach the stage where you are wanting liquid Hydrogen, you should also have enough development and water, that building a reasonable Hydrogen production plant shouldn't be an issue.  I'm going to guess that you have only 1 or 2 electrolyzers on the job?

 

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1 hour ago, Miravlix said:

No Hydrogen Geyser, 3 natgas geysers that runs dry before they recycle (So using as much as I can 6 NG Power plants). One Oil Well that can't support a single pump, one oil geyser 300C+ oil, but at less than half the rate of the oil well, so I can only run 1 petro power plant as I run out of oil with two.

 

I have a carbon geyser and a PO, both not really helping a lot with anything, but keeping a few slicksters and puff's happy, but neither allow the truly massive farms you need to really make them do something..

 

It's possible that unlimited power could be created with steam engine, but in a survival game that is a ton of cycle build and do over if I make a single mistake.

300c oil, that's a damn nice temperature for an oil boiler/steam power plant and of course, if you heat it up further, you get a **** ton of NG when you condense the sour gas.

Build this:

Pump 300c oil into it directly.  Using the 400c petrol pumped out, send to a steam generator, this will lose some of the heat from the petrol(400c->225c).  Use the 225c petrol to heat up the cold oil from the wells, which will also go into the boiler.  If you are lucky, you should end up with petrol at less than 100c.  This will effectively double your petrol production, as the oil refinery operates at 50% efficiency. 

This is basically what I'm doing at the moment, although I do have a volcano assisting with the oil cracking.  I'm making more than 5kg/s of petrol.  Ironically, I'm only using the petrol for rockets at the moment, as I just don't need it for power.  I've had to halt all oil production as the entire oil biome is about to overflow from too much oil, despite my refining efforts...

I have made mistakes, more than just 1, but rather more like dozens.  On the plus side, you'll understand more about how to make things work rather than what doesn't.

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2 hours ago, Miravlix said:

I neither have infinite water nor infinite power (though we do get "free beer" power with solar, but it needs a lot of space and most of my map is rocket launch platforms.

 

No Hydrogen Geyser, 3 natgas geysers that runs dry before they recycle (So using as much as I can 6 NG Power plants). One Oil Well that can't support a single pump, one oil geyser 300C+ oil, but at less than half the rate of the oil well, so I can only run 1 petro power plant as I run out of oil with two.

 

I have a carbon geyser and a PO, both not really helping a lot with anything, but keeping a few slicksters and puff's happy, but neither allow the truly massive farms you need to really make them do something..

 

It's possible that unlimited power could be created with steam engine, but in a survival game that is a ton of cycle build and do over if I make a single mistake.

but if you think for a moment SPOM still good, if you need a lot of hydrogen just build more SPOMs, you can loop bathroom water to create more clean water, don't really have to worry about power.

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The problem is that hydrogen storage is really hard until you can liquefy it. You can store up to 11 tons of liquid hydrogen in 6 tiles of space (reservoir+tiles), or 1.83 tons per tile.

 

Meanwhile, a gas reservoir is 5x3 tiles and stores 150kg. You can pressurise the tiles up to 20kg of H2, for a total of 450kg of gas across 15 tiles, or 30kg per tile.

 

Liquid hydrogen has 61 times the storage density of gaseous hydrogen. Practically speaking you want the ability to liquefy hydrogen before you should consider storing it in large quantities.

 

In addition, when you run the electrolyzer numbers, with full uptime the electrolyzer produces 112g/s of H2, or 67.2kg a cycle. Now, your electrolyzer won't be running full blast, but 3 cycles of production will top off a reservoir and then some. For every full cycle of production per electrolyzer you'd need an additional 2 tiles of storage space. Every 100 cycles you'd probably want a 200 tile room. Per electrolyzer. Slightly more than 3 tiles for liquid hydrogen.

 

And remember, this is a full reservoir+tile stacking so you need to install pumps, get high pressure vents, vacuum out the room, etc. If you want to expand an existing storage you need liquid locks.

You're not getting hydrogen rockets or super coolant for at least a few hundred cycles.

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5 hours ago, Miravlix said:

One Oil Well that can't support a single pump

None of them can as their output is a fixed 3333g/sec. But that 3.3kg/sec oil, when boiled into sour gas, condensed into methane, then boiled into natural gas will run 24 natural gas generators, with a bit left over. Those 24 generators will give you almost 20 kilowatts of power, as well as 1.6kg/sec pwater, 1.6 times more than clean water put into the oil well. 

You'd need a bunch of thermium to get all this set up, most importantly enough for 7 gas pumps and 4 aquatuners, as well as a few bits of radiant pipe. But I'd say it's near-limitless power that actually produces water and co2 for you, and doesn't take any inputs to run.

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6 hours ago, Miravlix said:

I neither have infinite water nor infinite power (though we do get "free beer" power with solar, but it needs a lot of space and most of my map is rocket launch platforms.

 

No Hydrogen Geyser, 3 natgas geysers that runs dry before they recycle (So using as much as I can 6 NG Power plants). One Oil Well that can't support a single pump, one oil geyser 300C+ oil, but at less than half the rate of the oil well, so I can only run 1 petro power plant as I run out of oil with two.

 

I have a carbon geyser and a PO, both not really helping a lot with anything, but keeping a few slicksters and puff's happy, but neither allow the truly massive farms you need to really make them do something..

 

It's possible that unlimited power could be created with steam engine, but in a survival game that is a ton of cycle build and do over if I make a single mistake.

Boil sour gas from petrol, make sure you have buffer storage for the natural gas geysers so they don't overpressurise... you could also reclaim the heat from bunker tiles and rocket launches in steam turbines for a bit of extra power. And of course it might be a good idea to look into the demand side; are there any areas where you can cut down on power consumption?

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how about you design your O2 production to burn the H2 early but later just bypass and liquefy?  This is what I do and avoids need to store large amounts and also avoids having to build something twice.  It is easy to setup so that the H2 goes to H2 gens early and you just divert to your LH2 later (and in fact, I add some H2 gens at the back end of the LH2 to avoid backup once target inventory is reached)

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2 minutes ago, chemie said:

how about you design your O2 production to burn the H2 early but later just bypass and liquefy?  This is what I do and avoids need to store large amounts and also avoids having to build something twice.  It is easy to setup so that the H2 goes to H2 gens early and you just divert to your LH2 later (and in fact, I add some H2 gens at the back end of the LH2 to avoid backup once target inventory is reached)

You can just use a bridge to redirect the hydrogen as needed. I've had to deconstruct and reconstruct the pipes on several occasions, actually.

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1 hour ago, Arcus2611 said:

You can just use a bridge to redirect the hydrogen as needed. I've had to deconstruct and reconstruct the pipes on several occasions, actually.

exactly.  I change one bridge to redirect; instead of going down to power plant area, it goes up to LOX/LH2 area.

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I agree, SPOM's are dead, Long live the HOM.

Once our tie's are tethered to using the SPOM's for powering themselves, we are just diverting the Hydrogen to where it's appropriate.  And as it has already been suggested, using a bridge just before it goes to the generators is the key, when storage backs up, it automatically defaults back to SPOM mode.

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I both agree and disagree on the ongoing To SPOM or not To SPOM argument. 

For me, they're useful from early to mid game, in the same way that renting a house/apartment is useful in your 20's. Sure, it's a waste of some resources but it makes taking the next step easier. 

Yes, you can go straight to powered HODM (Hydrogen Oxygen Disposal Module) just like you can buy a home straight out of high school/college, but it just adds needless complexity in most cases.

When playing a new base (I don't prescout geyser layouts), I invariably build my power plant on the opposite side of my base as my water supply so building a SPOM next to the water source works way better than running 10's of tons of heavy watt wire to the complete opposite side on my base is the better choice in the short term for me. 

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Early to mid game, I try to build around a water vent if possible and to make at least 1 spom as power cuts are still a threat, but I try to build this out of the way until I can make a Hydrogen/Oxygen factory.  This doesn't usually conform to any unit scale, but rather a reasonably sized area devoted to the management and distribution of these gases, which initially includes ensuring 1kg/s constant O2 supply to the hermetically sealed living quarters, a constant 1kg/s supply to 2 exo suit dock suites and an excess storage area. 

The minimum size of this is 3 electrolyzers, which ensure 2kg/s constant + spare.  I usually regulate the H2, so that at least some can by syphoned off from the power supply and stored for instant use in the future. 

By late game, it's useful to have probably 5 or 6 electrolyzers in space which just dump most of the O2 and provide a little extra power and also store some for later.

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13 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Yeah because n00bs thinks it's a great idea to have the headache of having to store small amount of hydrogen built up over 100s of cycles until a point in the game where you could just build 10-20 electrolysers and mass produce hydrogen on a massive scale.

Some people are just not very smart. SPOMs solve an early game problem. Hydrogen production for rocket fuel is a late game problem where you already have access to space age materials and probably near infinite water and power resources to tackle it with.

What's more, SPOMs are very easy to convert into HSOMs.

 

Edit: ninja'd. Curse my inner Elcor!

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Early game, you have to SPOM because where are you going to store it all? Eventually you'll always run out of space to store it and you'll have to go back to burning it off. What is going to power it all? Until you have a power grid setup to run it, you're better off using the hydrogen.

With this said, i do store a couple tanks of hydrogen in my base for most of the game. The hydrogen generators are enabled when they're full. This way i have ready access to it for hydrogen rooms and so on, but there's really no need to store large amounts until you've sent like 5 science rockets into space. Some people might never even get there.

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11 hours ago, biopon said:

None of them can as their output is a fixed 3333g/sec. But that 3.3kg/sec oil, when boiled into sour gas, condensed into methane, then boiled into natural gas will run 24 natural gas generators, with a bit left over. Those 24 generators will give you almost 20 kilowatts of power, as well as 1.6kg/sec pwater, 1.6 times more than clean water put into the oil well. 

You'd need a bunch of thermium to get all this set up, most importantly enough for 7 gas pumps and 4 aquatuners, as well as a few bits of radiant pipe. But I'd say it's near-limitless power that actually produces water and co2 for you, and doesn't take any inputs to run.

boiling to sour gas better than just to petro?

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7 hours ago, fishoutofwater said:

boiling to sour gas better than just to petro?

 

2000g/s of petroleum is needed to run 1 petrol generator, producing 2KW.

 

2000g/s of petroleum can instead be boiled directly into 2000g/s of sour gas, which can be condensed into methane and sulfur (which is a useless waste product). Even with the 25% loss of mass (I think it was 25%?) from conversion, 1500g/s of methane (once boiled back into gas) can run 16 natural gas generators for 12.8KW of power. Subtract about 3-4KW for running the condenser and you still come out massively ahead in the amount of power generated.

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7 hours ago, Arcus2611 said:

 

2000g/s of petroleum is needed to run 1 petrol generator, producing 2KW.

 

2000g/s of petroleum can instead be boiled directly into 2000g/s of sour gas, which can be condensed into methane and sulfur (which is a useless waste product). Even with the 25% loss of mass (I think it was 25%?) from conversion, 1500g/s of methane (once boiled back into gas) can run 16 natural gas generators for 12.8KW of power. Subtract about 3-4KW for running the condenser and you still come out massively ahead in the amount of power generated.

But you need space materials. Otherwise condensing sour gas to methane and back to natural gas is a bit more complex ( doable on smaller scale). 

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