[Simple Build] Gaseous Element Converter 2.0 (Philosopher's Stone) - Convert any gas to another 1:1

[Denisetwin]

13 minutes ago, R9MX4 said:

Waterwheel is a kind of gravitational energy. To introduce waterwheel, Klei has to introduce gravity first. (ie. pump liquid to different altitude costs different energy)

I dont think this will happen.

Guess I'm not following your thought, to me water falls towards the bottom of the screen (oil biome), I want a waterwheel I can stick in that downward flow that turns and generates power.  

[mathmanican]

45 minutes ago, Denisetwin said:

I want a waterwheel I can stick in that downward flow that turns and generates power.

Since liquid pumps do not require the same power to pump gasses upwards as they do downwards, a water wheel like you suggest would be a perpetual motion machine, providing infinite power. This is why you won't see it in the game, as gravity is not really implemented (otherwise pumping liquids upwards would cost a lot more power). I hope that gets at the heart of what @R9MX4 was saying.  Upon reading his post again, it's basically exactly what he said.

By the way, @R9MX4 provided the first element converter (hence 2.0).  Thanks for your work @R9MX4.

[lee1026]

Pumping stuff is already so expensive in terms of power (24J per kg to get it into pipes), they just need to make sure that the water wheel don't generate enough energy to pay for the pumping, at least not on its own.

 

Besides, this game is one giant perpetual motion machine - it allows for SPOMs, for heaven's sake.

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

4 minutes ago, lee1026 said:

they just need to make sure that the water wheel don't generate enough energy to pay for the pumping

Stack water wheel one by one, from space to magma

[mathmanican]

45 minutes ago, R9MX4 said:

Stack water wheel one by one, from space to magma

And then get the water all back to the top with an escher waterfall. 

52 minutes ago, lee1026 said:

it allows for SPOMs, for heaven's sake.

Very true.  Point well taken.

[ishakaru]

2 hours ago, mathmanican said:

For this you just use a MOGOM, or a strength training gym that uses pumps to deliver water instead of manually emptying the bottles.

Well, I was thinking 0 dupe interaction, but if you want to go this route then it would probably be better to go with the pipe empty route.

Have a liquid reservoir looped on it's self, have 2 valves, 1 set to 67g, the other set to 1, have the 1 with a split output that with one that loop to the input(result is .5g/s) for the 67.5g/s output. Set the pipe empty command on the input of the reservoir. 

 

What you have here is a task that can never be completed as long as the pw flows from the NG gen. It's fault resistant up to 5T in the reservoir. 

 

Since bottles off gas up to 1800g, a pump of some sort is recommended.

 

[mathmanican]

2 hours ago, ishakaru said:

it would probably be better to go with the pipe empty route.

Have you compared the pipe empty command speed to the mop speed.  You can mop at near 140kg/s.  Pipe empty is only 10kg, and it takes longer than a second. Huge dupe time difference.

2 hours ago, ishakaru said:

Since bottles off gas up to 1800g, a pump of some sort is recommended.

If the bottle sits in about 1kg of water with water on both sides as well, then it will offgas forever. Basically it's the liquid over vent principle, but applied to a PW bottle. So you can get any pressure of PO2 you want in a room, provided you use 1 tile mechanics to force it to continue off gassing.  Once I figure out the 100x faster off gassing mechanic from @Epishade, this will become insane. 

Spoiler

 

You could potentially have 14 pumps, all pumping 10kg/s, into a single room. One dupe can transfer this entire quantity into bottles (at a rate of 140kg/s - stomping on the speed efficiency of any plumber).  With this element converter, and an initial bottle filling and offgassing time (prime the system), you can convert this to oxygen at a rate of 140kg/s.  No one needs that much oxygen, nor could you keep up. 

Note that if you are concerned about dupe time, a single dupe in 1 second provides enough oxygen for 1400s of their life (140000 g made requires 1400s x 100g/s consumed). Each second they mop, you can support 10 dupes for 140 seconds.  If they mop for an entire cycle, you have enough oxygen for 10 dupes for 140 cycles.  That's 140 cycles of not worrying about oxygen! Close the doors, no one enters for 140 cycles (till the pressure drops and an atmosensor triggers you to reenter). Then another mop command calls them in (which never disappeared for the entire 140 cycles).   

See @Yunru's MOGOM post, or my gym strength training post, for more details.

Spoiler

This one bottles at 20kg/s. Drop 1000g of regular water or crude where you see Yunru's deposit location, and the bottles will not stop off gassing.

This one bottles at 40kg/s.  It currently has to be modified to make sure the bottle off gasses at insanely high pressures (already got a design planned, and prototype in progress). 

The only real limiting factor is that at 150kg, mop commands disappear. I might have to stop at 130 kg/s or so, but I'm gonna shoot for as close to 150kg/s as I can get. 

My next goal is to make a room that will bottle stuff at 140kg/s+, off gas forever, and be 100% automated (triggering a sweep command as needed without player interaction).  Priming this system will take A LOT of water, unless I can figure out the 100x off gassing issue, as then I can prime it with 100 times less water.  Then I'll spend one cycle, with 1 dupe, to make enough oxygen to last 100+ cycles for all my dupes.

 

[M.C.]

Proof of concept: the Philosopher's Stone combined with the perfectly efficient electrolyzer setup. Generates 1000 g/s of pure hydrogen at the cost of 1000 g/s of water. It can be fed to a hydrogen generator bank, producing 8 kW (12 kW with tune-up), trivializing midgame power generation.

(That's the reason I won't be using it during midgame. Building a power generation backbone is a challenge I don't want to give up.)

On the other hand, I will probably build it during the later stages of my space program. All that hydrogen will go a long way to make sure my rockets are well-fed.

Edit: this setup starts up well on the highest of normal speed levels. It does not start up well on debug-only speed levels (like Alt+Z): sometimes oxygen leaks into the gas pump chamber and the device breaks.

A variant of the same idea: this one produces 1000 g/s of oxygen. Probably not all that useful early on or during midgame, but can be combined with the design above to produce hydrogen and oxygen in equal amounts. Once again, this is good for your space program.

This one is trickier to start up. Because of the long, narrow passage on the left a bit of hydrogen will leak into the gas pump area. Simply wait for the pressure of oxygen to rise a bit, then run the pumps until the hydrogen tiles are gone, and you're good to go.

[Denisetwin]

On 2/28/2019 at 3:51 PM, mathmanican said:

I now present Gaseous Element Converter 2.0

Thank you!!!  my humongous room of Chlorine is now useful!  (I will not mention how many times I had to build and destroy things trying to make it work.)  Started with just over 2,000g of oxygen in the top room.

 

[mathmanican]

13 minutes ago, Denisetwin said:

Thank you!!!  my humongous room of Chlorine is now useful!

I see one potential downfall here.  If the polluted dirt from that water sieve ever off gases, and a single tile of PO2 makes its way to the conversion chamber, it can get stuck in the vacuum/water tile (it's happened to me with CO2 coming from above) and stop the whole process.

Glad you are having fun with it.  The uses are essentially endless.

[Damocles]

Just FYI this is not foolproof for everyone, namely me.  I've set this up twice now (in a real game, not debug) and it worked great.... for a while.  Somewhere along the line, the "in" gas manages to get into the top airflow tile.  I'm not sure if this happens during a save/load, or if it's because my ageing computer can't handle the game all that well (my FPS is poor), but it happens eventually, and reliably for me.  The system might run fine for weeks, or it might fail within the first day, but it always fails eventually, and the wrong gas goes "up".  After this happens, it starts duplicating the unwanted gas, which is a disaster if unchecked for too long.

It happens when there is way more pressure above the system than beside it, so I don't think it's pressure related.  I suspect it may have to do with how the game updates items that are off screen, because i can watch it for ages and it's perfect.  It only ever fails when I'm off doing something else.  Shame too, because my current map seems to be 90% chlorine gas

[mathmanican]

37 minutes ago, Damocles said:

Somewhere along the line, the "in" gas manages to get into the top airflow tile. 

Could you post a screenshot, or a save file.  I'll look into it.  I'd like to make a version that can detect this, prevent it, and fix it. 

Ideally I'd like to see the entire region around your converter.  A zoomed out screen shot, or save file would be best.

[Denisetwin]

3 hours ago, mathmanican said:

If the polluted dirt from that water sieve ever off gases

I can delete that sieve, it was just there to convert my P.water into water for the setup.  It is currently offline.  Thanks for the heads up though!

[Damocles]

@mathmanican here's two screengrabs.  First shows gas, second normal.  The bottom of the two attempts is currently blocked off until I can clean up the fallout from when it went wrong.  The top one I have just restarted (re-built the airflow tile at the top).  There's about 2KG/tile of chlorine to the right, and about 1000g of oxygen above it (and inside the airflow tile).  It'll work great as long as I never move the screen away

Dupes are allowed into the chlorine area, so I'm wondering if maybe some stray carbon dioxide might have got into the system (from the right) and screwed with it.  I would have thought the CO2 would get converted same as the chlorine though.

It was working great - there's an enormous cave above this area that was all chlorine, and is now mostly air and hydrogen thanks to your genius design.  Even if I end up abandoning the system, it's already done it's job, so thanks

[mathmanican]

43 minutes ago, Damocles said:

Dupes are allowed into the chlorine area, so I'm wondering if maybe some stray carbon dioxide might have got into the system (from the right) and screwed with it.

One stray blob of gas will ruin this setup completely. The fact that your chlorine region has mixed gas potential and the fact that your dupes sleep in a place that could get co2 in also will both break this. Try sealing both room with water locks. Pump stuff in and out.

I'm gonna test it overnight and report back.

[Damocles]

8 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

One stray blob of gas will ruin this setup completely.

My question is - if CO2 got into the chlorine input, why doesn't the CO2 get converted into O2 like the chlorine does?

Also, when the system goes wrong, it's chlorine that ends up getting pumped out the top, not CO2.  I could understand if CO2 got in from the top and started getting duplicated, but the chlorine can only come from the right.

I have been experimenting myself, and currently have this setup:

The pump will start taking O2 away from the area/system when it reaches 1250+ on the atmo sensor.  This seems more stable than before, but it's only been 10 days, so maybe I'm just getting lucky.  The timing fits though - if too-high O2 pressure is causing the failures, then that would explain why my first setup lasted so long (took ages to fill the base to high enough levels).

[goatt]

On 3/1/2019 at 12:21 PM, Denisetwin said:

Am I the only one that looks at these waterfalls and wishes that Klei would give us a waterwheel for power?  I would LOVE the way that looks!

 

I was thinking about turning gravitational energy into power but didn’t know how to do it. Water wheel is the way. It can even be started by moving critters, they push the wheel like water, and they move up and do it again. Would be funny to see.

@mathmanican the imgur image’s explanation is detailed but I didn’t understand it full. But this conversion is dope. I like your test designs, they look pretty and professional.

[Denisetwin]

On 3/1/2019 at 2:05 PM, lee1026 said:

they just need to make sure that the water wheel don't generate enough energy to pay for the pumping, at least not on its own.

This is actually what my thought was, very low power output but great for early base or for just cool looking later builds.

[goatt]

1 hour ago, Denisetwin said:

This is actually what my thought was, very low power output but great for early base or for just cool looking later builds.

I'll want it to be like, for each 200 kg water, it runs a quarter day, and produce 100 W, so in total, will be like 15000W, 15kW, same as dupes running manual for 37.5 s. This energy will be enough to pump 6250 kg water...... so this is bad design...

It will be either so much power output that it generate unlimited power, or so much water delivery that the delivery itself is tedious, such as 1000 kg every quarter day.

[mathmanican]

3 hours ago, Damocles said:

I have been experimenting myself, and currently have this setup:

Here's a snapshot of what you posted, with some marks on it.

My best guess as to what happened with your system is the following (as I've seen this happen myself in test setups that don't guarantee a single gas type):

1. Stinky (and his friends) went to bed in the cots in the upper left.
2. They breathed out some CO2.
3. The CO2 found it's way down to the airflow tile above the conversion chamber. 
4. Since the amount of CO2 was really low, and the O2 pressure really high, the entire blob of CO2 got sucked into the conversion tile (not part of it, all of it). Hence no conversion to CO2. Instead, your converter stopped for a time. 
5. Eventually, this tiny blob of CO2 swapped spots with some chlorine on the right (which I'm guessing was high pressure). So now we have a blob of high pressure chlorine stuck where the water/vacuum should be.
6. Since the Chlorine is high pressure, the next tick of the game sends some of the chlorine upwards, now occupying the airflow tile. The O2 is no longer in control. 
7. While this was happening, The CO2 blob made its way further down to the right, happily out of way and no longer causing problems - the damage has been done. 
8. At this point your converter is completely ruined.  It's got chlorine on both sides of the converter.  The next tick of the game, the water can finally move right, leaving the vent, as the chlorine is now able to move freely both up and right. While the blob of CO2 was there, the water actually stopped occupying that tile completely (no conversion).
9. Good news, the converter was not creating more chlorine, rather it was equalizing pressure on both sides of the chamber. Your high pressure chlorine is now pouring into your base. 

I've been testing things with 1000kg of pressure on one side, and 10 mcg on the other.  No slips. Though as soon as vacuum is created on one side, the whole setup breaks. 

Suggestion: swap the top 4 airflow tiles left of your ladder to tiles. Then Stinky and his friends can't breathe CO2 that gets into your converter. The CO2 will never move upwards, but it can move right several tiles before moving down. This is most likely the culprit. 

2nd Suggestion:  You clearly have O2 and hydrogen finding their way into your chlorine room (circled in red). Clear out all gases but Chlorine, and make sure only chlorine can appear in this room (liquid locks, etc).  That door on the top of the room could cause problems. When your chlorine pressure gets low, those oxygen and hydrogen blobs can cause problems as well. 

Hope this helps. 

[mathmanican]

10 hours ago, mathmanican said:

I'm gonna test it overnight and report back.

Well, it's been several hours. Computer is overheating with constant use.  I left all the converters off screen while letting it run. I've even played this on Alt+Z speed, and not once have I seen it slip.  I also added automation to shut it off as needed.  

Spoiler

 

[Stampy]

Easy solution: keep track of all magic mass.

If elements A and B are contending for a square, and N grams of B is converted to N grams of A, add N to A's counter and subtract it from B's counter. When deciding which of two elements to delete, consult the counts to see whether deleting A or B gets the system closer to equilibrium, and do that.

It's a bit more work on each iteration of the gas movement, but maybe not too much; and it only needs to track state on the scale of the number of elements, not the number of tiles. It'll also work fine if each decision isn't perfect, so it can be parallelized across a few copies of the counts if diffs are tracked and reconciled each frame.

[mathmanican]

30 minutes ago, Stampy said:

consult the counts to see whether deleting A or B gets the system closer to equilibrium

And then I just design a system that causes CO2 to become oxygen in part of the map, and O2 to become C02 in another.  Instant teleportation. Would probably be harder to crack, but that sounds like a fun challenge.  

Every numerical approximation scheme has side effects that you have to live with.  The questions is, which side effects do we want. Do we want matter converters, so anyone can set up an alchemy shop?  Do we want to lose our hard earned mass?  Do we want a global tracker that allows us to cause gases to insta-teleport across the map?  Which consequences do we want to avoid?

I liked the suggestion. Alchemy would disappear, but teleportation would become a fun game. 

On 3/3/2019 at 1:06 AM, mathmanican said:

Well, it's been several hours.

By the way, it's been several days. I do all my goofing around in this same file. A hundred cycles have passed.  Not once has a gas particle slipped. If you encounter slippage, it's most likely because you did not force each side of the converter to maintain a single gas.  A single tiny particle of any other gas will ruin this whole contraption. If someone does see slippage, let me know, as I'd love to figure out what causes it.