Solar panels are a significant power loss for me

[Sigma Cypher]

Why use robominers at all?  Doesn't this still work? 

Doors pulse in the close direction for one tick every 10 seconds.

[Nitroturtle]

11 minutes ago, JohnFrancis said:

It has been tested pyramid shape is the best. Well before peak lux fully exposed solar panels max out. Solar panels with 5 tiles exposed do not at any point so this allows you to extract more energy. Don't know if solar was buffed but I am using pyramid and it works as advertised.

Yes, if you go back and look, I'm actually the one that brought up the pyramid shape in the thread that included the testing.  I'm just stating that only 4 tiles of the panels can be covered if you want them to reach peak output, not 10 as posted above.

[Gus Smedstad]

On 3/7/2019 at 10:57 PM, nakomaru said:

Any regolith that touches your doors should have no chance of heating up all that steel and igneous rock significantly beyond rest temperature. This is the power of thermal capacitance.

It turns out this doesn't work. I built a cooling network both for the bunker doors and one row above them. However, any regolith above this still remained above 300 C when it fell. Delaying the opening of the bunker doors didn't help.

There's no way to get the regolith reliably below 275 before it hits the miners, and it will heat up the miners beyond the damage point before you can cool the miners down. Any scheme that involves allowing the miners to get entombed will damage steel robo miners. Until you get thermium miners, it's just not workable.

20 hours ago, Cookiematico said:

I still dont get it why you have to cool down the regolith if you maximize the range of the robominer. No need to be high near the red line: regolith showers should never reach the height towards the robominer to heat it up, if you properly tune everything up. And with a simple oxygen output vent near the robovent, you prevent it from overheating it in the first place. All you need is steel robominers. (and ive never seen the blast doors reach above 300 after 800 turns)

Unless you let regolith pile up for like, multiple meteor showers, it should never reach the height of 7-8 blocks. The only issue you might have at the start is not sufficient power so the bunker doors opens slowly, but with that amount of solar panels that becomes a nonissue. And since regolith stays on the mesh tile in vacuum, it wont impact anything negatively.

 

The idea behind cooling the regolith is that it would theoretically let you use a setup like the one Neotuck posted, where the robo miners have no overhead protection. It simply doesn't work, at least not with steel robo miners. It's fine for thermium robo miners, but almost all of these considerations go away once you can replace all the miners with thermium versions.

The initial discussion was about how to cool steel robo miners. Oxygen vents are one method, provided you use overhead protection, or hang them above the protective roof.

As for the blast doors not going above 300 - what? Before I tried cooling them, my blast doors were 320-330 C all the time. Actually, most of my blast doors are still that temperature, since I put a row of them across the entire width of the map, and I'm only actively using some of them. The ones still outside my surface base are running that hot.

9 hours ago, Sigma Cypher said:

Why use robominers at all?  Doesn't this still work?  .

As I said early in the thread, I personally consider the door-munching thing to be an exploit, and I won't use it. I fully expect that to be patched out at some point, like the gas matter conversion thing mentioned in another thread.

[Gus Smedstad]

It's an idea that sounded like it might work, which is why I tried building that cooling network.

At this point I've progressed to the point where I have all the thermium I need. I was watching a video on an unrelated subject and the narrator mentioned that you can convert thermium to niobium 1:1 in the metal refinery, which means that once you have 5kg, all your tungsten can become thermium if you keep doing the nobium + tungsten -> thermium -> nobium loop. I didn't know it worked that way, I thought thermium was a resource limited by your space industry, like super coolant or insulation.

Which means that the whole robo-miner cooling issue has abruptly gone away for me. The issue is really a window of time one, between the point where you first start setting up scanners and telescopes and the surface, and the time you get your first load of nobium. During that period cooling steel robo miners is important. That window dragged on a long time for me, personally, because I've been struggling with dirt shortages, which delayed my research. That, and I waited for petroleum rockets before looking beyond 10k, instead of pushing forward earlier with solid boosters.

Now all that cooling setup I've got up top seems unimportant. I haven't disassembled it, since it's just costing me a bit of water to make steam to vent to space, and I want to take a stab at using it to power a steam turbine. Not that I need the power, it's more doing it for the sake of doing it.

Right now I'm focused on building a oil boiler for more efficient, more reliable petroleum production. After that I'm going to either switch from steam venting to steam turbines, or set up liquid oxygen / liquid hydrogen production.

[lee1026]

This is from several builds ago, so I don't have a screenshot, but I did a lot of stupid things in that build - my bunker tiles were no where near the top, which kinda ****** me over when I ran out of space. But I think that is what protected me from the very top not exchanging heat.

[Gus Smedstad]

This is my first colony so I'm still learning a lot of the mechanics.

I initially built my bunker door wall at relatively low altitude. I didn't know how far up space went, and I was in a rush because I'd heard that the meteors would eventually destroy your entire asteroid if you didn't build protection early enough. I guess that's not true anymore.

When I first started really building in space, rather than just throwing up a protective wall in a hurry, I moved the new doors to pretty much the top of the map, two rows below the no-build zone. Like most things in Oxygen Not Included, if you put something in the wrong spot, it's usually not too expensive to demolish it and re-build it where it should be.

[Tonyroid]

On 3/8/2019 at 9:30 AM, Nitroturtle said:

While the point remains valid, I think this is factually incorrect.  Unless something has changed, it takes 9 tiles exposed to max daylight (80k lux max per tile = 720k total) according to this thread: (obviously this means 10 tiles exposed since you can't cover half a layer of the panel)

 

What I meant by "4 tiles" is that a solar panel is 7 tiles wide and you get the most power if you expose four of them to the sky. It doesn't quite get to it's full output, but if your solar panels are stacked that way then you get most power possible from the available light.

I had a look at the post you quoted. He was really thorough and there is good information there.

[JackOverkill]

On 3/7/2019 at 3:37 AM, Mullematsch said:

I mean it takes like 2-3 cycles and costs maybe like 30t of metal to cover the whole map. You can even use steel which is free of space and all the random eggs you get. 

I can understand not wanting to use it because you consider it an exploit but you can't argue that digging up regolith continuously is an efficient way to use dups:

 

hello . can i have this save ? i really wanna learn your build

[Mullematsch]

9 hours ago, JackOverkill said:

hello . can i have this save ? i really wanna learn your build

I eventually upgraded to this, which has been working amazingly:

Here is an old video I found, shows the basic automation: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7KZZlCW0fc

This is the automation for the same design with door piston (could be simplified): 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR9F1VizQRs

 

[JackOverkill]

10 hours ago, Mullematsch said:

I eventually upgraded to this, which has been working amazingly:

Here is an old video I found, shows the basic automation: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7KZZlCW0fc

This is the automation for the same design with door piston (could be simplified): 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR9F1VizQRs

 

ty