Industrial accidents

[Gus Smedstad]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I seem to be in the habit of making little mistakes now and then that have far-reaching consequences.

Usually it's plumbing. For example, I managed to cross-connect a crude oil pipe with a water supply line. I built a liquid bridge, as normal, but I guess I was sloppy in drawing the pipe up until that point. This meant I had crude oil in my water supply.

That one taught me how oil wells don't give you any kind of error message when they're full of the wrong kind of liquid. They just stop working but don't otherwise throw an error message.

Similarly, I once deconstructed a crude oil pipe, and it dropped some crude oil into the polluted water collection area below a natural gas plant, where it got sucked up by a pump.

My most recent one was just outright negligence. I built a pump to suck up a moderate pool of polluted water, and directed it to a nearby sieve. Except, instead of connecting the pipe to the input pipe, I connected it to the output. Shortly afterward I discovered I had polluted water packets pretty much through my entire clean water network, going to lots of stuff that doesn't like that. I had to chop up nearly my entire water network and carefully connect each segment to a filter. Took me a couple of hours of play to fix that one.

[angrybovine]

Prior, I try to swap thru overlays before I build\deconstruct just to see if I'm going to screw with an existing system.

Then when I'm done, I save changes and play on slow for a few seconds to make sure the new stuff\old stuff works\still works like plumbing and automation.

[Sasza22]

Stuff like this happens. I remember when some polluted water got in my clean water system and into the liquid reservoirs where it was comming out for multiple cycles causing all sorts of trouble. Eventually i had to set empty pipe on 9 and half of my colony was doing plumbing for over 10 cycles before it was fixed.

Another day i had a design making liquid phosphorus near a volcano (to get abyss shinebugs) and i was mopping it and throwing into my water tank to cool it down. I didn`t notice when the water run out and liquid phosphorus got into the electrolizers cusing a minor disaster in my oxygen generation system.

[SharraShimada]

Cool your metal refinery with normal water, watch it explode, melting the whole area. Its a lot of fun, and the end of the game.

[Derringer]

8 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

Cool your metal refinery with normal water, watch it explode, melting the whole area. Its a lot of fun, and the end of the game.

A giant steam poof can be a lot of work to clean up, but I wouldn't call it the end of the game unless it takes over your living quarters. I once had about 100 tons of 300C regolith fall into my smelter's quenching pool. The ensuing steam poof got into the neighbouring biomes and made a bunch of machinery that was only rated for 75C malfunction, and it probably took about 50 cycles to finally clean up. Atmo suits help a lot.

[SharraShimada]

300°C is not a real problem. That can be cooled. But an explosive water escape from a metal refinery can be 1000°C and more.

[Xuhybrid]

When is the plumbing job going to work when deconstructing? Pretty dumb what you have to do to empty a pipe before deconstructing it.

[MorsDux]

1 minute ago, Xuhybrid said:

When is the plumbing job going to work when deconstructing? Pretty dumb what you have to do to empty a pipe before deconstructing it.

Even if you empty it fills up again. I didnt profit from my plumbers so far either. What i do is, if all else fails I deconstruct and mop 1 pipe and use a bridge to let the liquid in the pipe segment exit, sometimes into a reservoir i build for that. 

[Gus Smedstad]

The trick to using plumbers to avoid spills is to stop the flow in the pipe first.

Fluids (and gasses) won't flow unless there is both a supply (green) box and a consumer (white) box on the pipe. Bridges don't contain anything, so you can safely deconstruct those. Typically I'll deconstruct the bridge immediately upstream of where I'm working, empty the pipe, and then deconstruct it. Then I rebuild the bridge. It's a slow, multi-type process, so I will skip it now and then if time is important and I can live with a spill.

It's also possible to deconstruct things downstream, provided you eliminate all the consumers.

The one case where it's not possible is if it's a direct connection between two buildings with no bridges in between. For example, if you've got two reservoirs with fluid in them. I'm not sure what happens if you try and deconstruct a reservoir without emptying it first, I've always assumed it would dump the entire contents in a huge spill, so I've never done it.

[mathmanican]

While working one day, Stinking got mad and went to town on an airflow tile (or I misclicked on an airflow tile and accidentally deconstructed it - can't remember if it was Stinky's fault or mine).  Little did he know that his tiny tantrum led to the tile breaking. Poof - 400,000kg of water flew out of the compressed liquid storage tank.  Oops.  Everyone had to move to space....