Solutions for cooling buildings in vacuum

[pacovf]

There is currently no way to cool down robominers or sweepers in vacuum. This makes building a space bunker very awkward if you intend to deal with the incoming regolith. I would like some ways to do so that don’t involve dropping liquids or gas on them.

The two possible solutions I see are:

- Robominers exchange heat with the tile they are attached to, and sweepers (and other “floating” buildings) exchange heat with drywall / tempshift plates, when present. The latter means that drywall / tempshift should be able to exchange heat with the background tiles adjacent to them, and probably also with pipes (even in vacuum). Feels like a lot of work to implement, but would be cool.

- Radiant pipes exchange heat directly with buildings where present, instead of with the gas / liquid medium. This would make things so much more convenient, both for space builds and elsewhere, and doesn’t feel like should be too hard to implement.

 

Any other possible solutions?

[SharraShimada]

The trick is to not getting them overheating in the first place. Keep the miners out of the dirt, and they never overheat.

[pacovf]

They do! Because they produce their own heat from working, whether or not they touch the regolith. They will break, eventually, if you don't cool them down.

[Sasza22]

Just now, SharraShimada said:

The trick is to not getting them overheating in the first place. Keep the miners out of the dirt, and they never overheat.

Robo miners produce heat themselves. They will overheat eventually no matter what they are made out of..

Imo the best would be to cool down the wall the miners are attached to, put a tempshift plate to transfer the haet to the wall and vent some hydrogen to transfer it from the miner.

[pacovf]

I know there are ways to cool the miners if you vent gas or drip liquid on top of them. I find these solutions useable, but... gas gets vented to space eventually, and liquids force awkward builds to keep it in place without flooding the miner or the things around it. 

More straightforward solutions would be nice. I can do a working build, but I would prefer if it was a less arduous process. Taming the surface is already hard enough without this added difficulty, IMHO. And it might also leave more freedom for new kinds of builds, which is always good.

[Daxterr]

Once you get niobium overheating isn't too much of an issue anymore!

[Gus Smedstad]

9 hours ago, Daxterr said:

Once you get niobium overheating isn't too much of an issue anymore!

While true, it's not very interesting. There's always a period when you need  to clear regolith but don't have thermium yet.

For that matter, the thermium solution is to let the miner get buried. Which means there's a delay, quite often substantial, while a neighboring robominer digs it out. Solutions where the miners never get buried are much faster, but require cooling.

On 4/23/2019 at 3:49 PM, pacovf said:

I know there are ways to cool the miners if you vent gas or drip liquid on top of them.

I prefer the solutions which have a tiny drop of liquid providing a thermal connection between the robominer and the pipe running through the tile. They don't destroy resources.

The main constraint of such solutions is that the miner must have a sold tile or an airflow tile immediately below that the tile with the liquid. Which either means your miner is horizontal and not hanging upside down, or a tile that blocks line of sight.

[pacovf]

Yeah, I know of those solutions. They are just unnecessarily awkward, in my opinion.

I have been trying to setup a pre-thermium space scanner build that gets no buildings buried, even temporarily, with 100% scanner efficiency, and that mines then sweeps away all regolith in the vision cone of the scanner. I’ve been at it for hours now, and I am pretty close, I think. But the extra requirement to cool down miners/sweepers *without* venting gas or liquid might mean it’s not possible.

[Gus Smedstad]

2 minutes ago, pacovf said:

But the extra requirement to cool down miners/sweepers *without* venting gas or liquid might mean it’s not possible.

I've done it. It's actually pretty simple, and not awkward at all. At least, not as far as the miners themselves are concerned.

Place pairs of miners. Each miner has 2 tiles directly overhead as cover. Miner pairs overlap each other. Each miner can clear the roof of the adjacent miner.

Miner pairs do not need to overlap with other pairs.

Scanners are mounted on doors. Logic opens the doors under the scanners at the same time the bunker doors open. The stay open long enough that regolith falls through, which is about 50 seconds after the bunker doors start opening, or 12 seconds past the time the bunker doors are fully open.

The scanners have to at least 2-3 tiles above the ground so there's room for the regolith to fall.

If you don't want to use doors, and don't want the scanners to be buried, the scanners must have overhead protection. Which may or may not work in the future, since only mesh tiles can work, and that's probably not intended.

If the scanners have overhead protection, they can be mounted lower, so their overhead protection is flush with the floor level of the miners.

 

[pacovf]

Would you mind taking a screenshot of that build? I could use the inspiration / sanity check.

I do want to avoid placing the scanner on top of a door, AND sweep all that mined regolith away, while keeping miners and sweepers unburied and cooled. I know I am making life unnecessarily hard for myself with that, it just feels too game-y for me otherwise.

 

EDIT: This is version 0.2 of my build, if you are curious.

Bunker doors open, airlock doors stay closed for ~1.5 mins while the miners do their work, then they open, mined regolith falls down, sweepers grab the regolith (almost instantly if they sweep it to a storage locker, veeery slowly if they sweep it to an autoloader). All buildings (aside from the scanner, that doesn't produce heat for some reason) are in water so that they can be cooled down (tiles don't need to be full, it's just for testing).

Right now the main problem is that regolith builds up on top of the bunker tiles, blocking the view of the scanner. I will try the paired-miners you mentioned, see if I can make it work that way.

 

[Gus Smedstad]

I don't have a current build with steel miners. In my QOL 2 game I apparently converted all my miners to thermium and got rid of the roofs, or I'd use that. I'm nowhere near the surface yet in my QOL 3 colony. If I get a chance I'll mock something up in debug.

Sweeping the regolith really isn't sustainable. I'm not sure about the cooling, but regardless of cooling, there's just too much of it to store.

You don't need anywhere near that much liquid as a transfer medium, and you don't need sunken wells for the miners. Mount 'em flush, and break a pipe over each to give you a 10kg drop. I prefer petroleum over water because there's no danger of it boiling away with steel miners.

[Gus Smedstad]

OK, here are two layouts I threw together in debug. The layout on the left is the one I actually used (minus the automation), the one on the right is the no-door, no automation version that relies on mesh transparency to radar.

Both versions give you 100% scan quality.

[situpc]

As someone who just stumbled upon this thread having never ventured to space, holy **** I thought my hatch farm was hard. 

[UberFubarius]

The drop of liquid work, but feels a bit exploity and gamy. I would prefer to have something more natural like a building transfer heat with the tile they are sitting on, even if said transfer is slower (effective thermal conductivity is, say, 10% of normal)

[Gus Smedstad]

I'm not seeing how a drop of liquid is an exploit, or even gamy. Granted, it's inelegant, and I'd rather that miners exchange heat directly with pipes, but that doesn't make a liquid heat exchange medium a cheat.

If they do let miners exchange heat with pipes - which probably won't happen - I can't think of any good reason why the exchange would need a nerf like 10% of normal conductivity. You nerf things because there's something borderline exploitive about them, because there's a preferred solution that you would rather the player used instead. In this case we're talking about direct exchange vs. requiring a liquid or gas as an intermediate medium. I don't think encouraging players to do the latter is important.