Proper Solar/Scanner Setup

[Kiel814]

So I want to set a proper solar panel, protected by bunker doors, which should be auto controlled by a space scanner... I have seen a couple of designs but some seem to be outdated, others seem to rely on pulsating bunker doors to delete the regolith after meteor showers (which feels kind of "exploity" to me).

So what is the proper way to set it up? I have like a million questions:

1) How to set bunker doors to be controlled by automation signal? They can either be set to "Open" or "Lock", there is no "Auto" setting.

2) What signal opens the door and what signal closes the door? Does green open and red close? Or is it the other way around?

3) Do I need additional logic like a buffer or something? Or is it enough to just connect the scanner to the bunker doors?

4) How do you protect the space scanner itself? If I put a bunker door on top of the scanner, will it go down to 0% accuracy? How will it know when to open again?

5) Is there a way to have my dupes auto-clean the regolith/stuff after a meteor shower? Or this can only be done by auto-diggers and auto-sweepers?

[McSanta]

Getting a proper space setup is not easy, I will answer your questions and later point to good video for additional input.

1) Bunkers don’t really have Auto, since dupes don’t walk through them. You need to control open and close via automation.

2) green open and red close

3) the scanner logic is different: green - yes there are meteors. Red - no meteors. Therefore, you need to reverse this signal for the door via a not gate

4) Even if the scanner doesn’t see the sky, it will detect a meteor shower while it is occurring (but no prior warning). The signal will stay on, until the shower is over.

5) to clear regolith, you need some kind of robo miner setup. Dupes only do it after you assign the task manually. 

I recommend Francis explanation here: 

 

let me know, if this was helpful  Cheers!

[SharraShimada]

Correction: Dupes DO walk through bunker doors. Mine pass them all the time, when they walk on fallen regolith, beneath the door. 

[Sasza22]

12 hours ago, Kiel814 said:

4) How do you protect the space scanner itself? If I put a bunker door on top of the scanner, will it go down to 0% accuracy? How will it know when to open again?

There are a few ways to do that. The scanner needs to be under the bunker doors, whith no machinery nearby and unobstructed sky above it (cone shape). Once it detects meteors the signal will stay on for the whole shower duration so you can keep it under the doors. After the shower ends regolith may fall on the scanner. You can either:

Build an robominer to cear the regolith.

Build the scanner on a door that you open with automation after the shower ends. This requires 2 filter gates and a XOR. You hook it up to the same signal the bunker doors are getting then the first filter set to 40s (that`s how long the bunker doors open). Next you branch the wier into 2 one goes to one side of the XOR other to the second filter set to 10s (it controls how long will the door be open) and after that to the second input of the XOR.
Actually i got a screenshot, why am i overexplainng it then

Spoiler

The top left part is the scanner setup (the scanner output does a loop to the bottom for "reasons"). The last filter is set to 1s and it`s there to prevent accidental door opening due to automation lag.

 

[natanstarke]

I use 1 xor 2 scanners 1 for meteor and 1 for rockets. The meteor one linked to a not gate then both enter the xor gate, the xor then sends signal active to the bunkers when rocket returning or not having meteor showers.

This same automation line that goes to the bunker goes to the input of the command capsule of the rocket to allow rocket auto launch when fuel full. 

The output port of the command sends a automation line to a not gate linked to the gantry.

 

The solar setup just needs a scanner with a not gate. Instead of all the xor etc ports. Mine at least

 

[Tonyroid]

There are lots of clever designs but the most important thing is to not stress out too much about making the perfect solar panel setup early in the game. Eventually you'll have access to thermium and you are going to tear it all out anyway and replace it with something like this... and the regolith sweeping stuff isn't even necessary. It's literally just thermium robo-miners in a row, close enough to dig each other out.

[Sasza22]

7 hours ago, Tonyroid said:

There are lots of clever designs but the most important thing is to not stress out too much about making the perfect solar panel setup early in the game. Eventually you'll have access to thermium and you are going to tear it all out anyway and replace it with something like this... and the regolith sweeping stuff isn't even necessary. It's literally just thermium robo-miners in a row, close enough to dig each other out.

This type of design is possible pre thermium with steel but you need window tiles out of diamond and strong cooling for them (radiant pipes inside or something). This way the regolith will transfer the heat to the windows cooling the robo miners along the way.

[Zorku]

1) Just connect them to automation wire, and that will override the interface settings.

2) Green is open. They open up when they get a signal. 

3) Ok, this gets a bit more complicated. Each scanner detects meteors with it's own fairly random timing, extending out to way WAY earlier than the meteors are going to arrive. As long as the bunker doors are closing, the meteors hit them instead of your fragile structures, so you want to close the doors as late as possible, to let the most light in.

Since we have to invert the signals from the scanners anyway, a big solar array is easy to manage: just have every scanner go into a NOT gate, then have all of the gates hooked up to all of the doors. This way the gates won't turn off until all of the scanners are sending a green signal.

4) Open bunker doors don't block the scanner, and after the scanner has detected incoming showers it doesn't need to look at space anymore. They already know exactly when the showers will end.

5) Technically if you have storage containers set to store regolith, your dupes will run around and pick that stuff up so long as they don't have higher priority stuff to do. The autominer seems to be the only way to automate mining tasks though, and there's gonna be a whole lot of this crap to mine, so if you want the place clean you might as well fully automate it. Just leaving it all sitting in a vacuum doesn't do any harm though.