Solar Essentials

[Tonyroid]

There are many tutorials for solar power. This one is meant to get right to the point and tell you only what you need without any fluff.

 

[Promethien]

Thumbs up. Definitely covers the essentials and you learn a few tricks usable in other places. Notably about setting up effective cooling and how you can use diagonals to make it possible for automated devices to reach places. 

[SamLogan]

I feel your Robo-miner setup takes a lot of space, you can simply do that :

[Junksteel]

27 minutes ago, SamLogan said:

I feel your Robo-miner setup takes a lot of space, you can simply do that :

How do you cool those?

[Gus Smedstad]

While that setup is clearly not cooled, it's easy enough to modify it so it is. Use solid tiles or airflow tiles below the miners, put a drop of liquid in the miner tiles, and then run radiant pipes behind the miners.

Also worth noting is that you don't need to pack the miners quite that tightly. Put them in pairs, and you can space the pairs 14 tiles apart. This uses about 30% fewer miners.

[ruhrohraggy]

But robo miners are a pain. You can simply do this instead :

Spoiler

 

There also exists a solar guide, with even less fluff. You can find it here :

 

Would like to point out a few, but essential inaccuracies...

Powered Bunker doors take exactly 38.2 seconds to open / close. Having spent the majority of my recent time in oni puts-ing around with investigating efficient solar systems, I can tell you with confidence that, exact timings become more important when dealing with giant hot balls of falling destruction. 3-4 seconds of unprotected meteor fall can wreak havoc on a solar system.

Your space scanner description does not feel entirely accurate, or at least to me, doesn't contain enough information for a newer player, and is slightly misleading...You state that "everything between the space scanner and the sky needs to be transparent", which, to me, implies that only the space directly above the space scanner needs to have a clear view of space.

A space scanner needs clear vision above it in a cone like this [picture taken from oni meteorology page] :

Spoiler

...Which definitely impacts solar/scanner builds.

Also, the only tile the game cares about when considering "distance from space scanner" with regards to scan quality, is the power tile.

So more specifically, the power input of a space scanner, must be 15 (not 14) or more tiles away from the power input/output of heavy machinery.

 

Spoiler

 

It is also worth pointing out, that the power input of the scanner must also be located 12 or more tiles down from top unbuildable zone of the map, otherwise you will suffer a scan quality penalty. (And if one is not aware of this, they will be scratching their head asking "wtf, but there's no machinery 15 tiles away and it's open to the sky?!")

I find it odd that you also do not mention power storage with regards to your solar system. It is worth pointing out that smart batteries should be your go-to storage option over large batteries due to drain, if you are planning on building a solar grid with any sort of efficiency. In discussing this, it also provides an opportunity for you to direct viewer attention to additional videos you have made, as the power switching system in one of your videos applies directly, and usefully to solar power.

Lastly, out of all the systems in oxygen not included that deal with efficiency, solar is probably the most deserving of it if you even decide to bother with it in the first place...Which is me asking, why bother with solar, if you're not going to be efficient about it?

Having efficient solar is one of the easiest hard things you can do in ONI imo.

Even briefly mentioning scan quality with regards to system efficiency to raise awareness of the topic is worth it.

You lose a tremendous amount of power even over the short-run, by having bunker doors close early due to inadequate scan quality. And this is also a scaling loss : I.E. the more solar panels you have, the more power you lose when your bunker doors close early.

Some additional, handy info from my solar power spreadsheet : the magical number of solar panels needed to make 6 non-pulsed scanners worth it, is 7.

6 scanners paired with 7 solar panels, if correctly managed, will outweigh the "power savings" (on average) of having fewer scanners with less scan quality, so 7 panels would probably be a good # to aim for when setting up a solar farm in space...

Also also..., if you pulse your 6 scanners like a boss, you can cut down their power consumption to LESS than that of 1 continuous scanner while still maintaining exceptional accuracy. Neat right?

- My 2 (or 3?) cents.

[SamLogan]

1 hour ago, Junksteel said:

How do you cool those?

I don't, I just deconstruct it then rebuild, it lasts long as I use steel. By I can use gas if I want.

[Moah]

Hi, nice video, good work!

 

But one small point: if you generally place your solar-panels this way (pic) you can place at least one more panel.

[Lafara]

robo miner laser beam do ignore mesh tile !?

[Moah]

23 minutes ago, Lafara said:

robo miner laser beam do ignore mesh tile !?

no, but they can dig diagonally throu tiles

[Gurgel]

5 hours ago, SamLogan said:

Problem with this set-up is that occasionally dupes will climb to the top and then be stuck there and die without help. Solution is a 185sec block of surface access when the doors start to open, or more distance between floor and doors like this:

4 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

 

You still need ladders here to the blockers above the miners to prevent dupes from getting stuck. Better to put the miner covers up against the bunker doors.

[Hellshound38]

9 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Problem with this set-up is that occasionally dupes will climb to the top and then be stuck there and die without help. Solution is a 185sec block of surface access when the doors start to open, or more distance between floor and doors like this:

You still need ladders here to the blockers above the miners to prevent dupes from getting stuck. Better to put the miner covers up against the bunker doors.

Or just extend the ladders to the bunker doors 

[Gurgel]

Just now, Hellshound38 said:

Or just extend the ladders to the bunker doors 

Ah, yes. Dupes can now walk over opened bunker doors. I forgot about that.

[MorsDux]

This was a very good video, compacted down the essential information on the subject perfectly. Thank you.

[RonEmpire]

Neat video but   the power wire I'm sure is going to get overloaded.   2000kw.  Doors opening all at once plus the miners 

[Angpaur]

6 hours ago, RonEmpire said:

Neat video but   the power wire I'm sure is going to get overloaded.   2000kw.  Doors opening all at once plus the miners 

Looks like only 16 doors are powered so it wont overload. Robominers are not working same time when doors are.

[ruhrohraggy]

@Angpaur

How's your pulsed scanner build coming along btw?

I know your last post on the subject stated that you were still working on it...

[Angpaur]

@ruhrohraggy

I haven't played the game in a while. My last build is from QoL3 game version:

Spoiler

I managed to make it pulse only one scanner to detect end of meteor showers.

For launch update playthrough I planned to also detect peace seasons and disable scanning during that time, but since new meteor types were introduced with different timings it will become a hard thing to achieve.

Unfortunatelly I lost a bit interest in playing and my LU colony is still even before cycle 50 so there is no space scanner build progress to report

[Tonyroid]

14 hours ago, RonEmpire said:

Neat video but   the power wire I'm sure is going to get overloaded.   2000kw.  Doors opening all at once plus the miners 

I used two circuits. Note that the doors never work at the same time as the miners, so it's possible to get away with putting almost all of that on the same circuit.

[Tonyroid]

On 8/21/2019 at 5:51 AM, ruhrohraggy said:

 

Would like to point out a few, but essential inaccuracies...

 

I added some of your points to the Notes (the pinned comment on YouTube). Thank you. The creativity people put into their solar panel setups is always surprising me, I would never pretend to know everything about it.

[ruhrohraggy]

31 minutes ago, Tonyroid said:

I added some of your points to the Notes (the pinned comment on YouTube). Thank you. The creativity people put into their solar panel setups is always surprising me, I would never pretend to know everything about it.

Thanks. I also very much appreciate when people take the time to do the same for me when I post up builds, I'm glad you reacted positively instead of taking it the wrong way.

An interesting observation of people who play this game...Seems like most builders tend to gravitate / specialize into one specific area and spend most of their time optimizing in it.

Fun offhand examples...

Myself, I like solar and simplifying general systems.

Lilalaunekuh tends towards oddball, organic solutions. Even eccentric solutions I daresay.

Mathmanican - Most of what I seen revolves around liquid / gas handling.

More of a general observation at least, seeing builds of similar nature posted by the same individual anyway :P. (Not that this is always the case)

Which is actually what I like about this particular gaming community. Different people specialized into different aspects of the game increasing overall learning / discovery progress, which means there's no real need to know everything about everything.

[QuQuasar]

No love for dupe-powered regolith digging? If you're a new player, it seems like it would be many times easier to set up a regolith shoveller than cooled robo-miners.

* designate some high priority construction work where the regolith falls on the mesh tiles.
* turn off your designated duplicants construction ability in the "Priorities" tab
* use door permissions to make sure they're the only one capable of reaching the regolith

Regolith shovelling is the only reason I haven't thrown Meep into magma yet.

[MeesterButts]

On 8/21/2019 at 6:02 AM, SamLogan said:

I don't, I just deconstruct it then rebuild, it lasts long as I use steel. By I can use gas if I want.

Lame!

[Rockhumper]

Doors.