The power of ethanol and Arbor trees

[Priitm]

Time to time posts pop up that power from ethanol is not worth it, and I totally agree. If you only look for power is clearly bad option even with power tune ups as its just too much infrastructure and dupes labor time for very little gain. But just to show what you can do with Arbor trees and ethanol I played little challenge map. No hard digging, so only starting biome, but we take little help from printing pod… And for bit of fun with heat pressure its Oasis map.

And this is our base where 10 dupes can live forever (just one dupe have Diver’s Lungs).

Living quarters have comfortable beds (plastic made from slicksters crude oil), dupes eat barbeque and have germ free lavatories and showers.

My dupes are picky and don’t like germy water at their bathrooms or gems in air. We don’t have access to chlorine for easy disinfection and heating water up to kill germs is problematic as we only have aluminum as metal for pumps and in less than 75C water germs die off bit too slow to be safe. So, we just send germy polluted water into some domestic Arbor trees with little price of small water loss (domestic Arbor trees to ethanol loop is not water positive) and need for Pip ranching for dirt (one pip can support 2 domestic trees). We just love Pips (those trees don’t plat themselves) and we would ranch them anyway. Thimble Reds are there just for backup if trees cant use up all the polluted water.

We use quite standard self powered oxygen module at the top of the base. Any excess power is sent directly into living area power grid. Not that its needed, we have more power than we need… And there are also little sage hatch farm for fun to eat some omelets what we don’t need anyway, and if we decide so we can use them to turn excess polluted dirt into coal for extra power what we don’t need.

What about cooling? Our main base and tree gardens are nicely around 22-25C and slicksters farms with ethanol production are kept around 50C for comfortable life for everyone.

So how its done as we have only aluminum to work with. Printing pod are not giving iron or gold amalgam at all and will not give steal before you open up space. So we cant use aquatuner steam turbine setup. But we have tons of lumber. And lumber has specific heat capacity of 3.4 whats almost as good as water. Only problem is that its thermal conductivity is bit low side for solid, so you need to run conveyor rails through liquid or metal tiles for heat change. In moment there is bug that whenever you put lumber into container it resets its temperature to 20C. But lumber drops from trees at the surrounding room temperature (at least it should be), so we have thermal range from 25 to 75 to work with, so we can cool down whatever we want.

And now we get to our power and water production area. 8 ethanol distillers to run 2 ethanol generators at full time if needed. As of average 6 of them working. At the top row there are 3 ethanol generators. Automation with them are set so 2 of them work if water level and CO2 pressure is lower than threshold and all 3 work if battery level drops to 70% regardless of water lever or CO2 pressure. For failsafe, if water level drops too low showers are turned off to save water. Lower right side is also system to handle crude oil and burn of nat gas and petroleum for polluted water and power.

      Left side are stables. Topmost is Pokeshell stable. 3-4 of those are needed for sand for base water purifying needs. Next one used to be sage hacth stable to turn extra polluted dirt into coal. Now its extra Slickster stable for backup (as we don’t need coal) and now we have 5 slickster stables. Two of them gets their grooming stations turned off if pressure drops lower. Eggs are dropped to the incubator room, we have over 200 slicksters there. That room is separated with row of the doors from the main room and they close if CO2 level drops too low to keep main room nicely pressurized. Btw, all incubators are not powered. Eggs in them are developing at normal speed, but dupes can pick up hatched critters for stables.

We could demolish those backup coal generators and add to more ethanol distillers and invite 1-2 more friends in as our lumber stockpile is still growing…

[Nebbie]

A thing of beauty. I guess you have no metal refineries set up, though? Surely this base needed some with how much aluminum it has around.

[suicide commando]

A beautiful sight to see such a wonderful and pretty base. Mine tend to be more along the lines of 'semi functional' and semi-organised.