Harvesting ALL CO2 from meteors

[Zarquan]

Ever see that beautiful black gas that comes off of meteors disappear in to space and think "What a waste?" 

Spoiler

Timeline.sav

This is 16 radiating pipes, each of which connect to 2 aquatuners (which are not constantly running).  The aquatuners pump up ethanol at between -60 C and -74 C to the top of the map.  This liquefies the CO2 and makes it pour on to the ground below, where it pours in to a room where it solifidies and is swept away by an auutosweeper.  Also, there are autosweepers picking up almost everything else that falls from space and sending it away.

I ran this machine for 10 cycles at speed 3.  It collected 40900 kg CO2, or 4090 kg/cycle.  This rate is enough to:

1. Feed around 1169 untended slicksters properly, assuming you are running petroleum generators (1116 if running a sour gas condenser and natural gas generators). 
   1. You can support more slicksters if you abuse starvation.
2. Produce 1.460.7 kg polluted water/cycle (1869 kg/cycle with natural gas)
3. Produce ‭5,579.7‬ kW, or 3.345 MJ/cycle boosted (22,153.9 kW, or 13.29 MJ/cycle nat gas unboosted)

On average, this my colony with this machine (which consists of a water sieve that runs occasionally as well as the machine) drew ‭‭3.24563‬ MJ/cycle (if you consider the steam turbine as negative loss).  Keep in mind this is NOT optimized at all, so the power draw can almost certainly be significantly reduced.

Keep in mind that this were built lower, more CO2 would be captured, as the amount of CO2 produced is related to the distance traveled. 

I will follow this up later with an assessment of whether this is worth the space from a number of slicker or amount of water standpoint compared to other options including arbor trees.

This is not optimized, it is simply a proof of concept.  There are probably many ways to improve this setup.

EDIT:  I should note that, for the space, these numbers are not that good.  With rockets or arbor trees in the same number of tiles, you can get significantly more resources.  I do not recommend this approach to getting CO2.

[Blazing Falken]

I had experimented with a similar concept but went vertical instead (about 16 wide). The benefits are: less space tiles occupied (more room for solar, scanners, or rockets); pumplessly feeding slicksters at bottom of map; less hot regolith to cool; way less auto-sweepers/miners and associated power consumption; and not to mention it doubles as one hell of a rocket silo. Bonus for more recoverable heat and gasses from rocket launches. You can even condense the co2 at the bottom and the higher pressures above will push a great portion of the gas column downwards, no need for pumping to collect.

The cons are mostly just planning and avoiding things that aren't deconstructable/diggable and extra insulating considerations as it passes through many bioms.

 

It's a great idea but I believe vertical is the hands-down winner.

[mathmanican]

I love it @Zarquan. Love it.  Thanks for posting. 

[Lifegrow]

Ooooooooold! It's been done many times in the exact same fashion - loop of radiant piping (only actually needs to be a 2-height radiator by the way, radiant piping is very strong) and then make it rain CO2.

Can't recall when it was last posted here - it was a youtube fellow that posted a survival build he'd done though. 

Honestly though, what a gigantic waste of power and resources. A fun derpy build if you've nothing better to do but thats about where it ends tbh. Yes, CO2 can be converted to oil, but think of the game impact this sort of build creates vs a simple solar build. It's also way less efficient and yields no benefit at all as far as I can tell.

Crazy fools...  

[Zarquan]

12 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

Ooooooooold! It's been done many times in the exact same fashion - loop of radiant piping (only actually needs to be a 2-height radiator by the way, radiant piping is very strong) and then make it rain CO2.

Can't recall when it was last posted here - it was a youtube fellow that posted a survival build he'd done though. 

Honestly though, what a gigantic waste of power and resources. A fun derpy build if you've nothing better to do but thats about where it ends tbh. Yes, CO2 can be converted to oil, but think of the game impact this sort of build creates vs a simple solar build. It's also way less efficient and yields no benefit at all as far as I can tell.

Crazy fools...  

I know its totally not worth it, I just thought it would be fun.  I do not intend to build this in my base.

[Daxterr]

Bow down to your ONI overlord lifegrow who will tell you how to play the game!!!

[Lifegrow]

9 hours ago, Daxterr said:

Bow down to your ONI overlord lifegrow who will tell you how to play the game!!!

Pretty sure I just summed up a handful of reasons why you wouldn't want this in your base, not why you shouldn't - but yeah, good work.

As I said, a fun derpy build but hugely pointless.

[Gus Smedstad]

"Can you do it" is often an interesting enough reason to explore an idea, even if it doesn't pan out.

I'm not sold on the CO2 -> oil conversion, since by the time you can build something like this, you have plenty of renewable energy.

However, the last time I built a sleet wheat farm, I was perpetually starving for dirt. So CO2 -> dirt is kind of attractive, and solar panels don't render that conversion meaningless.

I strongly suspect, though, that the answer to dirt shortages now is pips. I'm still playing a Terra asteroid, so I don't have any naturally occurring ones, but I did get some pips and acorns from the printer, and I've been experimenting with them. They seem like a pretty strong, renewable source of dirt. So probably the CO2 -> dirt isn't worth it either.

[Hakon]

2 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

hugely pointless.

If I am not mistaken, you can feed 27 dupes with oxygen if you use natural gas and electrolyzers. That isn't pointless.

Spoiler

1869 / 600 x 0.888 x 10 = 27,7 dupes

Are my calculatios correct?

 

[Zarquan]

Ok, so I have done the math.  Arbor trees vs capturing CO2 from space on resources per tile. 

I will not be considering slickster farms in tile cost, as I can theoretically fit any number of untended tame slicksters in a fixed number of tiles.

Note that the actual structure of the machine has no real effect on capturing CO2, but simply the space the meteors have to fall.   This scheme uses around 12720 tiles.

EDIT:  I actually did the math wrong here, but I redid it in the math in my sour gas vs arbor trees thread on water.

The point is that domestic trees produce 0.873 g/s/tile water.  In the space given, I could create 6,663 kg/cycle water.  With wild trees, that increases to 2.592 g/s/tile water, or 19,782 kg/cycle water.  They can also feed a lot more slicksters, around 14503 slicksters for domestic or 6,231.5 slicksters for wild.  Of course, this is theoretical.  That many slicksters would make the critters on the map think very slowly and they might start to starve to death before they think to eat or some other similar fate.

Spoiler

12 domestic arbor trees, 4 ethanol distilleries, and 1 petroleum generator is one uni.  Including floors, this takes around 180 tiles.  Using slicksters, this setup results in 800 kg/cycle of CO2, which feeds 160 slicksters.  They also produce a profit of 160 kg/cycle water, sheerly by coincidence.  Anyway, if we get around 2 of these, we get as much water as we do from space.  If we get 6 of these (72 trees, 12 distilleries, and 6 petroleum generators), we get more water and more slicksters.  Plus polluted dirt on top of it.  And this would take up 1080 tiles.  So, since we can get an infinite number of arbor trees, arbor trees are a better use of the space.

 

16 hours ago, Hakon said:

If I am not mistaken, you can feed 27 dupes with oxygen if you use natural gas and electrolyzers. That isn't pointless.

  Reveal hidden contents

1869 / 600 x 0.888 x 10 = 27,7 dupes

Are my calculatios correct?

 

Another thought experiment I want to undertake is whether sour gas is worth it from a material generated/space measurement.  Because you do get more water from the natural gas conversion, but is it worth the space?  Burning 10 kg petroleum takes 5 petroleum generators, whereas burning 6.7 kg natural gas takes 75 natural gas generators.  That is a lot of space, a lot of piping, a lot of pumps, etc.  I'm not sure it's worth it, so I usually consider the petroleum numbers in these calculations.

[Hakon]

40 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

Another thought experiment I want to undertake is whether sour gas is worth it from a material generated/space measurement.  Because you do get more water from the natural gas conversion, but is it worth the space?  Burning 10 kg petroleum takes 5 petroleum generators, whereas burning 6.7 kg natural gas takes 75 natural gas generators.  That is a lot of space, a lot of piping, a lot of pumps, etc.  I'm not sure it's worth it, so I usually consider the petroleum numbers in these calculations.

Yes I agree, if I would do this I would use molten slicksters so that I wouldn't even need to build a petroleum boiler. For these numbers you could feed 21,6 duplicants with oxygen.

[Lifegrow]

7 hours ago, Hakon said:

If I am not mistaken, you can feed 27 dupes with oxygen if you use natural gas and electrolyzers. That isn't pointless.

  Reveal hidden contents

1869 / 600 x 0.888 x 10 = 27,7 dupes

Are my calculatios correct?

 

It's nothing to do with how much you can provide for your dupes, you're comparing apples and.... ponies.

I was simply pointing out that in terms of solar real estate i.e. the cosmic biome, and in terms of POWER you'd be far better off building solar gens if you want to net a sizeable power gain. I'm not saying not to collect CO2 if that's your kink - but collecting it from rocket launch bays and not using up your entire skyline would be the smarter plan.

On 01/09/2019 at 1:10 AM, Zarquan said:

935 untended slicksters

Where did this number come from? I've been checking the maths and can't make sense of this. Untended means "wild and eggs from a ranch" I'm guessing? In which case you'd have tame, glum slicksters? 

If so, (and please, correct me if i'm wrong) they consume 6.67g/s of co2 and output half that amount ~4kg per cycle co2 -> 2kg oil per slickster, per cycle.

If the above is true, then 4090kg of CO2 per cycle when fed to 1022 slicksters would net you 2045kg of crude.

If boiled in a sour gas boiler (we'll ignore the energy cost for that) you'd lose 1/3 of the mass as sulfur, and net 1349.7kg of natural gas. 

Assuming a natural gas gen runs non stop, and consumed 0.09kg/s of Natural gas, it would consume 54kg per cycle, and your 1349.7kg would translate to ~25 natural gas gens running for the cycle. Power gain of 12mj, gain of 1012kg polluted water, 337.5 kg of co2.

Another 85 slicksters turn that into 168.75kg crude, -sulfur loss becomes 111.38kg natural gas, or 2 additional gens etc etc blah.

I'm mostly concerned with the CO2. Moving it with pumps is obviously a no-go, but even if you solidify it and move it on rails, you then would need to invest power later to heat it again to a temperature that wont kill your "935 slicksters",at a rate of 6.82 kg/s by the way. So on top of the initial aquatuner costs, you now have a sweeper arm and loader that are running for 60% of your cycle, and then you have to heat the end product to a comfortable range, plus sour gas boiler consumption, plus generator cooling, etc etc. At this point i'd wager from experience that you've wasted around half of your generated power on cooling/heating various elements of the build, all but fried your computer with the mass of piping, calculations, state changes and slickster slurpings.

At which point, i'd refer back to my previous statement : 

On 01/09/2019 at 2:18 AM, Lifegrow said:

Yes, CO2 can be converted to oil, but think of the game impact this sort of build creates vs a simple solar build. It's also way less efficient and yields no benefit at all as far as I can tell.

Crazy fools...  

If the aim is to feed slicksters, why not just collect the ALREADY HOT co2 if your aim is to feed it to molten chaps... Better yet, put your slicksters in your rocket launch tubes and give them a window seat. Scratch that, let the slicksters worry about the rockets - and you boys stick to slurping up all this yummy co2 you're so desperate for  

There seems to be a lot of opinion without much application here - I offered insight based off what's already been done before, and what we already know. 

Nerds  

[Zarquan]

4 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

If boiled in a sour gas boiler (we'll ignore the energy cost for that) you'd lose 1/3 of the mass as sulfur, and net 1349.7kg of natural gas. 

First off, if you have a sour gas boiler, you don't need to worry about energy costs.  You have essentially unlimited power.  The power we get from sour gas boilers is completely insane.  It is also heat positive, so I can use the heat from this to reheat the CO2 very easily without power.  With what you can feed to 1 petroleum generator (2000 g/s crude oil), you can get 11,900 W, or 7150 kJ/cycle.  That is not including the potential of using the hot sour gas to power a steam turbine (as the conversion is heat positive).  The power it takes to run is not what makes sour gas boilers difficult to use, but instead the space it takes to place 15 natural gas generators as opposed to 1 petroleum generator.

4 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

If so, (and please, correct me if i'm wrong) they consume 6.67g/s of co2 and output half that amount ~4kg per cycle co2 -> 2kg oil per slickster, per cycle.

An untended slickster does eat 6.67 g/s.  I got that mixed up with happy wild, who eat 8.33 g/s.  That increases our number.  I will redo the math.  4090 kg/cycle CO2 is 6816.67 g/s.  Now, we have a loop.  For now, I will simplify the problem.  Suppose we have 1 g/s CO2.  This can be converted by a slickster to 1/2 g/s petroleum.  After that, we feed that 1/2 g/s petroleum to a generator to create 1/8 g/s CO2.  So, that 1 g/s became 1/8 g/s.  This is a geometric series, where every loop results in a reduction of 1/8th of your amount.  So, using the formula for a geometric series, we calculate 6816.67 * (1/(1-(1/8))) = 7790.48 g/s.  Feeding that to slicksters results in 1168.6 slicksters.

Using a sour gas boiler, our 1 g/s CO2 becomes 1/2 g/s petroleum, which results 0.67/2 g/s natural gas.  That results in 0.67/8 CO2.  Therefore, we have a similar geometric series.  6816.67 * (1/(1-(0.67/8))) = 7,439.75 g/s, which feeds 1116.0 slicksters.

4 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

I'm mostly concerned with the CO2. Moving it with pumps is obviously a no-go, but even if you solidify it and move it on rails, you then would need to invest power later to heat it again to a temperature that wont kill your "935 slicksters",at a rate of 6.82 kg/s by the way. So on top of the initial aquatuner costs, you now have a sweeper arm and loader that are running for 60% of your cycle, and then you have to heat the end product to a comfortable range, plus sour gas boiler consumption, plus generator cooling, etc etc. At this point i'd wager from experience that you've wasted around half of your generated power on cooling/heating various elements of the build, all but fried your computer with the mass of piping, calculations, state changes and slickster slurpings.

CO2 has an extremely low specific heat.  That's why it is so easy to liquefy.  It doesn't take much to heat it up.  I could heat it with the regolith (which is still hot in my build), the petroleum from my petroleum burner (powered by a magma-cooled metal refinery), my water geysers, etc.  I always have something that needs cooling, and the solid CO2 can knock a few degrees off while coming to temperature. 

Also, did I mention this is a proof of concept?  Not an optimized build?  The point is to see what resources could be gained, not build the best possible method of getting those resources.  This build is complete overkill and can be made much cleaner. 

I am a bit confused about the concern over power.  My base is generating more than enough surplus power to power what I currently have and this machine together.  My concerns are water and slicksters, as slicksters are food and water is life.  

Where is that sweepers running 60% of a cycle coming from?  They run for 10-20 seconds out of 200 seconds.  I have 2 sweepers for the solid CO2, as it is all collected in one of two places.

And my laptop ran the game at 30-40 FPS with this at the top of my base.  More when I wasn't looking at it with overlays.

4 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

If the aim is to feed slicksters, why not just collect the ALREADY HOT co2 if your aim is to feed it to molten chaps... Better yet, put your slicksters in your rocket launch tubes and give them a window seat. Scratch that, let the slicksters worry about the rockets - and you boys stick to slurping up all this yummy co2 you're so desperate for  

How would I go about collecting all of the hot CO2?   It vents in to space.  The goal here is to collect it all, not some or most. 

Also, the current state of this build assumes that you haven't gone to space.  No space materials and no rockets.  Just an examination of meteor CO2 collection.

4 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

There seems to be a lot of opinion without much application here - I offered insight based off what's already been done before, and what we already know. 

But I hadn't done it before, nor do I recall seeing it before.  I wanted to know the potential of the space CO2, so I found what I believe to be the upper limit in what we can get given the space I gave it.  I never said this build was good or useful.  It is a line of research I was curious about.  And now I have the answer to "How much CO2 can we collect from space."  I also determined that it wasn't worth while, as arbor trees produce more water per tile and support more slicksters per tile.

4 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

Nerds  

I am proud to be a nerd. 

4 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

It's nothing to do with how much you can provide for your dupes, you're comparing apples and.... ponies.

It has everything to do with how much you can provide for your duplicants.  I use oil wells to produce water and food for free.  Power is just a pleasant byproduct that we already produce more of than we need.

13 hours ago, Hakon said:

If I am not mistaken, you can feed 27 dupes with oxygen if you use natural gas and electrolyzers. That isn't pointless.

  Hide contents

1869 / 600 x 0.888 x 10 = 27,7 dupes

Are my calculatios correct?

 

That seems to be the right result.

[Lifegrow]

7 hours ago, Zarquan said:

First off, if you have a sour gas boiler, you don't need to worry about energy costs.

You can't say things like this if you're going to go into the maths of a build and portray it as if it's super positive. There are other costs involved, and they should be factored in, otherwise you're just misleading people with big numbers that mean nothing (or the politician strategy as I like to call it).

8 hours ago, Zarquan said:

I am a bit confused about the concern over power.  My base is generating more than enough surplus power to power what I currently have and this machine together.  My concerns are water and slicksters, as slicksters are food and water is life.  

It's not a concern over power, it's a comparison. Solar is the complete package, nothing else needed - just raw output of power. If your system has more variables/outputs/considerations then they should be... well, considered. Again, you seem to come back to "it's a proof of concept" which I'm fine with, but then say things like "My game ran at 30-40 fps with this at the top of my base" which implies a complete picture.

8 hours ago, Zarquan said:

Where is that sweepers running 60% of a cycle coming from?  They run for 10-20 seconds out of 200 seconds.  I have 2 sweepers for the solid CO2, as it is all collected in one of two places.

4090 / 20kg/s = 204.5 seconds so around 34% - it was late and I did "head-maffs", cocked this up, but still doesn't quite mesh with what you say

8 hours ago, Zarquan said:

And my laptop ran the game at 30-40 FPS with this at the top of my base.  More when I wasn't looking at it with overlays.

Was this before you added 1116 slicksters, and set up the complete infrastructure for the build? If so, i'm not sure why you've mentioned it.

8 hours ago, Zarquan said:

How would I go about collecting all of the hot CO2?   It vents in to space.  The goal here is to collect it all, not some or most. 

Also, the current state of this build assumes that you haven't gone to space.  No space materials and no rockets.  Just an examination of meteor CO2 collection.

Same build but in a sealed off rocket bay, as has been done in the past. Collecting rocket exhaust, we have bunker doors. You're not collecting it all either, just the majority. You've also gone to the effort (and I mean, serious effort) of dry walling the entirety of your cosmic biome to make this possible, yet say you've not been to space. In the time this would take to build, I reckon even the most novice of player could have launched a few rockets so that's a bit of a moot point.

8 hours ago, Zarquan said:

It has everything to do with how much you can provide for your duplicants.  I use oil wells to produce water and food for free.  Power is just a pleasant byproduct that we already produce more of than we need.

You've quoted me out of context here - I was explaining that my comparison has nothing to do with outputs, it was a simple explanation that you could achieve a similar result by collecting rocket exhaust and STILL leave room for a solar build too. You seem to be misunderstanding the angle of my comment so i'll be clear and underline it for you :

Theres nothing wrong with your build, it's an already existing concept that has been tried and tested before you. Others opted to cool their rocket "bays" and collect that CO2, rather than waste their entire cosmic skyline. Solar panels are an additional hands off bonus of the cosmic biome - your build negates that bonus.

I'm done here now buddy, was just asking for more information - don't want to derail this any further with nonsensical back and forths.

[Zarquan]

7 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

You can't say things like this if you're going to go into the maths of a build and portray it as if it's super positive. There are other costs involved, and they should be factored in, otherwise you're just misleading people with big numbers that mean nothing (or the politician strategy as I like to call it).

There are other costs to a sour gas boiler, which is why I don't necessarily recommend them.  If you see what I said, I portrayed the petroleum method primarily and the sour gas method as a secondary for a reason.  But I have build pre space petroleum burners and sour gas boilers using a minor volcano and a metal refinery, so they are certainly possible pre space.    The problem is that they take up a ton of space with the natural gas generators.  The numbers are big because the space used is big.  That doesn't mean it's worth it.  In fact, I feel that the numbers are small given the space used for this.  I would get around 10 times the water if I were to brick space with domestic arbor trees and ethanol distilleries with a slickster loop.

Don't call me a politician, that is uncalled for.  /s

7 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

It's not a concern over power, it's a comparison. Solar is the complete package, nothing else needed - just raw output of power. If your system has more variables/outputs/considerations then they should be... well, considered. Again, you seem to come back to "it's a proof of concept" which I'm fine with, but then say things like "My game ran at 30-40 fps with this at the top of my base" which implies a complete picture.

My point was that I was not that concerned with power.  I was concerned with material resources gained with power as an afterthought.  The mentioning performance was because you said this would overload my CPU and I was saying that hadn't happened yet.  This system is also significantly more complicated than it need to be, so it could have less pipes, meaning fewer computations.

7 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

4090 / 20kg/s = 204.5 seconds so around 34% - it was late and I did "head-maffs", cocked this up, but still doesn't quite mesh with what you say

Why are you dividing by 20 kg/s?  The sweepers don't need to be on all the time, and they can move 1000 kg in one go, so that would be 4090/1000, which means they only need to run for long enough to pick up one thing 4 times per cycle plus a tiny amount extra.  I don't know exactly how long it takes to pick something up, but 10 seconds seems to be enough, so 40/600 is about 6.67% of the time.  Since I divide the work over 2 sweepers, they have to be on about 3.33% of the time, but there are two of them.  The conveyor loaders on the other hand have to be running 204.5 loader-seconds per cycle, or about 1/3rd of a cycle for one conveyor loader.

7 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

before you added 1116 slicksters, and set up the complete infrastructure for the build? If so, i'm not sure why you've mentioned it.

The only thing I didn't have is the slicksters, and that is because slicksters don't appear to make the game lag.  In my current colony, I have around 700 slicksters in a one tile pen.  They think very slowly, but my dupes are still responsive and I am getting decent frame rates.  I fear there will be a point where the slicksters think too slowly to eat and starve out, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

Since I am producing less than 20 kg/second CO2 with this, it would simply take one conveyor rail to bring the CO2 to a hot place to make this CO2 come to temperature.  Certainly not a performance destroying proposition, especially since the regolith is right there. 

7 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

Same build but in a sealed off rocket bay, as has been done in the past. Collecting rocket exhaust, we have bunker doors. You're not collecting it all either, just the majority. You've also gone to the effort (and I mean, serious effort) of dry walling the entirety of your cosmic biome to make this possible, yet say you've not been to space. In the time this would take to build, I reckon even the most novice of player could have launched a few rockets so that's a bit of a moot point.

The only CO2 that escapes is the stuff that is made on the top couple tiles on the map.  I thought of an approach like that, but it didn't capture as much as this one.  Also, I'm not using rockets because I wanted to see what we could get from space.  Of course I would never build this exact system even if the CO2 numbers were good because I would want rockets.  But I wanted to see what came from space and I calculated it.  Now I have an upper bound that tells me it is not worth it.

7 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

You've quoted me out of context here - I was explaining that my comparison has nothing to do with outputs, it was a simple explanation that you could achieve a similar result by collecting rocket exhaust and STILL leave room for a solar build too. You seem to be misunderstanding the angle of my comment so i'll be clear and underline it for you :

Theres nothing wrong with your build, it's an already existing concept that has been tried and tested before you. Others opted to cool their rocket "bays" and collect that CO2, rather than waste their entire cosmic skyline. Solar panels are an additional hands off bonus of the cosmic biome - your build negates that bonus.

Except that I see power as not that difficult to get.  Solar panels are largely redundant in my mind because of how much power I tend to have in my bases.  Why would I build solar when I could instead do something else with the space that gives me the resources to support more dupes? 

I recognize that rockets also produce a ton of CO2 and heat that can be collected and fed to slicksters, but this post wasn't an examination of that.  It was simply trying to get all the CO2 from meteors to determine whether such an effort is worth it.  I believe I have determined that it is not worth it to build this. 

Which makes this discussion with you confusing because you seem to think I am advocating for this build.  I am really not.  I also never claimed that I was the first one to do this, nor did I claim this was a good idea.   Not all builds that are posted are good builds, even in the opinion of the designer.  Not all ideas that should be explored pan out or end up being effective. 

Negative results are still important.