An Advanced Space Design

[Tonyroid]

This is currently my favorite strategy for conquering the space biome. Space setups are REALLY creative and have diverse sets of characteristics  so I would never say one is the "best" but this is my favorite at the moment.

 

[Steve Raptor]

I Remember I tried something similar 2 months ago with the same idea of allowing heat transfer with regolith and cooling it down with radiant pipes.

There is a veteran ONI player named Neotruck that I drew the inspiration from and he made the exact same idea in a thread i can no longer find.

That proved to demand insane amount of cooling and I had 3 aqua tuners, just like you, running nearly full time and consuming insane amount of power.

Only super coolant proved to be able to withstand the amount of heat removal needed and even then it felt like its not worth it.

Eventually i Scrapped this design and came up with something else.

[Xaekai]

a band of tempshift tiles made out of dirt across the whole sky is a crazy investment

[Steve Raptor]

4 minutes ago, Xaekai said:

a band of tempshift tiles made out of dirt across the whole sky is a crazy investment

True, its definitely not dirt cheap like granite, for example.

 

 

I will show myself out.....

[beowulf2010]

1 minute ago, Steve Raptor said:

True, its definitely not dirt cheap like granite, for example.

Boooo..... 

[Tobruk]

1 hour ago, Xaekai said:

a band of tempshift tiles made out of dirt across the whole sky is a crazy investment

Unless you play on arboria with pips. I've got, and I do not exaggerate, more dirt than regolith (1k tons to 800 tons)

[Tonyroid]

16 hours ago, Steve Raptor said:

I Remember I tried something similar 2 months ago with the same idea of allowing heat transfer with regolith and cooling it down with radiant pipes.

There is a veteran ONI player named Neotruck that I drew the inspiration from and he made the exact same idea in a thread i can no longer find.

That proved to demand insane amount of cooling and I had 3 aqua tuners, just like you, running nearly full time and consuming insane amount of power.

Only super coolant proved to be able to withstand the amount of heat removal needed and even then it felt like its not worth it.

Eventually i Scrapped this design and came up with something else.

I've seen @Neotuck around and I know he knows his stuff. I'd definitely like to see what he came up with.

I don't have any aquatuners in this one. Unless you count the one that's keeping the steam turbines cool, but it barely does anything. The cooling is passive, I just let the heat diffuse into the steam on it's own. But I'm also not trying to cool the regolith any more than is necessary to prevent the steel buildings from overheating, it's the bare minimum amount of cooling.

16 hours ago, Xaekai said:

a band of tempshift tiles made out of dirt across the whole sky is a crazy investment

It's true. There's not really a need to use dirt, it's just the optimal choice.

[Steve Raptor]

38 minutes ago, Tonyroid said:

I've seen @Neotuck around and I know he knows his stuff. I'd definitely like to see what he came up with.

I don't have any aquatuners in this one. Unless you count the one that's keeping the steam turbines cool, but it barely does anything. The cooling is passive, I just let the heat diffuse into the steam on it's own. But I'm also not trying to cool the regolith any more than is necessary to prevent the steel buildings from overheating, it's the bare minimum amount of cooling.

It's true. There's not really a need to use dirt, it's just the optimal choice.

Found it:

 

Basically it works on the same principle as yours, but overtime, and especially when there are major meteor showers that drop huge amounts of regolith, cooling the regolith/miners below 275C starts to drain a lot of power, and the cooling systems can't keep up.

When I tried it, I isolated the solar panels and I created a "sandwich" of : bunker tiles/glass  - hydrogen - glass and ran the cooling pipes in the middle through hydrogen. When regolith came down, it would exchange heat with the bunker tiles/glass tiles and the miners/sweepers/loaders and then their temperature would drop below 275C.

Spoiler

But, again, the re-cooling of the bunker tiles after each meteor shower was very demanding.

And what makes it worse is that you can't use PW for this since its vaporization point is too low compared to the temperature of the regolith.

[bobe17]

you could feed a steam turbine with its own output divided into two flow of 1000g

[Tonyroid]

2 hours ago, Steve Raptor said:

Found it:

 

 

I don't understand how the auto-sweepers and conveyor loaders stay cool after the regolith has been auto-mined. For me, they have too much work to do between meteor showers and they get beyond 275C. Maybe something changed since Nov 2018?

Besides that, it's great. It's basically the same as my version but with glass instead of petroleum. That makes it look WAAAAY nicer. But a layer of glass blocks 10% of the light, and that's something I wanted to avoid.

9 minutes ago, bobe17 said:

you could feed a steam turbine with its own output divided into two flow of 1000g

You can indeed, and it's a good idea. But a 10kg/s pipe of petroleum has 4.2 times the heat carrying capacity as a 1kg/s pipe of water. I would have to use 8 pipes of steam turbine water instead of only 2 pipes of petroleum, and I STILL would need a petroleum system to manage the petroleum dripping on the platform because water would just evaporate when regolith landed on it. It definitely seemed simpler to just use petroleum for the whole thing.

[bobe17]

wouldn't be enough in a build where all the robots would be protected by two tiles and the flow of water go into radiant pipes through naphta (1) at the bottom of the robots and then, through the bunker doors (cooling the doors and the regolith above it). Finally, the regolith cooled to maybe 200° falls when the doors opens and cools the sweepers ? (that's what i test currently)

(1) no matter if light is mostly absorbed as the scanners aren't under this section.

PS : Why not put your scanner on the mesh tiles ? This way, you avoid the problem with petroleum absorbing light.

PS 2: Sorry if i misunderstood or missed some concepts in your video (just watched the first eight minutes for now). English is not my natural language.

 

edit : ok, sweepers really need to be made of niobium/thermium asap

[Tonyroid]

19 hours ago, bobe17 said:

wouldn't be enough in a build where all the robots would be protected by two tiles and the flow of water go into radiant pipes through naphta (1) at the bottom of the robots and then, through the bunker doors (cooling the doors and the regolith above it). Finally, the regolith cooled to maybe 200° falls when the doors opens and cools the sweepers ? (that's what i test currently)

(1) no matter if light is mostly absorbed as the scanners aren't under this section.

PS : Why not put your scanner on the mesh tiles ? This way, you avoid the problem with petroleum absorbing light.

PS 2: Sorry if i misunderstood or missed some concepts in your video (just watched the first eight minutes for now). English is not my natural language.

 

edit : ok, sweepers really need to be made of niobium/thermium asap

What you are describing sounds like a good strategy. I have tried all of those pieces but I have never put them together in quite that way.

I have never warmed up to the approach of using a small permanent drop of liquid for cooling a building in a vacuum but I've seen other builds that use it with great outcomes.

I don't want to put the scanner on the mesh tiles because it would have to be too close to the auto-loaders and the scanner won't work very well.

Yeah, once you have thermium... it's easy and none of this is necessary.

[Chthonicone]

On 9/26/2019 at 9:57 AM, Steve Raptor said:

True, its definitely not dirt cheap like granite, for example.

 

 

I will show myself out.....

Well most people do take it for granite.

[suxkar]

It is a nice looking setup but I feel like it consumes too much power compared to, for example, the popular "C" shaped belt of miners:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh1JtmQl4No

Regolith sweeping can be done with chained automatic dispensers without wasting power on loaders (which also hinder scanners effectiveness). The sweepers can be cooled with very small amounts of waste gasses, say once a day. The problem with loaders is that they force sweepers to work continually with very low effectiveness (loading 20-40kg instead of the potential 1000kg), they consume a fairly big amount of energy while being inefficient and produce a significant amount of heat
 

On the other hand, I feel like your setup would shine with space materials: thermium for sweepers so they are cooled by regolith and again dispensers to move regolith around. You could keep the cooling loop, but in this case to take the heat into a steam chamber for a steam turbine, so you can probably run the system on it's own ( not sure if the heat would be enough, but still you get energy back basically for free).

May be you already knew all this and just wanted to show a different setup, in that case apologies, just wanted to give my 2 cents!