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How to deal with duct infrastructure


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I’m getting back into the game after about a year, and I’ve managed to make a base that, while not exactly “good” by any conventional definition of the word is at least decrepit in a functional way. I have a whole litany of problems to deal with, from frequent brownouts to high stress to inadequate heat rejection, but I’m steadily reducing the danger they pose. But there’s one fundamental problem that has been vexing me for a long time, and which lurks underneath a lot of the other problems: duct infrastructure. It seems like I’d need to fill my whole base with the things to carry adequate amounts of the gases I need. First there are the obvious ones: CO2 needs to go from the generators and the basement to the carbon scrubbers, oxygen needs to go from the electrolyzers (which are split between two locations due to poor planning) to the vents and the atmo suits. Then the secondary ones: hydrogen needs to circulate as a coolant, oxygen needs to come out of overpressurized areas and go... somewhere, maybe space, maybe storage. Is there anything that can “give” more easily than the others, either by being moved or by being made passive? I can think of ways to get rid of the CO2 pipe, but that’s somewhat less of a problem than the others as-is. It gets much worse near the electrolyzers

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You do not need to pipe the CO2. Over time it will automatically sink to the bottom, so just placing your scrubbers at the bottom of the base should be enough. For cooling: I tend to cool my (base) oxygen near where it is produced, rather than separately cooling the base. Note that you usually do not need to cool the atmo suit oxygen.

As far as overpressurised oxygen is concerned: just don't let it overpressurise. If you pipe it into the base from your production unit and distribute it through normal vents, then they will never get the pressure to more than 2kg per tile.

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Just now, Majestix said:

You do not need to pipe the CO2. Over time it will automatically sink to the bottom, so just placing your scrubbers at the bottom of the base should be enough. For cooling: I tend to cool my (base) oxygen near where it is produced, rather than separately cooling the base. Note that you usually do not need to cool the atmo suit oxygen.

As far as overpressurised oxygen is concerned: just don't let it overpressurise. If you pipe it into the base from your production unit and distribute it through normal vents, then they will never get the pressure to more than 2kg per tile.

I have been piping it in with normal vents, and I really don’t know how it’s getting so overpressurized, but it is. In the lower base it’s probably because the boundary between the cold biome and the oil biome was thin even before I mounted the first expedition, which meant there was an overabundance of steam. In the upper areas I have no idea why it’s happening but it should be solvable without pipes.

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I used a U-shaped duct design around the core of my base in my current map that worked fairly well.  After some lessons learned this is my plan for my next base.  I write this as much for you as a reminder to myself :D

Assumptions: 

  •  This design assumes the Self-sealing airlocks to allow for more orderly layouts, but it can be modified to use waterlocks and such if you prefer.
  • This design assumes that immediately left of your starter biome you have a caustic or other non-slime biome.  Things can get tricky (but not fatal) before atmosuits otherwise.

Temperate core (20-30C, oxygen atmosphere):

  • I know, we want to discuss duct handling... but it is strongly affected by how you lay out your base, so we must cover at least a little of that.  That is why I include this section.
  • Three 16x4 columns of rooms, 8 rooms high.
  • Left column(from top to bottom):  Hospital (with its sink/toilet), 5 bathrooms, Great Hall (with a 1x3 CO2 food floor pit in the corner - initially with an unpowered refrigerator, later just dump food into floor with automation), Kitchen, Atmosuit entry/exit.   NOTE: Vertical polluted water pipe inside left wall, vertical clean water pipe along inside right wall.
  • Mid column:  Research stations and manual generators (batteries on a 9th level - maybe outside of temperate core), 5 bedrooms (for eventually 20 dupes in comfy beds), dirt-floored area that will later become pip-planted nature preserve and where a few of each safe wild critter is held (is only exit from great hall, ensuring morale bonus), 16x7 food ingredient chlorine storage (bottom floor is also passage to atmosuits).
  • Right column:  6 temperate plant farms - farm tile, hydroponic or wild pip-planted dirt floor (with printing pod and 1-tile pacu water tank in one of them), Rec Room, TBD room (also main passage to/from atmosuits).
  • 4-wide column with ladder and firepole.
  • Core is surrounded by one empty space tile, igneous rock insulated tile, one empty space... to reduce heat transfer.
  • Airlocks lead to Ranch core on the right - outside of the insulated core wall.  The ranch core will use insulated rooms.
  • Reserve area above the temperate core for further temperate core expansion.
  • NOTE:  Water pipes inside the base are Sandstone or Granite.  We plan to pipe only 20C water through them, and is part of the core cooling system.  Initial water pockets fit this restriction fairly well, and later we will intentionally cool water before use.

Vertical dupe highway and power/duct bus:

  • Left of the core goes 4-wide channel for external vertical ladder/firepole highway.  Maybe wider to leave space for vertical transit tube next to core base insulated wall but I need to learn more about transit tubes first.
  • A regular wall, with manual airlocks for occasional access.
  • 5-wide column for the power/duct bus then a solid regular tile wall.  This allows heavy-watt wire in the center, transformers as needed left and right, 5 gas and 5 liquid ducts.  Plus 2 more ducts inside the walls if needed later for expansion.  The gas duct nearest to the base is reserved for O2, the furthest for "reclamation gasses" that you collect from gas pockets or CO2 from the base.  The liquid duct nearest to the base (over the O2 duct) is for "cool" 20C water (so that any heat leakage through the insulated pipes does not heat the O2).
  • Left of this highway and duct bus will only go things that are rarely accessed, and it is done through occasional passages through the bus that are heavily decorated to minimize the impact of heavy-watt decor debuff.
  • Gas sorting and storage tanks go immediately left of the bus, liquid mass-storage goes left of that.  This makes it easy to send mixed gasses from your collection pipe to the filters and to send pure gasses out to the bus.
  • NOTE:  Next to the base core I use the 5 pipes for Mixed, Hydrogen, Chlorine, CO2, cool O2.  Outside the base you don't need all of those, and you might need to transport other things like Natural Gas and Polluted O2.

Horizontal dupe highway and power/duct bus:

  • Runs under the base to supply the Ranch core with power and needed gasses.
  • Similar to the vertical ones, but will need to use 2 4-high channels, first because you can't reach 5 tiles up and second because you will need other kinds of gasses like polluted oxygen for some of the critters so a little extra capacity will help (but at least this is a short channel)

Other considerations:

  • In general, things that are mostly "hands-off" will go left of the vertical bus, and things that require at least some duplicant labor will go to the right.
  • Gas storage is easily achieved in a reasonable amount of space if you use one of the techniques that allow overpressurizing the gas.  There are also methods to overpressurize liquids in a small space, or if you just want to use a visible liquid pond a reasonable size seems to be 3 stacked 4x16 rooms.
  • Temperature matters, especially for liquids since they aren't as easily cooled, so you might want to have insulated walls for your liquid ponds.
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There is a slime biome to the immediate left of my base and it extends above my base as well. However, I have atmosuits, and even in emergency situations where I’ve needed dupes to come into contact with Slimelung sans-atmosuit I’ve found that Slimelung is not anywhere near as dangerous as it used to be. In the old days it would incapacitate the dupe for a long time, now it just means they have to pop over to the sickbay to get treated, which takes less than a cycle.

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20 minutes ago, Yoma_Nosme said:

Did you use airflow tiles in your floors (at least some) they help with more even oxygen distribution?

Good point, that is so basic I didn't even think of it.  1 airflow tile every 4 tiles or so is a good general rule.

As to sickbay... I am a very cautious player so I never needed it. Not even once since I started playing, on any map I played.

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On 9/27/2019 at 11:37 AM, zOldBulldog said:

Good point, that is so basic I didn't even think of it.  1 airflow tile every 4 tiles or so is a good general rule.

I did some tests with this (because I'd rather not waste raw metal) and it's all about the rate at which you need the airflow. It also helps that dupes will consume oxygen and newly created oxygen will push unwanted gasses away from the source. If you find carbon building up somewhere, it is usually because there is nowhere left for it to fall to or there is a narrow passage that throttles airflow (same with hydrogen, but reverse). I have pretty good airflow because of the ladder-pole combo in my cookie cookie cutter base. Just avoid 1 tile passages, the 1-tile rule is to blame for this. notice the rooms I have for the barracks and bathroom, they can have hydrogen get trapped in them, all you have to do is replace the tile 2 up from the door to an airflow tile to remedy this. There are also other effects in play like gas-gas interaction, different compression of gasses, and gas movement tenancies (I forget if co2 moves left or right, gasses that rise move opposite of falling ones) that affect where they will end up, but I think I'll just wait for @mathmanican to find out more with aerodynamics in the game.

Spoiler

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I wanted to see how hard I could cheese pacu in this map after my achievement progress in another map said I used debug when I had not and I could not load far enough back to fix this. I don't know what other mod causes this, but I have to constantly watch my achievement progress until I get every last steam achievement, then I can superspeed away until the inevitable lag death of the game.

 

 

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9 hours ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

 (I forget if co2 moves left or right, gasses that rise move opposite of falling ones) that affect where they will end up, but I think I'll just wait for @mathmanican to find out more with aerodynamics in the game.

CO2 trends to either side now.  It used to prefer the right, but since an update a while back it has been more of an equal-opportunity nuisance.  It should be noted, however, that it does trend to the SIDES.  Lets say you have a long open chamber at the very bottom of your base.  If you put a carbon skimmer near the sides, you'll have almost no CO2 building up in the middle.  However, if you instead put them in the middle, then you'll have some pools of CO2 building up at the sides.  Since Hydrogen rises above Oxygen, we see a similar mechanic there -- but it will prefer the middle.  Oxygen, as the heavier gas, prefers to drift to the sides. 

It should also be noted that this effect isn't static -- the transition layer will drift around from side to side, "sloshing" like waves.

Spoiler

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While there is a substantial amount of randomness, the overall trend, however, is that gasses that rise tend to work their way toward the center, and gasses that fall tend to work their way to the sides.

Here's an example of the trending.

Spoiler

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You'll notice the density on the right is about 5 times higher than on the left.  Near the middle, the density is about half that of the right.  On the other side of my base is a similar room.  Before I built a carbon skimmer there, CO2 would build up in a similar fashion, except preferring to hang out on the left.

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