Salt water volcano

[Oni Noob]

What are the uses of Salt Water Volcanoes?  TIA

[biopon]

Farm waterweed with salt water. Otherwise not much use for it in that state. You can desalinate it, either by boiling or with the desalinator, and then it's just regular water, and you get some salt on the side.

[SharraShimada]

Its saltwater. Its water + salt. So it gives.... (dam dam dam damdadada damm) RIGHT Answer! It gives water and salt!

[Gurgel]

I did an Oasis map a while back where the only source of cooling and clean, cool water was a salt-water geyser. Most of my dupes spent most of the day generating power for the desalinator and the aquatuner...

[Samson.ONI]

Wanted to add to what biopon said about waterweed, it's not just a food source but one of the most water-efficient edible crops. However, you would also need a chlorine vent to support sustainable domesticated waterweed as it is fertilized with bleach stone.

Desalinating it does of course also offer clean water, and the salt water geyser is one of the two highest output water sources on par with the polluted water vent. This is great if you are running large farming operations or bulk hydrogen production. The salt byproduct can also be refined into table salt for +1 morale, but isn't worth the effort beyond the simple satisfaction of providing luxuries for your dupes.

Like Gurgel said, desalinators are power hogs and generate a lot of heat; but there are other approaches to vaporizing salt water beyond the desalinator. You can use a tricked tepedizer coupled with a steam turbine which is much more efficient, but exploitative. Save for that you will want to tap into an external heat source such as a volcano, the magma biome, or hot regolith to vaporize the salt water.

[zergologist]

I've heard that you can melt salt into molten salt and then turn that into a gas for more heat.

[biopon]

Oh, a molten salt reactor

The DTU gain is roughly 25%, it might be worth it. 

[Oni Noob]

14 hours ago, biopon said:

Oh, a molten salt reactor

The DTU gain is roughly 25%, it might be worth it. 

Im listening....

[biopon]

Nothing special, it's not going to get you a ton of free power. E.g. melting reqolith multiplies the heat by 5, this is only a ~1.25 multiplier so kind of nice but not amazing.

However, if you don't mind the extra work and space used, and are working in that temperature range anyway, pushing heat through molten salt and leeching it from the gas will give you some gains. I'll still have to do my rust melter, I'll try to incorporate a salt element in that for extra complexity.

 

[nakomaru]

You can't really exploit this very well, since like 99% of the gained heat is lost again when condensing to liquid and any heating beyond vaporization is net zero. You gain a little bit each time you cycle phases due to the difference.

The best you could push this would be by using the 1/10th conduit rule and bringing the temp down do 150C before solidifying. But still, probably not worth it.

[biopon]

6 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

You can't really exploit this very well

Hmm... it's true, there's only like a 4-degree band where you get to play with the gains. X-2 is where it liquifies, X+2 is where it turns into gas. It's probably too narrow to be actually useful. With the 1/10th rule you could also take it much higher than X+2 and have it still be a liquid so heating it is "cheap", but once you vent it so that it turns gas and gains the energy you want, it's going to be REALLY tricky to get it into a gas pipe.

 

[psusi]

On 10/29/2019 at 8:06 PM, Gurgel said:

I did an Oasis map a while back where the only source of cooling and clean, cool water was a salt-water geyser. Most of my dupes spent most of the day generating power for the desalinator and the aquatuner...

Cooling?  It's 95 degrees.  I can't even figure out how to electrolyze it for oxygen and cool down the oxygen.  Even using a gold aquatuner to move heat from the oxygen to the hydrogen before you burn it can only get the oxygen down to about 60 degrees.

[Gurgel]

47 minutes ago, psusi said:

Cooling?  It's 95 degrees.  I can't even figure out how to electrolyze it for oxygen and cool down the oxygen.  Even using a gold aquatuner to move heat from the oxygen to the hydrogen before you burn it can only get the oxygen down to about 60 degrees.

You split it: One part goes into an aquatuner and one part is used to cool the aquatuner, mostly as steam. You crush the steam whenever things get close to max-temp. The aquatuner needs to be steel for that to work reasonably well though. 

[psusi]

11 hours ago, Gurgel said:

You split it: One part goes into an aquatuner and one part is used to cool the aquatuner, mostly as steam. You crush the steam whenever things get close to max-temp. The aquatuner needs to be steel for that to work reasonably well though. 

Crush?

[Gurgel]

4 hours ago, psusi said:

Crush?

With a gas-crusher. You know, two doors, the first one closing, locking the gas into the second one, the second one then crushing the  gas out of existence. Alternatively, you can vent it to space as well.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

With a gas-crusher. You know, two doors, the first one closing, locking the gas into the second one, the second one then crushing the  gas out of existence. Alternatively, you can vent it to space as well.

Umm... if you have max temp steam, then rather than delete it, why not feed it to a turbine?

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, psusi said:

Umm... if you have max temp steam, then rather than delete it, why not feed it to a turbine?

Because I wanted to see whether this works _without_ turbines? Also, turbines are late-stage research and require plastic.

[fredhp]

I use as volcano/aquatuner cooling.

Salt water + heat == steam + salt.

steam + steam turbine == clean water...

Clean water == oxygen, food, oil etc.

 

[psusi]

1 hour ago, fredhp said:

I use as volcano/aquatuner cooling.

Salt water + heat == steam + salt.

steam + steam turbine == clean water...

Clean water == oxygen, food, oil etc.

 

I wouldn't really call that cooling since the only thing you are cooling is the magma.  i.e. you can't keep the rest of your base cool or cool down the water to <30 C.  This is really more of a magma powered steam turbine that is doing double duty as a free desalinator.

[Craigjw]

I pump 95c water into my electrolyzers and oil wells without any issues and they aren't cooled. Well almost no issue, one of my oil wells did get overheated 280c, but I think this is because I put the pressure sensor too low to measure the NG, but rather the steam pressure, which was never high enough to activate the pump & remove the hot NG.

[0xFADE]

It is a larger source of water than steam geysers that require some extra work to extract said water so it is a nice small complexity step. 

The game is full of soft difficulty transitions that you can tackle whenever you want which is another reason the game is great.

Id say the only real hard difficulty transitions are dealing with oxygen then food and then later the heat buildup you yourself caused. 

[Gurgel]

7 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

It is a larger source of water than steam geysers that require some extra work to extract said water so it is a nice small complexity step. 

The game is full of soft difficulty transitions that you can tackle whenever you want which is another reason the game is great.

Id say the only real hard difficulty transitions are dealing with oxygen then food and then later the heat buildup you yourself caused. 

Pretty much matches my take. This game is an excellent example of looking dead simple and having a lot of depth. 

Salt water geysers are simpler than cold steam in one aspect though: You do not need to cool the geyser itself to make it produce water instead of steam. 

[psusi]

Yea, I'm tackling my salt water geyser now since that seems a hell of a lot easier than dealing with the steam geyser.  Say, can you use a tile of hot chlorine still to trick the turbine into eating the cooler steam from the vent?

[0xFADE]

Desalination is very expensive. It is much easier to pipe salt water in to a boiler and pipe the water from the turbine out than to just cycle it. 

[psusi]

19 hours ago, 0xFADE said:

Desalination is very expensive. It is much easier to pipe salt water in to a boiler and pipe the water from the turbine out than to just cycle it. 

It isn't free, but I wouldn't call it very expensive.  To extract the salt from the boiler you need an auto sweeper and I'm not ready for that yet.