Large quantities of cold CO2. Do I vent into space or are there other uses?

[Lilscratchy]

So I have a cooled industrial brick, with a closed off area running 8 petroleum generators and 2 polymer presses. 

It's 5 high by 40. Problem is not the cooling, everything is steadily sub 5C - 10C depending how long and often I run my gens and presses, and whether at those moments they all run together or not. Over some cycles the pressure of CO2 in the space rises by about 80 to 100 kg per tile. After venting it and releasing about 200 kg per tile of CO2 for the second time using one of those triple airlock vacuum seals I thought there has got to be a better way to deal with the CO2. I'm dealing with close to 600 kg per tile of CO2 in there at the time of writing this, I'm scared it might break my tiles due to overpressure just like with liquids (if this is possible at all) It's more than I could ever hope to effectively feed to slicksters. Scrubbers are an option but that moves my problem from incredible amounts of excess CO2 to even higher incredible amounts of excess polluted water I'm (already) dealing with. Do I just vent it into space? Seems like a waste to be fair. Would I be better off storing it for now? Ive already got more than enough CO2 to use for example in cooling my autosweepers for regolith collection in space. 

[Ixenzo]

Gas pressure doesn't break tiles, you can let it run for eternity. Feed them to slicksters, though if you're feeding them this much mass at such a low temp you'll have to heat it up - preferably by not cooling the power brick past slicksters' survival temp. Spacing material is such a waste tbh, and it's not like you'll ever run out of space to store it - just let it accumulate.

[nakomaru]

Make dry ice. Throw it on the ground. I'm not sure what next.

Yeah just crush it in a door or store it forever. CO2 is the easiest thing to generate if you ever needed it. And you don't.

[Lilscratchy]

49 minutes ago, Ixenzo said:

Gas pressure doesn't break tiles, you can let it run for eternity. Feed them to slicksters, though if you're feeding them this much mass at such a low temp you'll have to heat it up - preferably by not cooling the power brick past slicksters' survival temp. Spacing material is such a waste tbh, and it's not like you'll ever run out of space to store it - just let it accumulate.

Good idea! I have my slicksters set up at the bottom of the map. I dug out an oil biome which is already full of 110 degree 20kg per time CO2. However 2 tiles above my ranch there is a perfectly insulated Boulder of 1000+C obsidian. I think I'll just run some piping through there before venting it to my slicksters. This (one of several) Boulder is kind of in the way of my brick. I was looking for a way to put the heat to use so that's two birds with one stone. 

Already have some builds in mind I'm eager to try out, thanks! 

However I read that one petroleum generator produces enough for 15 slicksters. In order to offset my production I'd need to ranch 120+ slicksters. Good thing I'm building a module with 18 stables. 

28 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Make dry ice. Throw it on the ground. I'm not sure what next.

Yeah just crush it in a door or store it forever. CO2 is the easiest thing to generate if you ever needed it. And you don't.

I could easily put in enough cooling for the temperatures to create it, I'm cooling my brick with supercoolant. However wouldnt that deprive my gens of effective ways to dispose of heat? If I converted the CO2 into dry ice the entire room with my petroleum gens and plastic presses would be a vacuum. And the polluted water they drop would also freeze as means of heat dissipation, and which also feeds my water supply. I could do it, but I'd need to rearrange and re-setup a a lot of things with a lot of downtime of many industrial equipment I don't think I can afford. 

It's certainly an option, but not one that'd work for my industrial brick with the way its been designed. 

I could pump the CO2 somewhere else to be converted into dry ice though. But I find re-heating the CO2 through obsidian to feed it to slicksters to be a more doable alternative though. 

[nakomaru]

Now I feel a bit embarrassed - I didn't mean that very seriously. I don't think there are many good uses for CO2, nor slicksters to be among them. But now that you have a project idea from Ix, that's all that matters.

[Lilscratchy]

2 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Now I feel a bit embarrassed - I didn't mean that very seriously. I don't think there are many good uses for CO2, nor slicksters to be among them. But now that you have a project idea from Ix, that's all that matters.

That's the problem, slicksters are the only alternative coming close to a proper use for CO2. If my ranch doesn't appear to be enough, I might still run with the converting it to dry ice idea. Or I might Make some expensive pets and use it to create longhair slicksters, that'd also help deal with some O2 over production from my SPOMS. 

Though not entirely serious, your input is definitely something I might have a use for. So thanks a lot anyway! 

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Lilscratchy said:

So I have a cooled industrial brick, with a closed off area running 8 petroleum generators and 2 polymer presses. 

Jesus, what are you doing with all of that power?  I'm coming up on cycle 800 with two rockets and 16 dupes and I have more power than I know what to do with just from steam turbines and burning the hydrogen from the electrolyzers, and I have a single ethanol distiller using up the wood from 4 wild arbor trees running a petrol gen at only 25%.

1 hour ago, Lilscratchy said:

Scrubbers are an option but that moves my problem from incredible amounts of excess CO2 to even higher incredible amounts of excess polluted water I'm (already) dealing with.

No; you just set up a closed loop feeding water back and forth between the CO2 scrubbers and a sieve.  Net input is some power and filtration medium and output is dirt.  Takes less space and dupe labor than ranching a ton of slicksters, though the slicksters do also provide meat. 

[Ixenzo]

You can set up a slickster stable that can house essentially infinite creatures and dump all that CO2 in there, perhaps in an infinite gas storage style vent. They'll eat a lot of gas there.

 

[Lilscratchy]

Honestly, I don't know. I like to just be set for the fore

4 minutes ago, psusi said:

Jesus, what are you doing with all of that power?  I'm coming up on cycle 800 with two rockets and 16 dupes and I have more power than I know what to do with just from steam turbines and burning the hydrogen from the electrolyzers, and I have a single ethanol distiller using up the wood from 4 wild arbor trees running a petrol gen at only 25%.

No; you just set up a closed loop feeding water back and forth between the CO2 scrubbers and a sieve.  Net input is some power and filtration medium and output is dirt.  Takes less space and dupe labor than ranching a ton of slicksters, though the slicksters do also provide meat. 

I don't know to be honest, I like to be set for the foreseeable future. I'm closing in on cycle 1000 running 20 dupes, planning on running about 6 rockets soon. I've got 8 hydrogen generators, a regolith melter powering 11steam turbines with 1400C igneous rock, plus 6 additional turbines. Lastly Ive got 10 NG generators as wel. The 8 petrol generators are far from everything there is for me. But, I'm running a lot of aquatuners as well for cooling loops. Have a lot of transit tube acces points which also consume quite some power. So, I'm producing more than needed in most cases, but my demand for power is not small either, for as far as my experience can tell me. The petrol generators are also just a runoff for excess petroleum. But with the prospect of lots of expansion further down the line I'd like to not have a lot of small extra issues I'm running into. My average consumption is about 27Kw. With a potential consumption of 48 kw (should I for some unlikely reason need to turn on everything at once, everything runs periodally for short times.) 

Also on the CO2 scrubbers, you're right. For some reason I thought CO2 scrubbers worked like toilets and ended up in a net water gain. Foolish me. 

4 minutes ago, Ixenzo said:

You can set up a slickster stable that can house essentially infinite creatures and dump all that CO2 in there, perhaps in an infinite gas storage style vent. They'll eat a lot of gas there.

 

That's a good idea, might be good on performance too. Although, isn't the infinite storage thing more of an exploit? I could work around that nevertheless, it'd save a lot of space, solve CO2 and give me extra crude oil and petroleum + meat. Frankly I see no reason not to go for this. Thanks! 

[Ixenzo]

1 hour ago, Lilscratchy said:

 

Well, the IGS vent is more of a safeguard with that build, OP there mentions that the 340 slicksters in that pen were constantly eating two and a half worth of gas pipes of CO2 without reaching the 20 kg/tile pressure limit of the vent.

[PhailRaptor]

Just a couple notes on Slicksters...

-> If the CO2 is too cold, they can freeze to death.  Fortunately they have a lot of mass, but their starting temp when they hatch isn't extravagantly high.  You may end up needing to pre-heat your CO2 for them.

-> Because the CO2 will be cool or cold, the Slicksters will start laying Long Hair eggs instead of normal Slickster eggs.  You'll need to relocate those to a location where you can feed them Oxygen instead.  This will, ultimately, cull out the normal Slicksters, as they lay more and more Long Hair eggs over their lifespan.  They will not repopulate themselves if you do not keep them warm enough.

[Lilscratchy]

6 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

Just a couple notes on Slicksters...

-> If the CO2 is too cold, they can freeze to death.  Fortunately they have a lot of mass, but their starting temp when they hatch isn't extravagantly high.  You may end up needing to pre-heat your CO2 for them.

-> Because the CO2 will be cool or cold, the Slicksters will start laying Long Hair eggs instead of normal Slickster eggs.  You'll need to relocate those to a location where you can feed them Oxygen instead.  This will, ultimately, cull out the normal Slicksters, as they lay more and more Long Hair eggs over their lifespan.  They will not repopulate themselves if you do not keep them warm enough.

I am aware of the temperature of the oxygen, luckily the spot I'm planning to put my slickster pens is situated right below a Boulder of 1000+ C obsidian, so I can definitely use that to preheat the CO2 pretty effectively I'd say. 

[Zarquan]

CO2 has a very low specific heat.  I pump any temp of CO2 in to my slicksters and pipe my hot petroleum through it with radiant pipes on the way to the generators (because I have a crude oil to petroleum boiler).  This makes the temperatures comfortable.

[DarkMaster13]

For my playstyle, CO2 is simply a waste product I have to remove from my bases.  So it gets vented.  Unless I don't have access to vacuum or need to get more polluted water, then I skim the CO2.  There's always more than what I need for oxyferns and/or soda fountains.

[Zarquan]

19 hours ago, DarkMaster13 said:

For my playstyle, CO2 is simply a waste product I have to remove from my bases.  So it gets vented.  Unless I don't have access to vacuum or need to get more polluted water, then I skim the CO2.  There's always more than what I need for oxyferns and/or soda fountains.

I see each kg of CO2 as food, water, and power which can sustain my duplicants.  My colony feeds all of the dupes with barbecue from my slicksters.  By recycling the CO2 through my slicksters, each kg of CO2 is worth 0.429 0.214 kg water (feeding the petroleum to a generator and feeding the CO2 back to the slicksters).  If you put them all on one tile and don't look at them, my framerates remain perfectly serviceable with hundreds of slicksters and no dupe labor required.  This can also be used to make arbor trees resource positive if you like trees.

Of course, if I look at them, my framerates go down.  If I mouse over them, my game freezes for a few seconds.

 

 

[nakomaru]

15 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

My colony feeds all of the dupes with barbecue from my slicksters

Have you had a look at wild voles? You can start accumulating them early on and getting free meat forever with fewer critter counts (32000 kcal per). But it depends on your demand.

[Zarquan]

Just now, nakomaru said:

Have you had a look at wild voles? You can start accumulating them early on and getting free meat forever with fewer critter counts (32000 kcal per). But it depends on your demand.

I have considered voles, and I do plan on capturing them all for extra meat, but they don't turn CO2 in to water, and my dupes need to breathe.

Plus, I turned care packages off for my current run, so I only have a finite number of them.

[suxkar]

For me polluted water is very precious since it is the only way to mass produce insulation (unless you go into mass drekos). If you have excess water, you can scrub the CO2 to get PW-->Reeds-->Insulation and Polluted Dirt-->Pokeshells-->Steel.

[psusi]

5 hours ago, Zarquan said:

By recycling the CO2 through my slicksters, each kg of CO2 is worth 0.429 kg water

How do you figure that?  You only get half a kg of oil out of the slicksters,  That only takes 150 g of water to pump out of an oil well.

Or to look at it another way, running a petrol gen takes 2kg of petrol and puts out 500g of CO2.  If you scrub the CO2 then pumping that 2kg of oil takes 600g of water.  If you recycle that CO2 into more petrol, then you only have to pump 1.75kg of oil at a cost of 525g of water.  So all of those slicksters are only saving you 75 g/s of water per petrol gen, or less than one dupe's budget.  It's something, but is it worth it?  When water seems to be so plentiful these days?  Are you trying to sustain 150 dupes?

[Zarquan]

4 hours ago, psusi said:

How do you figure that?  You only get half a kg of oil out of the slicksters,  That only takes 150 g of water to pump out of an oil well.

I actually calculated the wrong thing.  It is half of that.  I was calculating with 1 kg crude oil instead of CO2.

You start with 1 kg crude oil.  You feed it to a slickster to get 500 g of crude oil or petroleum.  If crude oil, feed it to a crude oil boiler (crude oil to petroleum at 400 C) for 500 g petroleum.  Burn the petroleum in a petroleum generator.  You now have 125 g CO2. 

Now we consider, what if we feed the CO2 from the petroleum generators in to the slicksters.  You end up with 1/8 of the CO2 you started with.  And from that, you end up with 1/8th again. This is a feedback loop that works as a geometric series 1+1/8+1/64... = 1/(1-1/8) = 1.14 kg CO2.  So this is the total we get out of a single kg of CO2. 

This means we, in total, will burn 571 g petroleum, which results in 214 g polluted water. 

4 hours ago, psusi said:

Or to look at it another way, running a petrol gen takes 2kg of petrol and puts out 500g of CO2.  If you scrub the CO2 then pumping that 2kg of oil takes 600g of water.  If you recycle that CO2 into more petrol, then you only have to pump 1.75kg of oil at a cost of 525g of water.  So all of those slicksters are only saving you 75 g/s of water per petrol gen, or less than one dupe's budget.

I take it by pumping oil you mean extracting oil from an oil well.  This follows the same process above.  One oil well is worth 3333.33 g/s crude oil.  This can be converted 1:1 to petroleum, so 3333.33 g/s petroleum.  This is burned in to 833.33 g/s CO2.  When this is fed to slicksters, we end up with 416.67 g/s crude oil again.  This is once again a feedback loop that can be calculated as a geometric series.  Therefore, we calculate 3333.33*(1/(1-1/8) = 3809.52 g/s crude oil total or 3809.52 g/s petroleum. 

This results in 1428.57 g/s water, or a profit of 428.57 g/s. 

Without the slicksters, this is only 1250 g/s water, or 250 g/s profit. That increase is the ability to provide enough oxygen to easily support a dupe per oil well. 

Plus, now we have limitless food and power as well.  And the slicksters take a constant amount of space, no matter how many of them I have.

4 hours ago, psusi said:

It's something, but is it worth it?  When water seems to be so plentiful these days?  Are you trying to sustain 150 dupes?

I would say it's worth it because it costs so little.  My framerates are unaffected as far as I could tell (due to my self sustaining 1 tile slickster pen) and I get free food, water, and power.  My dupes only eat barbecue.  And it costs nothing to sustain, though I do have a dedicated rancher dupe in feeder ranches to keep it growing.

The main effect of having so many critters is that it takes longer for the critters to decide what to do.

My goal is to always support more dupes (or at least be able to support more duplicants), because after the main goals, what else is there?  We can build all sorts of fantastic machines, but what is the point if what we have is already enough? 

[psusi]

47 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

The main effect of having so many critters is that it takes longer for the critters to decide what to do.

Yea, frame rate isn't the problem iirc, when things get bad, critters just stop functioning properly because the AI can't decide what to do before the next game tick.

[RonEmpire]

On 1/8/2020 at 8:34 AM, Lilscratchy said:

That's the problem, slicksters are the only alternative coming close to a proper use for CO2. If my ranch doesn't appear to be enough, I might still run with the converting it to dry ice idea. Or I might Make some expensive pets and use it to create longhair slicksters, that'd also help deal with some O2 over production from my SPOMS. 

Though not entirely serious, your input is definitely something I might have a use for. So thanks a lot anyway! 

If you have over production of o2. Don't use long hair    use   dense puffs and prince pufts. They will make you oxylite 

[psusi]

1 hour ago, RonEmpire said:

If you have over production of o2. Don't use long hair    use   dense puffs and prince pufts. They will make you oxylite 

And then what do you do with that?  It's only use is turning back into oxygen, which is what you were trying to get rid of.  Unless you still haven't gotten to the point of using LOX for rockets, in which case you're either already doing this or using the oxylite refinery and will be moving to LOX soon.

[DarkMaster13]

1 hour ago, psusi said:

And then what do you do with that?  It's only use is turning back into oxygen, which is what you were trying to get rid of.  Unless you still haven't gotten to the point of using LOX for rockets, in which case you're either already doing this or using the oxylite refinery and will be moving to LOX soon.

Oxilite can be stored far more efficiently than a gas, in fact as a chunk it can be stored infinitely.

[Ixenzo]

14 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Oxilite can be stored far more efficiently than a gas, in fact as a chunk it can be stored infinitely.

Any element in any form except natural solid tiles can be stored in a single tile of infinite mass.