Tiny little question about rocket automation

[Lilscratchy]

What's up guys, 

I'm hoping to invoke some of the Holy ONI intellects with this minor issue I've got. 

So as you can see in the image I attached, this is the way I setup my rocket automation (credit to Francis John) (EDIT: i forgot to mention this is a screenshot from one of francis john's Video's showing just the automation. For clarity im going to attach other pictures of my actual setup.

However I have turned my rocket silo's into sealed off steam chambers so that I can harvest any steam they give off upon launch and landing for power and regain some of the water spent for creating their fuel. 

A little problem I've come across is: good Ole meteors. Occasionally, as my rocket lands or launches, one or two meteors find their way down into my silo's leaving nasty pockets of carbon dioxide that block my turbines from recollecting the precious water. 

I tried connecting my separate automation wire hooked up to space scanners dedicated to detecting meteors to no avail. This either ends up messing with the door logic by keeping them open or closed (I'm not an automation star by any means, I am trying though) 

Is there a way to get silo doors to open upon rocket launch and landing (I'm good on this part) 

AND:

Keep silo doors closed when there is a meteor shower going on and either prevent a launch or prevent landing. 

Adittional question: Will blocking the silo entrance mean the rocket will just launch/land and smash the doors? Meaning that I'll have to figure out a way to launch my rockets in a way that makes sure they just depart and land when no meteor showers are going on? Is this even possible? 

 

 

 

 

Ive given up on this, my strategy has shifted to just constructing something that removes any CO2 getting trapped in the Silo's. I feel people may actually be interested in what im doing, So im going to share a little more here:

This is the layout of my silo's. its just a couple steam turbines mushed against them, nothing too complicated. The big chunks of insulated tiles which would normally provide me with the space i claim not to have has to do with conveyor rails. I could find no other way to keep some solids coming in from cooking off the rails and forming solid chunks of dirt and what not, other than letting them pass through insulated tiles that keep them away from as much of the heat in the silo's as possible.

 

Now my cooling means for the turbines are, as you can see some aquatuners through which supercoolant is circulated up and down, again nothing too  complicated or problematic, i set them to send a green signal when the super coolant goes above -16 to keep them just below the freezing temperature of the visco gel which provides duplicant access to the rockets.

 

Now, IDEALLY, i'd want my silo to look like this all the time (except that little ******* cloud of CO2 at the bottom of the middel silo in the screenshot, buts not blocking any steam turbines so it's nothing to worry about. Earlier on i was asking of ways to make it so that my rockets will launch and land outside of meteor showers and whatnot. To be honest i think this wasnt really feasible, judging by you guys' feedback. So i decided to just pump that stuff out. Which required me to halt any ongoing rocketry for a long time. But: I did it.

See the little slots where the steam turbines take in steam? yeah i just stuffed them with some gass element sensors and a gas pump, every single one of the 33 slots. (tedious i know). Everything made out of thermium, luckily i have a planet that has only niobium, isoresin and fullerene as solids availabe, so im getting tons of the stuff. done right?

 

well no, i dumped the CO2 into space, and put filters in place that basically send the steam back to the silo's. i did some playing around with pipe logic so that the steam would be divided over the silo's evenly, but to be fair its not really of any added value. So, turned out not even THERMIUM can withstand rocket launces right next to them. So that's new. 

well i have all this delicious and (relative to the inside of the Silo's) cool 99C water coming from the turbines, at its peak I'm sending about 6kg 's/s back directly past a heat exchanger for cooling, before it gets to my water tank. But as soon as rockets launch, im actaully recollecting more. Remember over time the amounts of water recovered gradually lessens as all the steam gets drained from the silo's. No exact numbers on this yet, it's also heavily dependant on how many times my rockets depart and land in a certain time frame, which is dependant on the destinations I make them visit. 

So by installing a liquid valve set to 1500g/s i can just reroute the rest back to the silo's for cooling. It instantly evaporates, gets sucked up and so on and so forth. This way im sort of actively cooling the really hot parts of my silo right next to the gas pumps that need cooling to remain below somehwere over 900C.

Here:s what i did:

Here's where the water is dumped:

 

As of now, this has done a fairly good job of keeping the pumps from overheating. However, this may change when my rockets go to nearer destinations, meaning more frequent launches and injections of huge amounts of heat.

This is still a work in progress, i remember someone asking for numbers on how much water i recover with it. besides from not being a numbers guy and just fiddling with it until it works, as of now it is an ever changing design. on top of that i feel like ive exelled in making it not as servicable as i'd like.

I'd love to hear any opinions, tips or whatever. Ill keep you guys updated on the performance of the gas pumps and such and whether or not its a viable long-term solution for if any of you guys want to try it.

 

[suxkar]

1 hour ago, Lilscratchy said:

Keep silo doors closed when there is a meteor shower going on and either prevent a launch or prevent landing. 

Adittional question: Will blocking the silo entrance mean the rocket will just launch/land and smash the doors? Meaning that I'll have to figure out a way to launch my rockets in a way that makes sure they just depart and land when no meteor showers are going on? Is this even possible? 

 

 

You can prevent launch by adding an and gate connected to your detection array, but you cannot prevent rocekts from landing. If memory serves me right, returning rockets will destroy solid tiles (leaving the corrisponding debris i believe) and break bunker doors (which can be repaired, which takes forever).
Rockets, on the other hand, will not take off if they detect solid tiles/doors in their wake.

Personally, I suggest an open silo, just let the meteor rain inside and dig if necessary. No doors/automation/detection required

[Edoc_]

3 hours ago, Lilscratchy said:

so that I can harvest any steam they give off upon launch and landing for power and regain some of the water spent for creating their fuel. 

It won't give you power but you could put some radiant pipes above the landing site with liquid cold enough to get the water condense.

I'm curious tho how much water are you able to harvest for each launch / arrival ?

[Gurgel]

I have completely given up on this. Rocket automation just does not work right. Just build a meteor-proof silo and let it stay open. 

[Lilscratchy]

I 

8 hours ago, Edoc_ said:

It won't give you power but you could put some radiant pipes above the landing site with liquid cold enough to get the water condense.

I'm curious tho how much water are you able to harvest for each launch / arrival ?

Hmm that's a good question actually. Ive tamed 3 cool steam vents, a cool slush geyser and am running my power off of 25 natural Gass generators. So basically: I have acces to lots of water. 

Until more recently my main food source was from crops and I was actually constantly battling an impending water shortage. After an ungodly amount of time and effort installing this I actually managed to almost break even on water. 

I was sustaining 25 dupes on bristle berries. Had a pincha pepper farm with four floors of 8 plants. And ran a huge partially wild/ partially domesticated arbor tree farm with 14 domesticated trees which all guzzle water. On top of that I am running two petroleum boilers that almost constantly churn out petroleum, which also costs water. So in times of huge water demand it did save me quite a bit of water, and significantly slowed down the decreasing of my water supply. 

I could check out some numbers for you sometime, although im not home at the moment. 

4 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I have completely given up on this. Rocket automation just does not work right. Just build a meteor-proof silo and let it stay open. 

I would but the water I can recover has a ton of value. If it's undo able I might have to find a way to stick gas pumps in there without them melting even when made of thermium

10 hours ago, suxkar said:

You can prevent launch by adding an and gate connected to your detection array, but you cannot prevent rocekts from landing. If memory serves me right, returning rockets will destroy solid tiles (leaving the corrisponding debris i believe) and break bunker doors (which can be repaired, which takes forever).
Rockets, on the other hand, will not take off if they detect solid tiles/doors in their wake.

Personally, I suggest an open silo, just let the meteor rain inside and dig if necessary. No doors/automation/detection required

I guess I,'m going to have to resort to gas pumps then, or allow the carbon dioxide to sink to the bottom for disposal. I just wish there was an easy and less finicky way of ridding myself of the problem, this whole thing will probably require me to rip out my rockets before I can enter the Silo's. They were made to never require servicing, which would be neat... If everything works perfectly. However the Co2 from meteors is the last nagging issue I'll be forced to deal with

 

[mathmanican]

Bypass pumps might be the key. Build them a tad higher up so the temp is not as hot. They can work fine with 2 gasses. The cost is 10mg per sec of any liquid, basically nothing.

Once the gasses are sucked from the chamber you can then manage them. You can build a natural filter with tile placement (such as a co2 lock and hydrogen/steam lock) and ignore thermium pumps. Dispose of the co2 if you dont want it or feed it to slicksters.

[Lilscratchy]

14 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Bypass pumps might be the key. Build them a tad higher up so the temp is not as hot. They can work fine with 2 gasses. The cost is 10mg per sec of any liquid, basically nothing.

Once the gasses are sucked from the chamber you can then manage them. You can build a natural filter with tile placement (such as a co2 lock and hydrogen/steam lock) and ignore thermium pumps. Dispose of the co2 if you dont want it or feed it to slicksters.

This is something really neat and handy! I could try implementing it. But isn't it kind of exploit(ish)? Also due to space constraints in my silo's I couldn't place anything like this at the bottom, which once again is an issue as this involves using liquids. 

I don't think super coolant even could survive in temperatures above 400 degrees so... Big yikes. 

FRUSTRATING

[mathmanican]

37 minutes ago, Lilscratchy said:

But isn't it kind of exploit(ish)?

Depends on whether or not you play using ONI's actual physics engine, or want to pretend and force yourself to play the game following whatever you believe actual physics is (you can't play the game with actual physics, as there is no ideal gas law for one). Your choice. Play the game the way you want, and keep whatever rules you want to abide by. For me, I'll exploit the crap out of ONI's physics engine as much as I can. (Isn't that what we do in real life, exploit the crap out of the laws of nature to get them to do as much for us as we can.)  

38 minutes ago, Lilscratchy said:

due to space constraints

I assume you meant you would have to place it at the bottom (forgot "except" at the bottom). If you want it at the top, then I see plenty of places to put it along the sides of your silo.  In all cases, you'll need a large cooling buffer (next section).

54 minutes ago, Lilscratchy said:

temperatures above 400 degrees

You can use a liquid/solid buffer under the rockets (or along the sides of your silo) to absorb the huge amounts of heat. The rockets put out a constant DTU, and you can soak this up to keep temps low enough to enable the bypass pump. What I'm envisioning is a diamond/steel tile room full of >= 1000kg/tile steam to soak up the heat, directly under your rocket or along the side walls. The bypass pump can be placed next to, or under, the buffer room, so that hot gasses have to pass by this buffer (and cool down) to get to the bypass. You can easily handle the temps with petroleum. Steam turbines can keep the entire buffer room under 200C with ease, if you don't want to add extra power and have aquatuners actively cool this room. 

There are tons of options. If the bypass is too exploity for ya, then freeze everything to solid, steam and CO2. Power is not really an issue (if it is, then build a Crude->NG boiler). Then build a buffer at the top of each silo, lined with steel and filled with anything that you actively try to keep near 0K (or whatever keeps the buffer from solidifying or breaking walls - go with super cold 40000kg/tile hydrogen gas if you want). Freeze everything that tries to leave the silo using these buffers. If any gas tries to escape the top of the the room, it will insta-freeze. Use tempshift plates and doors to extend the reach of the cooling zone so NOTHING makes it out of your chamber. No bypass used here.  If you don't like high pressure gasses, then don't use 40000kg/tile. Adjust these ideas to fit your gameplay style. 

@Zarquan ran an experiment once to see if he could capture ALL the gas coming from space, and he did it with ethanol (not super coolant). If you don't have a surplus of supercoolant, I'm sure you could use PW and keep the buffers full of hydrogen at around -10C (enough to liquefy any steam trying to leave). If you don't want the CO2, then just let it leave.  With this approach, you just need a liquid pump at the bottom of your silo to slurp up cool water, or a sweeper arm to move away the ice. No bypass needed. Just keep your entire silo as cold as possible, at all times.

I see that you have >=5 tiles of space between rockets, which means you can plop a steam turbine down between them, so you can enable even more aquatuner cooling of a super chilled buffer zone (between turbines). Using @Saturnus's trick for cooling steam turbines in a vacuum, you can put as many of these turbines as you need going up the walls of your silo.

I'm sure there are many more ways to do this.  I tend to enjoy using fluid mechanic solutions, rather than throwing power at it. There are lots of options. If/when you get one finished, please share.  I'm sure others would love to see what you've done as well as me. If you try several options, please share them all.  

 

 

 

[Edoc_]

On 5/28/2020 at 1:45 AM, Lilscratchy said:

I could check out some numbers for you sometime, although im not home at the moment. 

It was just a bit of curiosity knowing roughly how much you get back. But don't bother to make something complicated just to check this.

Thanks tho !

 

[Lilscratchy]

15 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Depends on whether or not you play using ONI's actual physics engine, or want to pretend and force yourself to play the game following whatever you believe actual physics is (you can't play the game with actual physics, as there is no ideal gas law for one). Your choice. Play the game the way you want, and keep whatever rules you want to abide by. For me, I'll exploit the crap out of ONI's physics engine as much as I can. (Isn't that what we do in real life, exploit the crap out of the laws of nature to get them to do as much for us as we can.)  

I assume you meant you would have to place it at the bottom (forgot "except" at the bottom). If you want it at the top, then I see plenty of places to put it along the sides of your silo.  In all cases, you'll need a large cooling buffer (next section).

You can use a liquid/solid buffer under the rockets (or along the sides of your silo) to absorb the huge amounts of heat. The rockets put out a constant DTU, and you can soak this up to keep temps low enough to enable the bypass pump. What I'm envisioning is a diamond/steel tile room full of >= 1000kg/tile steam to soak up the heat, directly under your rocket or along the side walls. The bypass pump can be placed next to, or under, the buffer room, so that hot gasses have to pass by this buffer (and cool down) to get to the bypass. You can easily handle the temps with petroleum. Steam turbines can keep the entire buffer room under 200C with ease, if you don't want to add extra power and have aquatuners actively cool this room. 

There are tons of options. If the bypass is too exploity for ya, then freeze everything to solid, steam and CO2. Power is not really an issue (if it is, then build a Crude->NG boiler). Then build a buffer at the top of each silo, lined with steel and filled with anything that you actively try to keep near 0K (or whatever keeps the buffer from solidifying or breaking walls - go with super cold 40000kg/tile hydrogen gas if you want). Freeze everything that tries to leave the silo using these buffers. If any gas tries to escape the top of the the room, it will insta-freeze. Use tempshift plates and doors to extend the reach of the cooling zone so NOTHING makes it out of your chamber. No bypass used here.  If you don't like high pressure gasses, then don't use 40000kg/tile. Adjust these ideas to fit your gameplay style. 

@Zarquan ran an experiment once to see if he could capture ALL the gas coming from space, and he did it with ethanol (not super coolant). If you don't have a surplus of supercoolant, I'm sure you could use PW and keep the buffers full of hydrogen at around -10C (enough to liquefy any steam trying to leave). If you don't want the CO2, then just let it leave.  With this approach, you just need a liquid pump at the bottom of your silo to slurp up cool water, or a sweeper arm to move away the ice. No bypass needed. Just keep your entire silo as cold as possible, at all times.

I see that you have >=5 tiles of space between rockets, which means you can plop a steam turbine down between them, so you can enable even more aquatuner cooling of a super chilled buffer zone (between turbines). Using @Saturnus's trick for cooling steam turbines in a vacuum, you can put as many of these turbines as you need going up the walls of your silo.

I'm sure there are many more ways to do this.  I tend to enjoy using fluid mechanic solutions, rather than throwing power at it. There are lots of options. If/when you get one finished, please share.  I'm sure others would love to see what you've done as well as me. If you try several options, please share them all.  

 

 

 

I think I forgot to clarify that the screens hot included is only a showcase of the automation used. It's a screenshot from one of Francis John's video's. 

My bad, I'll edit the original question. See directly below the rockets, just outside of the heat cones of the exhausts I have infrastructure such as space scanners and my LOX and Lh2 production. 

Trying to fit anything in there would mean I'd have to relocate quite some things. However I found that rerouting some of the recovered water at 99 C and Dumping it back in next to gas the gas pumps is (so far) effective in keeping them from overheating. 

[Lilscratchy]

47 minutes ago, Edoc_ said:

It was just a bit of curiosity knowing roughly how much you get back. But don't bother to make something complicated just to check this.

Thanks tho !

 

I heavily edited the original question with a description of my setup. However, it's tough to figure out the numbers. 

See the amount of water recovered of course depends on how aggressively I cool it down to usable temperatures, as well as how much steam ends up in the silo's. 

This in turn depends on the frequency at which my rockets depart and land. So it's variable. 

With my current cooling solution for the water I can, over 10 or 12 pipe segments, cool 6kg/'s of capture water down to roughly 20C. 

I could increase this number to 10kg/s (probably) , but I'm already maxing out my heavy Watt conductive wires at a little under 50KW/'s of power usage. 

[Edoc_]

Yeah i thought there would be too many variables to give an approximate answer. Don't worry I might test this soon and recover the water with a radiant pipe on the top of the silo to get liquid water and why not liquid co2 too. Maybe even coupling with a steam turbine absorbing the heat from the tiles the rockets stand on.

Also I should read the post linked in this thread about recovering the emissions of the rockets

on a side note I'm really surprised by the number of turbines. Are there many that are at full potential?

[Lilscratchy]

 

19 minutes ago, Edoc_ said:

Yeah i thought there would be too many variables to give an approximate answer. Don't worry I might test this soon and recover the water with a radiant pipe on the top of the silo to get liquid water and why not liquid co2 too. Maybe even coupling with a steam turbine absorbing the heat from the tiles the rockets stand on.

Also I should read the post linked in this thread about recovering the emissions of the rockets

on a side note I'm really surprised by the number of turbines. Are there many that are at full potential?

Ive found that the top two don't really run at that high a potential at all. 

However I initially started building this with the idea of say, two rockets departing and landing regularly. 

However it turned out that the planets I wanted to visit required one really large one, so I went with that. 

Usually the bottom 3 run at pretty high to full potential because that's where most of the steam ends up when a rocket takes off or lands, takes a while to distribute evenly over the entire silo. 

Maybe I went a little overkill on the turbines, I think 4 or maybe even 3 would've sufficed. Could've figured that out with some math. But I barely passed that in high school hahaha. 

On the flip side, my left most silo has only 3 turbines for two small rockets going back and forth between 10k destinations. That silo is the one where temperatures wreck my pumps the quickest and most often. So maybe 5 is a little much, but I think 3, depending on variables again, may be just short of enough

5 turbines might come in handy If I ever put a couple smaller rockets in the silo that go back and forth between 10k destinations, but that remains to be seen. 

I just remembered, I do also have an awful lot of unused potential cooling In the supercoolant keeping the turbines cold. 

If my solution so far doesn't work I might reroute some of that piping to the inside of the silo's and back. 

If so, I'll let everyone know!

[mathmanican]

You can insert a thermal buffer, kept around 130C or so, beneath this overheating pump. Just place it on the far left side of the vacuum space. Keeping 1000kg/tile of steam behind some steel walls on the top and and left side, will help rapidly cool the exhaust. 

What you are missing, next to each turbine, is something that you can actively cool for lots of cycles while waiting for the next launch. Something as small as 1 tile of high pressure steam, trapped behind walls, would do wonders at lowering the temperature of the new steam exhaust. Reinjecting 1/4 of the steam you are trying to capture will do a little to mitigate this, but that's only 500g/s per turbine, as opposed to a 1000kg buffer (so 2000 times more mass).  

[Lilscratchy]

On 5/29/2020 at 9:05 PM, mathmanican said:

You can insert a thermal buffer, kept around 130C or so, beneath this overheating pump. Just place it on the far left side of the vacuum space. Keeping 1000kg/tile of steam behind some steel walls on the top and and left side, will help rapidly cool the exhaust. 

What you are missing, next to each turbine, is something that you can actively cool for lots of cycles while waiting for the next launch. Something as small as 1 tile of high pressure steam, trapped behind walls, would do wonders at lowering the temperature of the new steam exhaust. Reinjecting 1/4 of the steam you are trying to capture will do a little to mitigate this, but that's only 500g/s per turbine, as opposed to a 1000kg buffer (so 2000 times more mass).  

That's a pretty good option actually. I've already got lots of cooling that can be done with the piping keeping the turbines themselves cooled, I can crank it up some and put some pipes behind the trapped steam and voila. 

Definitely a solution to keep in mind. I'm still kind of stresstesting my current solution. But I might just speed that up by letting all my rockets go back and forth between 10k destinations for a bit, and seeing how it holds out and if all fails I'll just put in the thermal buffer. 

[Tobruk]

On 5/27/2020 at 1:24 PM, Lilscratchy said:

prevent landing. 

You can't prevent landings rn. I was suggesting that the rocket orbits the asteroid until the meteor shower ends 2 years ago and nothing happened.

[Gurgel]

2 hours ago, Tobruk said:

You can't prevent landings rn. I was suggesting that the rocket orbits the asteroid until the meteor shower ends 2 years ago and nothing happened.

Rocket automation, as it is, is not really satisfactory. One option would be as you say. Another option would be that there is a "delay landing" signal you can give to a rocket (automation input e.g. at the command capsule) for the same and potentially other effects.

On the other hand just building a meteor-proof silo works reasonably well, so I can see why the Devs did not prioritize this.

Come to think of it, is there any material loss involved in having a rocket just break though bunker-doors or bunker-tiles? I think I am going to try that now, e.g. with a first pair of bunker doors that stay closed and get crushed on landing and a second pair that closes after the rocked lands. Requires manual repairs before launching the rocket again, but may automatize anything after the launch nicely and in a way that respects KISS (which is a big thing for me!)