Real Airlock

[wachunga]

This isn't a new idea, but it's been awhile since the last discussion so I thought some people might find it interesting.

The basic idea is that atmo sensors make dupes wait at the checkpoints until the lock is vacuum. Double doors are to slow dupes down so they can't run through before the automation triggers. Pressure plates serve the same purpose since the atmo sensors can be too slow in responding. The checkpoints in vacuum need a bit of liquid to cool them since they make heat.

This works reasonably well, only takes a few seconds to vacuum the lock and allow dupes to continue on. A lot of traffic can lead to excessive cycling so my idea was to limit the number of suits per lock (suit checkpoint is on vacancy only). And if dupes are waiting on both sides of the lock, a few mg of gas can slip through when it opens.

Liquid locks are of course vastly superior and I think transit tubes as well, but it's a fun idea to play around with. And for all the people that want real airlocks, making your own is really no big deal. This could be made a bit smaller and less clunky if gas pumps had a larger sense and intake area. That would also alleviate some of the issues caused by slow gas diffusion in general.

 

Edit: Just noticed that the inner checkpoints on the top lock should be swapped around. There is a rare condition where a dupe inside the lock going to the oxygen side opens the inner door at the same time as a dupe on the oxygen side opens the outer door. This allows the oxygen side dupe to out run the automation. Swapping the checkpoints to what the bottom lock has should make this rare condition a bit rarer.

 

Airlock.sav

 

 

 

[Yaswanth]

Extremely Overengineered. 

I love this.

[Lifegrow]

5 hours ago, Yaswanth said:

Extremely Overengineered. 

Not really to be honest, @wachunga has pretty much simplified this as much as possible  

If you want over engineered, you should try purging with liquid - now theres a pointless, albeit pretty exercise in over engineering  

Here's an ancient example that I tinkered with (but never bothered to finish!) when automation first got added, haven't returned to it since... (christ, it was 2 and a half years ago...)

 

 

[0xFADE]

The symmetry is real clean.  I wonder how long of an airlock you would need to just not care about it.  You would have enough pumps to suck it all back out before it makes it to the other side.

At that point you may as well just use a lot of tubes.

[TheMule]

Have you tried regular pumps instead? If you place them right behind the double doors, they should create a local vacuum much sooner than the whole room is cleared, but that's more than enough as it creates a air lock of sort.

[mathmanican]

1 minute ago, TheMule said:

regular pumps instead?

Regular pumps force you to wait for gas to diffuse to mcg levels. Small pumps give you direct coverage of tiles. 

[wachunga]

To explain what @mathmanican is saying for anyone new to the concept.

Small pumps are used because they have the same sense and intake areas that big pumps have. Each of the checkpoint cells is directly absorbed by one of the horizontal pumps, the symmetry isn't just to look pretty but is also essential to quick pumping. Similarly, the atmo sensor cells are covered by the vertical pumps. I've tinkered with having a combination of big pumps for throughput and small pumps for coverage. The chamber became so large that there wasn't much benefit and it looked too derpy for me.

 

Just making a hallway filled with pumps is certainly an option. Perhaps even a better option! I like the RP element of dupes chatting with each other while they wait for the lock to cycle before going to or coming from their spacewalk (I watched some ISS spacewalks recently).

 

@LifegrowI had forgotten all about that. It puts me in the mind of an underwater base where dupes have to purge the lock of water like something from The Abyss or Subnautica or Soma.

 

[TripleM999]

41 minutes ago, wachunga said:

It puts me in the mind of an underwater base

Wow... now i have to desire to make a whole underwater base... with divers... although i'm not sure... are magma divers a thing? 

[Lifegrow]

5 hours ago, wachunga said:

 

@LifegrowI had forgotten all about that. It puts me in the mind of an underwater base where dupes have to purge the lock of water like something from The Abyss or Subnautica or Soma.

My thoughts exactly - like waiting for pressure balances etc. Might be an idea worth revisiting, the logic is far better nowadays - as are the liquid mechanics I guess.

5 hours ago, wachunga said:

I like the RP element of dupes chatting with each other while they wait for the lock to cycle

I couldn't agree more, once you've built these things I find myself sitting back and chilling, admiring your work or whatever - seeing the dupes actually huddling together to use something is often the most charming part of the game  

4 hours ago, TripleM999 said:

Wow... now i have to desire to make a whole underwater base... with divers... although i'm not sure... are magma divers a thing? 

Get to it! One thing I know about dupes - they LOVE magma, especially when they're forced to unexpectedly breathe it...

[TheMule]

6 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Regular pumps force you to wait for gas to diffuse to mcg levels. Small pumps give you direct coverage of tiles. 

My point was not to wait for those mcg. As long they are in the middle of the room, they can't escape past the pumps.

[mathmanican]

1 minute ago, TheMule said:

My point was not to wait for those mcg. As long they are in the middle of the room, they can't escape past the pumps.

Once a single blob of gas makes it past the pump, then any large pump you build will always have a tile over it that it cannot draw from directly (and hence you have to wait for diffusion to reach vacuum).  If any single one of the mini pumps in the design above get swapped to large pumps, then there will be tiles in the room that are not directly under the pump input tiles.  And all it takes is one tiny blob of gas to get past the pump to then force the game to spent massive amounts of power while waiting for gas diffusion (10% of mass per 0.2s) to reach vacuum. 

The goal is to make sure no tile at all in the room is not directly under a pumps range.  A different design might be able to do this, but you'll still need mini pumps to fill in the gaps left by large pumps. I assume you'll be tinkering with this some, and I look forward to seeing a great design. 

By the way, thanks for helping to propagate the temp-swap stuff all over the other forums. I love reading posts and seeing that you've already been helping to spread the word. Cheers. 

[TheMule]

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

Once a single blob of gas makes it past the pump, then any large pump you build will always have a tile over it that it cannot draw from directly (and hence you have to wait for diffusion to reach vacuum).  If any single one of the mini pumps in the design above get swapped to large pumps, then there will be tiles in the room that are not directly under the pump input tiles.  And all it takes is one tiny blob of gas to get past the pump to then force the game to spent massive amounts of power while waiting for gas diffusion (10% of mass per 0.2s) to reach vacuum. 

The goal is to make sure no tile at all in the room is not directly under a pumps range.  A different design might be able to do this, but you'll still need mini pumps to fill in the gaps left by large pumps. I assume you'll be tinkering with this some, and I look forward to seeing a great design. 

Ah ok, it's a power problem. Yes there's that. I tend to build a boiler quite soon and with 5 gens running continuosly, I tend to forget about 240W.

 

What I had in mind, in this specific application, you can see in the attached savefile... it works because there's vacuum on one side and oxygen in the other... so we don't need to reach vacuum on the right side at all. Just run the game with the material layer on (only gasses), and see what I mean. And yes the pump runs almost continuosly. Not the 4 pumps above run much less. And it's 240W too... But dup transit is actually faster most of the cases in my build.

Here's an example of what happens when the original design fails. Now, it there's space on the left side, a few mcg of oxygen escaping isn't bad, if there's a room... well, still not a huge problem I guess, possibly if the room is big enough they'll be deleted eventually. But vacuum is broken, maybe for a while.

 

My design fails, too, BTW, when two dups enter the room from left and right almost at the same time and the doors don't close fast enough... it's a small window it may take a while to observe it, but it happens.

Airlock2.sav

3 minutes ago, TheMule said:

By the way, thanks for helping to propagate the temp-swap stuff all over the other forums. I love reading posts and seeing that you've already been helping to spread the word. Cheers. 

I should thank you, you and the other guys here do all the hard work.

[wachunga]

One idea I had but didn't implement is directional locks. Each set of suits could have two locks, one for leaving and one for returning. That ought to eliminate leakage when dupes are travelling through the lock in opposite directions. You need more locks but each lock is a bit simpler with checkpoints for only one direction, so maybe it's a worthwhile trade.

I suppose it comes down to what your particular aesthetic prefers. I don't care about the occasional small leakage for example and didn't want to have a tall tower of locks. But maybe there is a nice design waiting to be found.

[Lifegrow]

Oh thats what I thought you'd done here - my brain saw two of the builds stacked and didn't bother to note the directional arrows. I think that'd probably work better for logistical reasons if nothing else.

9 hours ago, wachunga said:

But maybe there is a *huge impractical monstrosity* of a design waiting to be found.

I did what I think is a fair edit bud  

[0xFADE]

I imagine you could improve the efficiency even more by having the area with the suits be another sort of passive airlock that is kept at a low pressure.

[KittenIsAGeek]

16 hours ago, TheMule said:

My design fails, too, BTW, when two dups enter the room from left and right almost at the same time and the doors don't close fast enough... it's a small window it may take a while to observe it, but it happens.

You could build two systems, one atop the other, each allowing dupe travel in only one direction.  Dupes go in one lock, go out the other.

Problem solved.

Er, yeah, what @wachungasaid.

[TheMule]

6 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

You could build two systems, one atop the other, each allowing dupe travel in only one direction.  Dupes go in one lock, go out the other.

Problem solved.

Er, yeah, what @wachungasaid.

Definitely it would make things better. Another improvement is to have a second room with a pump keeping low pressure. 

[wachunga]

I did a directional lock system for the hell of it. In terms of gas leakage, it is very robust. I think there may still be an extremely rare condition that would allow for gas slipping by but I haven't seen it. Didn't implement a low pressure vestibule to the locks but I agree that is a potentially good idea. I also used door controls to split up dupes per lock to help even out the usage. Put in some motion sensors to further eliminate some gas leakage scenarios as well.

It's gotten a bit away from the simple aesthetic of the original design, but directional locks are certainly a viable option. 

Airlock3.sav

[Lifegrow]

[Eonshikeno]

You could brute force this by making a single hallway that's nothing but mini-pumps.  Would need prolly 15-20 per side, but no doors or anything else needed.

[degr]

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