Maximizing Regolith Production

[DangerTeddyBear]

Hi I'd like to maximize the amount of regolith being produced as much as possible. 

I used a setup like this to do a test for myself and ended up only getting an average of 57,5 kg/s. 

I was curious about if you could possibly let meteors turn the regolith into chunks and if it potentially didn't half the mass, but sadly it did.

I tried to see if there was a method of cheesing the whole regolith getting deleted by open doors and collection it that way it being in vain however. 

Why? I wanna run several regolith melters, due to reasons.

[nakomaru]

Yep, door crushers delete the tiles outright, so you need to dig to half the mass. It looks like you have 5 tiles worth of space, which I guess is just about enough to not delete regolith. (If you build the doors a little lower, you may avoid meteors landing out of map bounds.)

Basically, you're already doing just about all you can without melting the regolith tiles directly.

[ghkbrew]

You can't mine the regolith with doors, but you can use them to clear the debris. Regolith tiles will sit on top of vertical doors (even when they're open), but debris will fall in. So a single line of vertical doors can be used as a power-free door pump to move all the regolith debris to a single collection point.

3 hours ago, DangerTeddyBear said:

potentially didn't half the mass,

The only way to avoid that i think is to melt the regolith tiles directly. It would be would take a ton of heat input since you can't counterflow the regolith with the cooling igneous rock, but it seems like something we should try. For science.

[DangerTeddyBear]

27 minutes ago, ghkbrew said:

You can't mine the regolith with doors, but you can use them to clear the debris. Regolith tiles will sit on top of vertical doors (even when they're open), but debris will fall in. So a single line of vertical doors can be used as a power-free door pump to move all the regolith debris to a single collection point.

The only way to avoid that i think is to melt the regolith tiles directly. It would be would take a ton of heat input since you can't counterflow the regolith with the cooling igneous rock, but it seems like something we should try. For science.

Just some rough math but that would be 15.000 KDTU/s to just straight up melt it. (With some added due to the other ore and junk that gets mixed in.

That would be some 52 volcanoes worth of magma, (assuming their all outputing 1 kg/s on avg) But you definately have me veeeerrryyy curious about it now. Even if it would completely negate what I'm trying to do lol.

[nakomaru]

You will lose a lot of heat heating it up, but you also multiple your heat by 5x due to SHC difference. But uh... yeah that's a lot of heat.

It wouldn't be counterflow, but you could exchange a bit of heat by running igneous rock under rails prior to being buried.

Because of the SHC difference you can probably get to almost 5/6ths of the way to the input temperature of the rock.

[mathmanican]

Left to right counterflow heat exchangers can amplify heat differences. The phase change bug can also amplify. If we only need to provide 1/6 of the heat then I bet we can drop that to 1/50th by combining stuff. This sounds fun.

[ghkbrew]

2 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

can't counterflow the regolith with the cooling igneous rock,

On second thought, regolith falls...  regolith tiles moves down by opening doors, debris moves up on rails = counterflow heat exchanger!

[DangerTeddyBear]

10 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Left to right counterflow heat exchangers can amplify heat differences. The phase change bug can also amplify. If we only need to provide 1/6 of the heat then I bet we can drop that to 1/50th by combining stuff. This sounds fun.

Since You'd still need to have some space scanners was I thinking that you might as well make a regolith melter or two and use the output from them to heat up the regolith. 

And once you have it up and running could you just dump all the old magma the regolith formed into back out on the regolith, perhaps along with some much hotter magma from a volcano. And finish it of with a metal refinery if that's neccesary, I think I'll attempt this without any exploits just to avoid having to redo it next patch some other way.