I used the carbon to destroy the carbon

[JRup]

Hi!

In this merry edition of mass deletion we have 2 contenders. CO2 and Diamond!

Background story: I built (whipped up is more appropriate) a test condenser without space materials plus counterflow block for sour gas in the oil biome. (Abyssalite had indeed blessed me with over a ton of the stuff...)

After several hundred cycles I had a couple of cool ice blocks left over from the endeavour... So I then decided to pop the cork on the condenser and let the CO2 in. The shipping inside the condenser room is manual so no surprise there.

Then the devilish thought took root: "Let's ship CO2 ice through the exchange block too.". Needless to say the CO2 ice and the diamond annihilated each other.

The interesting part here is the sequence of events that I managed to observe:

If the CO2 on the basket did sublimate, then the tile it was on had its temperature instantly turn into  -273.2º C. No temperature exchange happened with adjacent tiles after that. The CO2 would be deleted as it had nowhere to go to.

If the tile had a second event of the kind, then it and the CO2 would be destroyed altogether. (The shipping basket was fine )

TL;DR: You ship liquefiables on your own peril.

Without further ado, some screenshots, click for larger pics as usual.

The condenser that could probably do 1 kg/s (sour gas ran out):

The exchanger with some tiles missing, note the discoloration on some other tiles that are not missing. These have frozen beyond imagination and are being punished.

And finally some tiles with some info for the morbidly curious.

 

Hope you enjoyed.

[kbn]

8 hours ago, JRup said:

If the CO2 on the basket did sublimate, then the tile it was on had its temperature instantly turn into  -273.2º C. No temperature exchange happened with adjacent tiles after that. The CO2 would be deleted as it had nowhere to go to.

I think that's the temperature of the vacuum (-273.2C).
If you click on that tile a few times and check it, you will see that the natural tile on the back side is not a diamond, but a vacuum.

This is the same as the empty tile that is created when you try to fill a room with a liquid or gas using the sandbox fill tool and you accidentally fill it against an artificial tile.

This empty tile displays the temperature of the gas or liquid behind it as it is, so if there is a vacuum behind it, the temperature of the vacuum (-273.2C) is displayed.

Mass deletion due to liquefaction is what it's causing, however I'm not sure of the detailed mechanism of whether it's going to be tile removal or empty tile.

[JRup]

1 hour ago, kbn said:

I'm not sure of the detailed mechanism of whether it's going to be tile removal or empty tile.

Only a vacuum was left. Not even CO2 was there after the event.

The diamond tiles that were "frozen" did recover a liveable temperature after reload (26.9ºC equally)

I definitely enjoyed seeing these things happen and adding to the list of "no-no's" that one experiences.

This partial playthrough will indeed be rolled back to prior my experiments with the condenser as nothing much besides it was done... So my dupes will treat it as waking up from a dream... (I do find sandbox mode somewhat boring because I'm still learning build sequences and get clever ideas in the process of having dupes execute builds. So save spamming it is - base is over 2500 cycles already anyhow.)

Here's something that came up in the process: I might as well redo the whole thing with a different configuration: Putting the condenser on the bottom and having the methane/natgas "bubble" upwards into an pool lined with airflow tile. Liquid CO2 will only be used to "prime" the heat exchanger, if at all... Plastic tile lining did prove effective vs only using insulated ceramic tile (Tile to tile heat interaction is negligible in this case.)

[OxCD]

Could it be linked ?

 

[JRup]

@OxCD: It very much so appears to be the issue. I guess sublimation might have something to do with this.

On a related sidenote: Based on observing my heat exchanger I can definitely assure you that the liquid methane that appears in that screenshot comes from the second solid methane basket that melted. It can be seen coming empty from the metal tile.

The chain of events happened like so for me:

Starter event: Matter in basket sublimated within a tile.

→ Tile became -273.2ºC & stops heat exchange & matter from basket disappeared at once leaving no matter inside of basket, just the animation of it on the rails is left.

→ Next basket came and destroyed this tile because it exchanged heat with other tile and sublimated as well (on account of conveyor heat exchange quirk where it exchanges temp with tile below). Both masses are destroyed leaving a vacuum behind.

 

IIRC: The order for the reappearance of matter that suddenly finds itself inside a tile starts from top middle tile (let's say north tile) and goes checking for space counterclockwise until it finds an exit. (seen here where the natural gas is in your report)

I believe we see a similar effect all the time when we deconstruct pipes, wires, rails when inside tiles. A "fun thing" that I've had happen to me while deconstructing a bridge to fill a loop inside a window tile is getting the debris stuck inside the window. This bit of rock dropped to the open door in the heat exchanger below on reload.

What I'm not sure about is if it only checks the four adjacent tiles (N→W→S→E) or if it will include the diagonals as well (N→NW→W→SW→S→SE→E→NE). This would mean 4 checks vs. 8. (Of course I could be wrong on some detail like direction, but the pattern order for checking is definitely "circular". If so, let me know and I'll include an edit for this.)

By checking 4 directions, the metal tile should handle it perfectly if it melts and diamond tile next to it is at risk of some oddball event because NWSE are blocked and there is no exit for any matter that appears.

And by checking 8 points the natural gas that sublimates from the frozen methane would exit normally south from the metal tile and SW from the diamond tile next to it if the methane sublimates.

So, here's the rub: What would have happened if a simple horizontal line shaped heater had been used instead of using a vertical "inverted L" shaped heater?

Another quiet question would be if this also happens only with diamond.... (But I digress...)