Voyager rocket mini-colony ver 0.4

[darknotezero]

So after my first attempt in game to build a mini colony inside of a rocket interior, I decided to try again with the goal of self-sustainabiiity in sandbox. For this, I gave myself a couple of self-imposed limitations:

1. No pokeshells. The game i want to build this in for realz has no pokeshells on any of the three planetoids i've explored, and I don't know that I've seen them as care package options (which could be a byproduct of the game coming from the earliest EA release).
2. No use of space materials. Hitting the outer planetoids to try to tame a niobium volcano is not on my priority list.

Both of those restrictions meant that I couldn't reliably reproduce a filtration medium for PW to W conversion (AFAIK), so I decided to experiment with an alternate means.

This is still far from perfect. I did some major shifts in my design 3/4 of the way through, so the space is no longer optimized. I also need to test the longevity of the O2 piece of this because right now i'm losing too much water. More on that below.

Welcome to my Voyager mini colony build:

some key mechanics:

1. Electrolyzer

I decided to go with the electrolyzer because of the high O2 output and the benefits of hydrogen. To conserve on water loss, electrolyzer turns off when pressure reaches a particular threshold. My initial automation was tied to how full the water storage container was, but that wasn't working well at least to start.

Hydrogen gets captured in the gas pump and goes through a base-wide loop which includes the petroleum ice box in the lower left corner for cooling purposes. (Ignore the door and diamond tiles next to it, that's leftovers of old design.) The loop has a divergence to the Hydrogen Generator which provides backup power at night or if there's too much power draw at once.

Pipe overlay:

Spoiler

2. PW to W conversion

PW from the lavatories and sinks get sent to the lower left hand corner of the base. If PW is detected, it turns on the Aquatuner which heats the room until the PW evaporates into steam. Steam travels through the airflow tiles to the upper chamber. If steam is detected for a long enough time, it routes petroleum in the Aqautuner liquid pipes (which is super cold because of the AT) into that chamber to convert the steam to water instantly. That water then gets piped back into the system.

3. Eliminating CO2

This is very similar to my ver 0 build, but condensed and tweaked a bit. When enough CO2 fills the bottom floor of the chamber, it closes the ceiling doors and then opens the floor doors to vent the CO2 into vacuum.

4. Odds and Ends

Telescopes: Thanks to @Hodhandr for forwarding what was discovered in Brothgar's discord in this thread, I built two telescopes that could fall in range of LOS of open space.

Food: When Pacus get turned into filet, I store it in vacuum around the liquid airlocks. The final version of this design is going to change to eliminate the conveyor portion and instead just put a fridge in the vacuum. I'm dumb for not doing that from the outset.

Rec Room: Burt isn't feeling the jukebot love at the moment, but if he were, it'd be a fun little disco, triggered by dupe sensor. 

---

Challenges and future design plans:

Even when the PW to W chamber reaches hot enough temp to not have to run nearly as often to evaporate the PW, the power draw can cause some brownouts, particularly if the jukebot happens to be running at the same time. I may set some automation to turn the jukebot off if the AT is running.

Although PW to W is ultimately W positive, that I need to use W to run the electrolyzer makes it not so. My initial thought was that when the atmosphere gets oxygen rich enough then the electrolyzer will have to run so infrequently that it would stop the loss of water enough to no longer be negative overall. Theoretically I think this is possible since 4 dupes breathe O2 at a rate less than what is output of the electrolyzer, but i haven't done the math yet on how much net W i'm getting from PW/W conversion and how that translates to any loss in the electrolyzer. It's possible that I may need to force the dupes to use the lavatories more often than default and/or maybe add some showers or something just to get more PW production. Or add more dupes. But i need to test this over a long period of cycles and see what happens and hopefully tweak this in a way that will make it sustainable.

I also don't know if there's any loss of volume of the PW when it goes through the conversion process that could cause a net negative even if i wasn't using that water for other purposes.

 

Commentary/criticisms are very welcome.

[ghkbrew]

21 minutes ago, darknotezero said:

Even when the PW to W chamber reaches hot enough temp to not have to run nearly as often to evaporate the PW, the power draw can cause some brownouts,

If you have room you can greatly decrease the energy cost of pwater -> water conversion with a counterflow heat exchanger.  Use hot water to pre-heat incoming pwater, cooling the pwater in the process.  In theory a perfect exchanger would allow conversion of pwater to water with ~0 heat input. It will also decrease the amount of energy you spend on cooling the water afterwards.

or if you want to shoehorn a steam turbine in there it will recover ~50% of the power used to heat pwater with an aquatuner.  I think if insulate the pipes sufficiently (ceramic) you can run your toilets/sinks on 95C water without issue.

24 minutes ago, darknotezero said:

Although PW to W is ultimately W positive, that I need to use W to run the electrolyzer makes it not so. My initial thought was that when the atmosphere gets oxygen rich enough then the electrolyzer will have to run so infrequently that it would stop the loss of water enough to no longer be negative overall. Theoretically I think this is possible since 4 dupes breathe O2 at a rate less than what is output of the electrolyzer, but i haven't done the math yet on how much net W i'm getting from PW/W conversion and how that translates to any loss in the electrolyzer. It's possible that I may need to force the dupes to use the lavatories more often than default and/or maybe add some showers or something just to get more PW production. Or add more dupes. But i need to test this over a long period of cycles and see what happens and hopefully tweak this in a way that will make it sustainable.

I also don't know if there's any loss of volume of the PW when it goes through the conversion process that could cause a net negative even if i wasn't using that water for other purposes.

Dupes create an excess of ~6kg of pwater each time they use the lavatory.  Sinks and showers have equal inputs and outputs, so aren't much help here.  Dupes breath 60kg of oxygen each cycle, which takes 67.57kg of water using an electrolyzer.  They're not going to be water positive unless make them hold their breath and gasp all the time.

The most compact ways to make oxygen are probably morbs or wild arbor trees (wood -> ethanol + pdirt -> ...)

[darknotezero]

10 minutes ago, ghkbrew said:

If you have room you can greatly decrease the energy cost of pwater -> water conversion with a counterflow heat exchanger.  Use hot water to pre-heat incoming pwater, cooling the pwater in the process.  In theory a perfect exchanger would allow conversion of pwater to water with ~0 heat input. It will also decrease the amount of energy you spend on cooling the water afterwards.

or if you want to shoehorn a steam turbine in there it will recover ~50% of the power used to heat pwater with an aquatuner.  I think if insulate the pipes sufficiently (ceramic) you can run your toilets/sinks on 95C water without issue.

i had a steam turbine in there originally but i took it out for some stupid reason. The redesign will definitely have space to address this, so i'll mess around with that and the heat exchanger as well.

3 minutes ago, ghkbrew said:

The most compact ways to make oxygen are probably morbs or wild arbor trees (wood -> ethanol + pdirt -> ...)

yeah, after my first attempt at the build in which i deliberately ignored the reddit post you referenced earlier because i wanted to discover some stuff on my own, i went back and looked at that post and also your other post with your versions/attempts. the bottom row of nat tiles in this build was filled with arbor trees because i was going to go with that route, but then I decided to try the electrolyzer instead specifically because I wanted the hydrogen production for cooling and backup power. If ultimately this isn't water positive, i guess i can abandon this experiment early and veer back towards that arbor tree solution and find a different way to cool the interior, maybe reverting back to the original reason i created that diamond/steel door thing attached to the ice box in the first place.

 

[ghkbrew]

2 hours ago, darknotezero said:

2 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

 

yeah, after my first attempt at the build in which i deliberately ignored the reddit post you referenced earlier because i wanted to discover some stuff on my own, i went back and looked at that post and also your other post with your versions/attempts. the bottom row of nat tiles in this build was filled with arbor trees because i was going to go with that route, but then I decided to try the electrolyzer instead specifically because I wanted the hydrogen production for cooling and backup power. If ultimately this isn't water positive, i guess i can abandon this experiment early and veer back towards that arbor tree solution and find a different way to cool the interior, maybe reverting back to the original reason i created that diamond/steel door thing attached to the ice box in the first place.

Please don't let me discourage you from exploration.  I'm really enjoying these posts.  I'm just don't want you to waste time on impossible designs.

I think the limiting factor here is finding something that will create enough of mass per cycle to turn into 60kg (100g/s) of oxygen.  Without geysers, there aren't to many candidates for that much mass creation. Dupes create about 10g/s of pee, but you can't scale that.  Morbs create 10-15g/s each.  A wild arbor tree creates 139g/s.  Most plants and critters delete mass when domesticated.  The most productive wild plants (excluding trees) produce 1kg/4 cycles  = 0.41g/s.  Dreckos and pips both create a decent amount of mass.  Pips create 33.3g/s dirt, but that's not really convertable to O2.  Glossy Dreckos create 83.3g/s of plastic which can be converted into water/O2 by way of a sour gas boiler if you have the room (this is one option I haven't played with before).

My one suggestion for cooling is to dump it into something you're about to delete anyway.  The obvious one here is hydrogen.  You're already doing it, but you can heat it up to 325C with a steel AT and get a lot more heat deletion.  CO2 could also be used to delete heat.

[Sebastiangperez]

Sorry, but are you using the debug mode or sambox to do that ? 

[darknotezero]

1 hour ago, Sebastiangperez said:

Sorry, but are you using the debug mode or sambox to do that ? 

it was mostly sandbox and occasionally debug if i'm understanding your question correctly.

[hanshan]

I am probably just confused, but how does this relate to building a base inside a rocket?

As far as i understand there are only two rocket interiors so far, the small solo-one and the bigger one for multiple dudes. But even the latter is just 10x8 tiles big, which is a lot smaller than the base shown here.

Can you somehow expand the rocket interior with better research (I just started with the dlc)?

 

 

[darknotezero]

8 hours ago, hanshan said:

I am probably just confused, but how does this relate to building a base inside a rocket?

 In my original build here: 

I built that in an active game itself, not in sandbox or debug.

This is because of a current DLC bug/exploit - while you cannot deconstruct the wall tiles inside of a rocket interior directly, you can "replace build" those tiles with other tiles and then deconstruct those.