Regolith melt direction quest.

[JRup]

The quest is finally over.

Thanks to @nakomaru for providing insights and advice. The siren call of that heat exchanger could not be resisted (it only took my rocket, silo, any and all scraps of steel fwiw). The best way I could improve the heat exchanger was using carpeted tile, the dupes enjoyed building it for all I know. I did keep the rail of igneous on the top layer and regolith on the bottom inside the heat exchanger.

The boiler is my own. Or at least I haven't seen one with magma in a tank plus a salt booster.

Many iterations of this build have passed and I can finally say that the space program can be resurrected. The pile of igneous debris is not bugged, it does change temperature (it actually goes down from the 1408.3ºC)

Does it feature the original ideas? Sort of:

The tower heat exchangers and the donuts were shelved... Apologies, @mathmanican

Freezing magma as a bead made me lose the 3ºC from phase change. Freezing it as a blade only sets us back 1.5ºC. You may guess what I chose. The blob of lead for the tall bead fall was abandoned.

It still has a drip, a very short one on the boiler that does exchange with incoming regolith. (And it actually melts it when that happens!)

It has a liquid reservoir filled with magma. The magma pool was scrapped in favor of 3800 kg of liquid copper as a stabilizer.

The freezing basket was transformed and pulled up to the magma blade's level. The automation bridge used for this purpose should be made of tungsten for best results; runner up is copper, unironically.

The refined carbon was relocated to be used in the melter's power supply, so it's no longer directly part of it, but its spirit lives on.

The salt booster also doubles as a fail-safe against busted pipes due to magma freezing. An out of fuel scenario is unlikely to happen, though, consumption is low enough to survive any minor volcano's dormancy.

I won't go much into analysis but this is an excerpt of the many spreadsheets that were made to gauge this combo in sandbox/debug with 300ºC regolith as input and 1190ºC igneous rock as final product using this boiler:

So, let's round down to 15 g/s 

Let's just watch it in survival for a bit:

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Prince Mandor]

On 6/10/2021 at 12:56 AM, JRup said:

The quest is finally over.

Can you, please, provide a savegame with final variant?

[JRup]

6 hours ago, Prince Mandor said:

Can you, please, provide a savegame with final variant?

It'll take a bit, I have a working version prior to this that didn't have the "compactified" copper pool. So I'm cropping the actual build and fixing it in debug...

[JRup]

11 hours ago, Prince Mandor said:

final variant

Here it is, I just finished getting it back in order and testing it. I did leave some parts unused as they're connected to other parts of the base. But it is complete, power supply and all.

I was tinkering with the idea of automating the melter so as to not have it working all of the time that way it's turned off when not needed. Finding the override switch to ship regolith and see the build in action should be easy as pie.

Fresh magma used to come from the vertical ceramic pipe on the left side but I've omitted that part of the base (not gonna build a minor volcano pump, again). I hope that an almost full reservoir of magma will do. I lost the template for a full reservoir a while ago. Making one in debug should be simple, though.

There should be enough regolith to play for a while.

Ok, that's that. Have fun!

Y&S Final (Survival built).sav