Space liquid disappearance

[Barleyman]

I got into space and like everyone else, found out the heat does not radiate. After a few ideas that didn't work, I did resort to google. Seems like one common solution is (or was) draining a bit of water on top of the drills and the other regolith cleaning equipment, which will allow heat trasfer to happen as if by magic.

Ok, so far so good but this is not really working for me. I did build airflow tiles below the drills with caps at endpoints to stop sloshing over sides. I put drywalls behind that to stop the liquid from disappearing "behind" the construction. I did pre-clean regolith to make sure liquid doesn't suddently evaporate on touch.

What happens is that my vent (also backed by a drywall) does deposit water as expected, but instead of getting a layer of water on the airflow tiles, almost all of it disappears in these tiny droplets apparently falling from the airflow tiles, like a light rain. There's a tiny amount of water sticking to the flow tiles (like 20g tiny) but it's not visible but you can see it if you click on the spot above airflow tile. The rain appears to cover the entire breath of the airflow platform instantly, not like liquid spills over time normally.

Sometimes I see this rain indoors in the lobby I've sealed from vacuum and partially pressurised to stop transformers from overheating.

What gives? Was something changed so you can't do this anymore? But that'd leave you with no way to cool the drills at all except constantly venting gas on top of them?

[Steve8]

The liquid is just there to have something to conduct. And a tiny, bare visible amount is enough for that. It won't cool anything by itself though. You still need a cooling loop through all that.

[Barleyman]

8 minutes ago, Steve8 said:

The liquid is just there to have something to conduct. And a tiny, bare visible amount is enough for that. It won't cool anything by itself though. You still need a cooling loop through all that.

Yes, but where does the water disappear? If the water vent puts out 5kg/sec of water, it should rapidly build up. Instead 99.x% turns into "rain" and I get that iggy bitty bit left over. Backed by a drywall.

What's the mechanism here??

It was pointed out to me that I'd probably want petroleum not water so falling regolith won't immediately evaporate it but that's a different story.

 

[sakura_sk]

A blob of water is ~30g. Even if you put 1000kg of water in that tile, if it spills , what will remain is that 30g. (I say 30 by observations. I don't know if it is documented somewhere in ONI database /wiki or if viscosity/horizontal flow has something to do with it)

[Barleyman]

1 hour ago, sakura_sk said:

A blob of water is ~30g. Even if you put 1000kg of water in that tile, if it spills , what will remain is that 30g. (I say 30 by observations. I don't know if it is documented somewhere in ONI database /wiki or if viscosity/horizontal flow has something to do with it)

So, where does it spill? Note that in the screenshot there's a fresh pile of regolith that would immediately vaporize small amounts of water but I did my initial tests with the rubble cleared and robominers at ~ 67 degrees. There's no steam graphic, instead that rain graphic.

 

[sakura_sk]

15 minutes ago, Barleyman said:

So, where does it spill?

Ok... No spill then 

Your water could still turn to steam in many spots (and if it is in small amounts I don't think it would be very visible)

• The one end of the pipe leading to the liquid vent goes through regolith (I don't know the temperature but if it's "fresh" I would guess ~200C)
• The drywall could have enough heat to turn water to steam if there were any regolith touching it when steam was created
• The vent itself could have enough heat to evaporate small amounts of water

The "materials overlay" set to "gas" or "liquid" could make more clear what is happening. Either there is steam or water getting out of the vent.

 

I usually would seal the area first (bunker doors or bunker tiles), let every hot regolith drop down or sweep it in a spot and then build up any miners/liquid setup.

The first time I got to space in a playthrough, I just sealed the top of the map completely until I was ready to deal with the heat and meteor showers and then open parts little by little to see what woks and what doesn't

 

[Barleyman]

8 minutes ago, sakura_sk said:

Ok... No spill then 

Your water could still turn to steam in many spots (and if it is in small amounts I don't think it would be very visible)

• The one end of the pipe leading to the liquid vent goes through regolith (I don't know the temperature but if it's "fresh" I would guess ~200C)
• The drywall could have enough heat to turn water to steam if there were any regolith touching it when steam was created
• The vent itself could have enough heat to evaporate small amounts of water

The "materials overlay" set to "gas" or "liquid" could make more clear what is happening. Either there is steam or water getting out of the vent.

 

I usually would seal the area first (bunker doors or bunker tiles), let every hot regolith drop down or sweep it in a spot and then build up any miners/liquid setup.

The first time I got to space in a playthrough, I just sealed the top of the map completely until I was ready to deal with the heat and meteor showers and then open parts little by little to see what woks and what doesn't

 

There's a line of bunker doors on top which are hooked to the space scanners for just-in-time meteorite defense. I could of course just lock it for the time being as I've got plenty enough targets analyzed with the telescope to keep the rocket girl busy for a long time.

In any case, initially I tried this with zero regolith lying around.. If I spill water there now, it'll turn into a visible steam. I can't use auto sweeper as it'll immediately cook for obvious reasons.

There's that second line of airflow tiles above, which you can see that's built more sensibly but I've stalled due to lack of iron ore. All of the ore sources are way down below in oil biome and it's a fairly herculean task to get dupes to carry it all the way to the top into space, transit tubes or not. In general there's a lot of inefficiency due to partially organic growth (see turn #) and learning by doing. I could set up The Great Railway of Dupekind to balance critical resources between top/middle/bottom I guess.

[Barleyman]

Okay, so I completed the higher platform seen in the screenshot after adjusting it a bit with drills sitting 1 tile lower than the main platform. With that setup petrol does indeed build on the 1x2-tile holes with the drills as expected. I think there's some interaction with the water that makes it disappear in the rain as soon as it appears even although on the face of it it should be fine. Petroleum has a far higher temperature range for staying liquid, including not caring about regolith which comes in at around 200 degrees or so nowhere near the boiling point.

I could test the contraption with water to see if it still disappears in the smaller clean holes.

I built an aquatuner cooling loop which should keep the drills nice and cool, albeit I forgot to lock the steam chamber and of course a dupe runs in there to let water spill into the petroleum heat sink pool since a ceramic block fell in there.. It's always something.. I really do enjoy sorting liquid mixtures, especially with limited space available.

[Barleyman]

FWIW, with my upgraded platform housing the drills in 1x2 slots I didn't see the behaviour of 99% of water disappearing anymore. I tried this on debug mode and saw water accumulating as expected when I cut a water pipe on top of the slot. 

Go figure, perhaps there was some interaction with my long platform with end caps or something but the main thing is that it works as expected now. I also noted that I was building drills unnecessarily close to each other, you can have 5-6 tiles between them, depending on what you're trying to achieve. Not that much you need clear space access for a  bunch of panels in the base game for solar TBH, I'm struggling at the moment with natural gas accumulating on living areas, five NGGs are not quite enough to work their way through 2 geysers + 2 oil wells with the fuel pipeline.. I should have sealed the industrial region below habitable space when I made it suits only space.