Harvesting Beeta Radiation

[ghkbrew]

Since Klei seems intent on nerfing my favorite radiation exploits, I've resorted to ranching Beetas:

How it works:

Beeta hives produce 1 beetiny at the start of every cycle.  Beetinies live for 2 cycles then transform into Beetas, then die at the end of their 5th cycle of life.  This means a hive will have 2 beetinies and 3 beetas alive at any given time. 

It turns out that the little critters are actually quite radioactive. 

Beetinies produce 48 rads in the tile they occupy and beetas produce 288 rads. This works out to 960 rads per active beeta hive.  With 16 hives you get just over 15k rads/cycle needed to keep a radbolt generator firing 50 radbolts at it's max firing rate.

 

The hard part of this is actually delivering all the beetas to a single tile.  I'm using doors on a timer, because beetas are apparently ghosts (they aren't detected by critter sensors or weight plates). The beetinies get dropped into 100g of crude oil covered by 100g of petroleum.  They then path over to the single vacuum tile on top of the radbolt generator to avoid drowning.

Spoiler

Does anyone have a better way of collecting beetas?

[blueberry pi]

do the hives starve after a while?

[ghkbrew]

40 minutes ago, blueberry pi said:

do the hives starve after a while?

I think they just live forever unless they die from temperature or drowning. Even so, since each beetiny can turn into a hive under the right conditions, you can replace hives very quickly if they do die. (Or expand a single beetiny into a massive radiation farm).

[Coolthulhu]

12 hours ago, blueberry pi said:

do the hives starve after a while?

They do starve.

In my builds, I have multiple hives connected by open pneumatic doors to let them reseed each other when one dies.