Liquid Palantiri

[hydrotoast]

In sandbox, I discovered an amusing behavior of falling liquids above or below their critical points (freezing, vaporization) while in a vacuum. If the liquid happens to fall into a unit column (1-tile wide cup), the liquid will magically hover just above the opening with vacuum on all sides, avoiding a phase change!  Recall that a phase change requires a thermal interaction to trigger the phase change. See the amusing examples below.

Example 1. Liquid magma at 0 C (below its freezing point).

Example 2. Liquid p-water at 200 C (above its vaporization point). Although I could not upload the full gif due to file size constraints, the sublimation of polluted-oxygen will trigger a steam explosion and the formation of dirt debris.

Due to their shape as an orb and their capacity to foresee and avoid its own phase change, I have elected to call these liquid palantiri. For the structure below, I call it a cup.

Properties. I have explored some properties of palantiri with some members on the Discord already including @sakura_sk and Ishamoridin (if I can find your tag). Some interesting behaviors include:

• if the cup is widened, the palantiri will fall to the ground and phase change normally;
• if the cup is deepened, the palantiri will hover just above the opening;
• if the game is saved/loaded, the palantiri will load as phase changed (e.g. the frozen magma loads as an igneous tile).

Enjoy!

[sakura_sk]

8 hours ago, hydrotoast said:

if the cup is widened, the palantiri will fall to the ground and phase change normally

Unless the tiles are airflow tiles. 

It's not a palantiri anymore though... More like a hovering totally unstable puddle 

 

[kbn]

On 8/31/2021 at 4:52 PM, hydrotoast said:

Enjoy!

By reducing the mass of the hovering liquid, it can be made almost invisible.
I used to play with flying Pacu by placing this invisible liquid.

 

[sakura_sk]

Wow... Aerial water way and Sky fish. I never thought experimenting with that 

[Sasza22]

11 hours ago, kbn said:

By reducing the mass of the hovering liquid, it can be made almost invisible.

That`s super annoying if you happen to have airflow tiles in the base and spill some water on them, for example some melted ice falls on them. It`s invisible and keeps causing soggy feet.

[hydrotoast]

On 9/3/2021 at 1:30 AM, kbn said:

By reducing the mass of the hovering liquid, it can be made almost invisible.
I used to play with flying Pacu by placing this invisible liquid.

 

These are very interesting results! Since we discovered this after mergedown, we were wondering whether the behavior was new or preexisting. Your post shows that this behavior has existed for a while.

For applying this mechanic to heating/cooling, I was exploring this because of how Petroleum Generators output polluted-water at the temperature of the building, which can be below the freezing point or above the vaporization point of polluted-water. Since the phase change does not occur until the output element thermally interacts with another object, I was looking into methods of thermally isolating all of the outputs of the Petroleum Generator such that the building never interacts with its hot output elements. I believe that your Aerial waterway design provides some new options to separate the hot CO2 and polluted-water, e.g. creating an ephemeral, diagonal liquid lock over a building. (I realized this may be impossible given the temperature interactions after writing it).

[Tsabo]

On 9/4/2021 at 3:51 AM, Sasza22 said:

That`s super annoying if you happen to have airflow tiles in the base and spill some water on them, for example some melted ice falls on them. It`s invisible and keeps causing soggy feet.

The bases of solar panels do the same invisible-small-quantities-of-liquid thing as airflow tiles, which was EXTREMELY confusing the one time I tried to heat-control a solar power array by running cooling pipes through said small quantities of liquid.