Need some help with conveyor rails

[DamnLord]

Hi all,

can someone help me with this, I don't know if it is a bug and if so is there a workaround.

i have a Aluminum volcano tamer with a conveyor loop. Some of the packages are too little (mg or mcu) for heat exchange and it blocks my rail, as far as I know rails have to work as pipes, but the filling of the packages never occurs

 

The sensor just checks the temperature and let the package out.

Thank you

[Isidoro]

3 hours ago, DamnLord said:

Hi all,

can someone help me with this, I don't know if it is a bug and if so is there a workaround.

i have a Aluminum volcano tamer with a conveyor loop. Some of the packages are too little (mg or mcu) for heat exchange and it blocks my rail, as far as I know rails have to work as pipes, but the filling of the packages never occurs

 

The sensor just checks the temperature and let the package out.

Thank you

I had the same issue with several "cooling chains". I can't tell you how to prevent this issue to happen, but I certainly can tell you how I've circumvented it.

Add an OR gate to your temp sensor and put a timer (or cycle sensor) that will let through whatever clogs the rails once per a sum of time.

OR

at the end of the chain, where the shut off is, put a chute in range of the sweeper: if the shutoff is red, items will be dropped on the ground and picked up again, merging smaller packets together (supposedly).

 

I ended up with the latter because with nuclear and solar my energy issues are nil so I can splurge, but if you are on a budget, perhaps the former suits you better. In any case you should have "something" that cools down the output below 125°C so even if occasionally something gets dumped in this latter cooling section, you should't have any long term temp issues.

[DamnLord]

20 minutes ago, Isidoro said:

I had the same issue with several "cooling chains". I can't tell you how to prevent this issue to happen, but I certainly can tell you how I've circumvented it.

Add an OR gate to your temp sensor and put a timer (or cycle sensor) that will let through whatever clogs the rails once per a sum of time.

OR

at the end of the chain, where the shut off is, put a chute in range of the sweeper: if the shutoff is red, items will be dropped on the ground and picked up again, merging smaller packets together (supposedly).

 

I ended up with the latter because with nuclear and solar my energy issues are nil so I can splurge, but if you are on a budget, perhaps the former suits you better. In any case you should have "something" that cools down the output below 125°C so even if occasionally something gets dumped in this latter cooling section, you should't have any long term temp issues.

I don't have a power issue, solar is ok for this planet, plus this is making 1kw (plus or minus) surplus power when is active, I will try with the chute but i will make pulse clock for the sweeper in order to get some time off until i drops at least 2-3 packages. I really did not want to do this coz it not feels  clean  and i was hopping to be some kind of easy fix bug , but w/e

Thank you for the info

[JRup]

3 hours ago, DamnLord said:

i was hopping to be some kind of easy fix bug , but w/e

It's not a bug, it's a feature! (For real!)

I prevented this from happening completely by using two fully separated sets of sweeper & loader. 1st one is just for full cleanup purposes leading to the second sweeper area. Area 2 has few rules: sweeper is activated by weight & last package is always discarded back for processing.

I designed this before a shipping package bug was patched so the autosweeper only acts when packages are more than 21kg...

Here's the screenshot from my "offset volcano tamer". The map generator kindly shoved the volcano "comfortably" snug to the neutronium edge... So it was done that way.

[DamnLord]

8 minutes ago, JRup said:

It's not a bug, it's a feature! (For real!)

I prevented this from happening completely by using two fully separated sets of sweeper & loader. 1st one is just for full cleanup purposes leading to the second sweeper area. Area 2 has few rules: sweeper is activated by weight & last package is always discarded back for processing.

I designed this before a shipping package bug was patched so the autosweeper only acts when packages are more than 21kg...

Here's the screenshot from my "offset volcano tamer". The map generator kindly shoved the volcano "comfortably" snug to the neutronium edge... So it was done that way.

Thanks for the info, I know about 1g rule, but i though that since the rails have to work as pipes the bridge will fill up the little packages (this what i meant by bug )

p.s. I will try this too and see which will work best for me thank you

[JRup]

10 minutes ago, DamnLord said:

Thanks for the info, I know about 1g rule, but i though that since the rails have to work as pipes the bridge will fill up the little packages (this what i meant by bug )

p.s. I will try this too and see which will work best for me thank you

Oh, oooh! There is no merging in conveyor rails, sorry to say that.

[DamnLord]

1 minute ago, JRup said:

Oh, oooh! There is no merging in conveyor rails, sorry to say that.

Do you know why? it's only logical if they act like pipes to be able to merge

[JRup]

2 minutes ago, DamnLord said:

Do you know why? it's only logical if they act like pipes to be able to merge

Hmm, I feel your local mail delivery company could take issue with your logic... I wouldn't mind receiving 64GB of ram if some day I order only 16GB, though.

Besides that, I have a nagging suspicion that there's a lot in the to-do list when it comes to the conveyor rails system.

BTW: We only recently got the conveyor rail meter that can be used as a "splitter". And the "fun" with mini packages that don't conduct heat (less than 1g) has only just begun. (Feel the pain, oh yeah! - Blame it on rounding.)

I believe that instead of merging automatically as pipes do, there could be a space for an actual structure that would work like a packet merger (splitter too?). Right now I depend on double shipping to do the trick. (On that note: small correction to the double shipper info I gave: it's not 21kg. It is 20.1 kg what triggers the weight plate.)

Even designing a packet merger structure would not be without issue:

• It would be best if it required a filtered input (AKA single element) when merging.
• Would it only spew 20kg baskets or would there be an option to merge up to a user defined 'X' amount?
• What if it receives a basket with more than 'X' amount? Would it split that into 'X' sized baskets and keep the change?

Well I think that's it for now. Let me know what you think.

[madcat1188]

I initially thought this was a bug, since it didn't make sense to me that a small amount of material would not cool at all when 20 kg chunks were cooling no problem. So I decided to do some testing in sandbox mode to see what would happen with smaller amounts of metal, like 10 kg, 1 kg, 100g, and 1g. I added a conveyor meter to the conveyor line and connected the output directly to the reset so it would continually reset itself. I found you could get 1g by setting it to 0.001 units, and 100g by setting it to 0.1 units. Unfortunately, it did not allow 0.0001 units, it changes that setting to zero.

I then allowed the metal to continue down the line and into a chamber with 40 C hydrogen. I observed that the smaller materials cooled down much faster than the larger materials. In fact, anything less than 100g cooled down so fast it was difficult to observe it, even on slowest speed.

Does it make sense that less than 1g doesn't transfer heat to the environment, perhaps because of the small surface area? Or does the game function this way for performance purposes, ie, if there's a tiny amount of metal sitting on the ground, skip calculating how much heat is transferred to the surrounding gas since it's only a small amount. Perhaps a better shortcut would be to simply change the temperature of small amount of small amount of metal to the same as the surrounding gas to skip the full heat transfer calculation.

 

[JRup]

Hi!

I did want to do a quick write-up on the subject of shipping below 1 unit, but... oh well here goes.

13 hours ago, madcat1188 said:

I found you could get 1g by setting it to 0.001 units, and 100g by setting it to 0.1 units. Unfortunately, it did not allow 0.0001 units, it changes that setting to zero.

You will eventually get amounts below 1 gram on account of rules for binary numbers and this being a simulation in a computer and such...

A couple of wikipedia entries on the subject:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number#Fractions
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_decimal This talks about "repeating decimals", but it can be summed up as "repeating numbers after the 'dot'"
• A cutesy video that mostly illustrates this for base 10 numbers in the spoiler:

Spoiler

 

If you really have to use less than 1 unit measurements and want to avoid mcg amounts clogging up your rails (especially when using the conveyor meter) I could recommend looking into fractional amounts that are a power of 2, such as 0.5 units, 0.25 units, 0.125 units. Here, in unicode character glory, one half: ½, one quarter: ¼, one eighth: ⅛.

(These would correspond to 500g, 250g & 125g respectively. Quick mafs!)

Edit: @LadenSwallow kindly pointed out a not so minor mistake with the amounts given. This has been fixed.

 

13 hours ago, madcat1188 said:

Does it make sense that less than 1g doesn't transfer heat to the environment

This is capped by the game. Do bear in mind the thermal conductivity rules documented by previous generations of players... (Also mentioned above. Not like it's in the in-game database...)

Again, I believe it to be a good decision for such minor material amounts. Just imagine the computational overhead that is saved that way. (My opinion, anyways...)

If in doubt chock it onto ONI physics.

[Isidoro]

What really seems odd, of the whole thing, is that for anything meaningful in the game we use kilos and tonnes and we use grams occasionally while handling gases...so why involve mcgs at all? remove the vacuuming from the picture and I can't find another situation where you end up handling mcgs of stuff. So why bother at all?  

[LadenSwallow]

9 hours ago, JRup said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

If you really have to use less than 1 unit measurements and want to avoid mcg amounts clogging up your rails (especially when using the conveyor meter) I could recommend looking into fractional amounts that are a power of 2, such as 0.2 units, 0.4 units, 0.8 units and so on... (These would correspond to 200g, 400g & 800g respectively. Quick mafs!)

I'm curious if this is the 'intended' power of 2, but shouldn't it be 1/2 1/4 1/8 (2^-1, 2^-2, 2^-3 respectively - 0.5, 0.25, 0.125)?

How does the game 'store' the size of entities? Does it store it as a number multiplied by another number (i.e. 2 numbers) (representing standard form), or is it some 'signed' number representing how much bigger/smaller than '1' it is - by here I'm thinking something like log(base2)?

[degr]

For such cases I add conveyor shutoff with timer sensor, something like 5 sec green from 100 sec.

[JRup]

Hello again!

4 hours ago, Isidoro said:

What really seems odd, of the whole thing, is that for anything meaningful in the game we use kilos and tonnes and we use grams occasionally while handling gases...so why involve mcgs at all? remove the vacuuming from the picture and I can't find another situation where you end up handling mcgs of stuff. So why bother at all?  

It's because the mcgs happen "naturally" but we don't/can't really use them on purpose. For the purpose of exploiting the 1g rule one only would need to vacuum until we reach the concentration of hundreds of milligrams (less than 1000mg )

Fun side effect of mcg's not being significant is that the game automatically eliminates 1mcg blobs of gas from the game itself.

10 minutes ago, LadenSwallow said:

I'm curious if this is the 'intended' power of 2, but shouldn't it be 1/2 1/4 1/8 (2^-1, 2^-2, 2^-3 respectively - 0.5, 0.25, 0.125)?

You are correct, I was battered by the hour and should've gone to sleep instead. I'll edit that in.

27 minutes ago, LadenSwallow said:

How does the game 'store' the size of entities? Does it store it as a number multiplied by another number (i.e. 2 numbers) (representing standard form), or is it some 'signed' number representing how much bigger/smaller than '1' it is - by here I'm thinking something like log(base2)?

Don't know, haven't modded the game to see for myself. But since we get said effects I could suspect a float data type mingling around. Common computers aren't quantum yet, so....