Issues with Materials Studies almost full.

[giygus]

EDIT 2/6:  In case anyone happens upon this in the future, I have since found that Radbolts harmlessly dissipate when hitting solid tiles.  By "found", I mean I read the wiki and gave it a quick test out.   When I say dissipate harmlessly, I mean just that.  No explosion, no radiation, no fallout, nothing.  So long as they don't hit a dupe or each other, no harm no foul.  Of course you may not wish to waste radbolts, in which case a more elaborate set up will be required.  But if the radbolts are shot downward into the Material studies, any overflow will leave no trace behind it.

So I am having trouble keeping the Materials studies terminal full without overflowing.  Also I am unsure of what happens when a radbolt hits and "overflows"  This is what I've got:

The automation is set up so when the research station is full, the radbolt storage won't emit.  Then the storage is set up so if it gets to 1000, it turns off the collector.  Simple enough, right?

The issue is the research station always loses a little bit of bolts, so even after 2 bursts its never quite full, more like 98/100.  Then a third bolt was sent, seemingly causing a small explosion, next to Burt, but no radiation damage?  Burt lost 20 health, but didn't gain any radiation, also no fallout/waste. 

I assume the loss of bolts is due to travel time, short though it is, and therefore nothing I can really fix.  Is there anyway I can alter the setup so the collector won't send a bolt if the research station is at 98% instead of 100%?

[Nogard78]

Every 10 tiles when a radbolt package travels it looses 1 radbolt, for example when you shoot 103 radbolts from a generator, and when they reach 30 tiles this package has only 100 radbolts, I am not sure how many radbolts are lost when traveling diagonally, but I suspect it loses 0.2, but again I don't remember. Anyway when a research station overflows it just fires the leftover radbolts in the same direction they were traveling. A good workaround this is just setting it up that when one station is full the overflow goes to the next one, it has to be done diagonally because otherwise dupes might get shot.

(Just like on this beautiful artwork, green trail is radbolt path, blue rectangles are stations and purple circles are where radbolts are getting into station). With 3(or more) stations you can set some more automation or just do this stuff manually, check once a cycle if there are enough radbolts to research stuff and get more when necessary, I did that and completed entire research tree.

[pether]

Modify radbolt redirector not to shoot at 2-tile height. Instead, let rabolt enter the station from above or under an angle so if there is anything leftover, it won't travel on the collision course to the dupes.

You might also consider radbolt redirector loops, to keep radbolts contained. In your case - move existing redirector one tile down, add another one on the floor just next to the station to shoot it at 45* degree to the station input, then add another one below the ceiling to catch overflow and redirect it to the left - there you can redirect it back to the loop.

Also, keep in mind that once the station is missing radbolts, the battery will shoot all of them before reciving signal that no more is needed. Consider adding some timer sensor to that logic to delay shooting radbolts

[giygus]

1 hour ago, pether said:

Modify radbolt redirector not to shoot at 2-tile height. Instead, let rabolt enter the station from above or under an angle so if there is anything leftover, it won't travel on the collision course to the dupes.

That is a good idea, I didn't realize the radbolt just "continued" if it couldn't be absorbed.  I thought it was making an explosion at the absorber site.

1 hour ago, pether said:

Also, keep in mind that once the station is missing radbolts, the battery will shoot all of them before reciving signal that no more is needed. Consider adding some timer sensor to that logic to delay shooting radbolts

This happened a little while ago, causing a dupe to go to triage, and generating liquid radioactive waste.  I was thinking that I would need a timer or something.  I will have to play with it.

[hbarudi]

For this research, I use switches and manually control the "automation" to ensure that I only get the radbolts I need for the research.

[giygus]

11 hours ago, hbarudi said:

For this research, I use switches and manually control the "automation" to ensure that I only get the radbolts I need for the research.

It's a pain in the neck.  I gave up on it timer and filter logic for now, I just kept messing it up.  All tier 3 research is done anyway, and Ill play with the logic (or beg for help here, more likely)  when I can start getting databanks.

[bughouse26]

You can fully automate this with the radiation lamp. As Nogard78 also suggests you can stack multiple materials study terminals diagonally. You can then setup dupe access on the other side to avoid them accidentally walking in front of a radbolt.

Why 3 terminals? The terminal emits a green signal when full and a red signal otherwise. This means that there could be anywhere from 0-99 radbolts currently stored in the terminal. When a terminal is full, any radbolts will pass by it and be absorbed by the terminal behind it. You can use 2 terminals if you reduce the number of radbolt generators; the key is you want the sum total radbolt storage available in the terminals to be >= the sum total maximum about of radbolts your generators could fire at any one time.

Why multiple radbolt generators? In my current play I didn't have any uranium biomes on either of the first 2 asteroids. So in order to maximize the amount of research per uranium ore I use multiple generators. If you have lots of uranium ore and/or not a lot of power, you could simplify with 1 radbolt generator.

The automation shuts the lamp off if any one of 3 terminals are full or if manually overridden. There's also a 60 second filter gate in front since the moment a dupe starts researching a terminal may reduce from 100 to 99 radbolts and we don't want to immediately start generating new radbolts until we've created some room to store them.

Priority-wise the furthest terminal has highest priority in order to reduce the chances of having all 3 terminals with 99 radbolts stored and causing a wasted radbolt. In the unlikely event this happens though the radbolt will harmlessly strike the abysalite behind the last terminal.

Finally, the radbolt generators are set to fire with 101, 102, and 103 radbolts respectively. This is to reduce the chance that any 2 fire simultaneously and to account for radbolt decay when traveling.

The key insight in this design was the realization that radbolt generators will only consume power when radiation is present. When radiation is not present, the generators will not consume power _and_ retain any unfired radbolts.