Traveling Space in Style and Comfort

[biopon]

@ghkbrew brought the subject up on discord, but I wasn't there for the conversation. So here it is, a guide on embiggening your spacefarer module, in a completely legit and exploit-free way. (Unless you count melting steel an exploit.)

This is my colonizer setup, with a bedroom, great hall, rec room, washroom, showers, massage clinic, and a nature reserve. Power is produced via the solar panels. (Did you know the sun goes down at night in space?) A traditional bathroom loop supplies running water, the excess pwater is vented to space. Oxygen is supplied with a submerged oxygen diffuser for a slight overpressure. Reed fibers are grown in the reserve to repair atmo suits. An aquatuner under a turbine provides comfy temperature. Food is berry sludge, so no deep freeze food storage, but it'd certainly be possible. Sand, algae and food needs to be resupplied from time to time, but what's onboard lasts a long time.

Alright, so how do you knock some walls down to make something like this possible? You melt it with steel. It's a fantastic coolant with a very wide temperature band; you acquire molten steel at ~2420  °C, but it won't solidify until cooled below ~1080  °C. Great for combining with magma preheating, more on this a bit.

This is my entire setup for this:

The minor volcano supplies piped magma for preheating; this is not strictly needed but it brings the interior temperature up to 1600-1700 °C, which saves a fair bit of tedium later when you're working with steel. The turbines next to the volcano are just there to handle the magma used this way. The weird contraption above the volcano is for melting aquatuners to acquire molten steel and pump it into a reservoir. The petroleum-submerged tepidizer is just something for the melting AT to fight. Then finally the metal refinery and the stuff around it is to heat the steel well above its melting point; about 2800 degrees.

Step 1: Prepare the spacefarer

For preheating, run tungsten pipes in every wall segment you can, except over the input and output ports where insulated obsidian is needed. (Ceramic and anything else other than actual insulation would melt later when you're pumping in hot steel. Plus you want to protect these ports from melting, you can't fix them if you accidentally destroy those tiles. The ladders should be obsidian if you want them to survive the cooling process.) 

Step 2: Preheat

Pipe in 1kg/sec magma and handle whatever comes out in any way you like. When the output magma temperature is 1600-1700 degrees, you can cut the magma feed, wait for whatever's in the pipes to drain, and move on to the next step. If you want, you can wait until the output magma's temperature almost matches that of the input, but heating the inside does get progressively slower as temperatures rise. If you want it done quickly, you should stop around 1600 degrees.

Step 3: Prepare interior piping for steel

Leave the previous pipes in, they're super hot, you'll take care of it later. Make sure the newly put in piping only touches the wall segments you want to melt. Use tungsten; it can withstand the temperatures and has a low SHC so it doesn't fight you during the process.

Step 4: Acquire molten steel

I won't go into the details of this one, but it's not complicated and there are good guides out there. @GreezyHammer had a good video about it for example.

3-4 melted aquatuners will provide you with enough liquid to get the job done.

Step 5: Set up the refinery

This is my setup, there are many ways to do this but I found this pretty frustration-free. The left reservoir is where the steel starts, and also where the spent coolant (coming from the spacefarer) returns. It holds cold steel. Then you run its contents through the refinery, depositing it into the right reservoir where it waits to enter the spacefarer through the 1kg/s valve.

Piping. pretty simple. The top radiant pipe on the right is the return from the spacefarer, the pipe below that heads there. The insulated ceramic pipe was used to get the molten aquatuners into the reservoir.

One word of advice: figure out what layout you're going to use, build the piping first, connect all the pipe segments with insulated ceramic pipes that you'll later deconstruct, and heat all the pipes to 1100 °C. The Pliers mod is a godsend for this.

Step 6: Meltinate!

Have your best dupe put on her best atmo suit, and get her making steel. One batch of coolant (400kg) takes 2/3rds of a cycle to trickle through the rocket at 1kg/s, so she'll be doings this a couple of times a cycle. Make sure there's always a steady flow of steel; if you stop for whatever reason the wall segments you're trying to melt will very quickly equalize with the rest of the cabin, and you lose a lot of progress.

From my experience it takes about 17-18 batches of steel to melt two wall segments.

You *could* use 10kg/s and potentially get it done much quicker, but my experiment with that ended in a disaster. In short, it's too much liquid (and tungsten piping is OK but not not great) so the coolant won't shed all its heat in the walls with only 2 segments targeted. You end up with very hot coolant returning, and once you cook with 2800+ °C steel, the output will melt tungsten. You *could* mitigate this with thermo sensors on the pipes, and shutoffs, and more reservoirs, and bridges, but sometimes simple is better. I've not played too much with flow rates inbetween, maybe 2-3 kg/s is the sweet spot, not sure.

Step 7: Done! (Almost)

Once the walls you want gone are gone (and a couple of tiles under them too), wait for the steel to drain from the pipes, put a liquid vent up just after the liquid inlet, and pipe in 1kg/s water to cool everything down. The steam will get it done fast.

That's it. Enjoy the spacious rockets, the dupes certainly will.

[SackMaggie]

A wall -> deconstruct able wall -> indestructible wall -> destroyed by mad dupe -> cannot destroyed by mad dupe -> melted wall -> ????

The evolution chain is so great. XD

[blueberry pi]

5 hours ago, SackMaggie said:

A wall -> deconstruct able wall -> indestructible wall -> destroyed by mad dupe -> cannot destroyed by mad dupe -> melted wall -> ????

The evolution chain is so great. XD

I think you forgot the nuclear meltdown to break a window. I'm not sure if it did work tho.

The logical next step is to turn it into neutronium, then we'll build a rocket chimney to destroy it!

[pether]

1 hour ago, blueberry pi said:

we'll build a rocket chimney to destroy it!

I'm pretty sure you can't build rockets inside your rockets

[Gurgel]

5 hours ago, pether said:

I'm pretty sure you can't build rockets inside your rockets

You are correct on that:

[ghkbrew]

13 hours ago, blueberry pi said:

The logical next step is to turn it into neutronium, then we'll build a rocket chimney to destroy it!

The rocket hatch is actually backed by neutronium, though it claims to be made of steel.

Also, I didn't think rocket shaving worked in SO. Does it?

[TheMule]

I'd consider this too exploity.  And I guess melting of rocket walls is "soon to be fixed" at Klei. Yet, I don't dislike the idea per se.

I would be great if rockets could dock with each other in space, and transfer dups & materials. Then I'd build something like this, but only in orbit w/o ever using the engine. An orbital spacestation of sort.  The logistics of building one orbiting a very inhospitable planet (via multiple trips from the base planet) are so challenging that I woundn't consider that too cheaty.

 

[biopon]

18 hours ago, blueberry pi said:

I think you forgot the nuclear meltdown to break a window. I'm not sure if it did work tho.

It may withstand an angry dupe, but surely it can't withstand a reactor going haywi... nevermind.

(FWIW I'm not sure why Klei's meltdown event looks more like uncontrolled fission rather than an actual meltdown, but that's neither here nor there.)

[babba]

1 minute ago, biopon said:

It may withstand an angry dupe, but surely it can't withstand a reactor going haywi... nevermind.

(FWIW I'm not sure why Klei's meltdown event looks more like uncontrolled fission rather than an actual meltdown, but that's neither here nor there.)

We should team up someday in ONI multiplayer

[NewWorldDan]

Has anyone tried cracking the window tiles with water pressure?

In any event, I sincerely hope Klei doesn't make the walls unmeltable.  It's stuff like this that makes the game so interesting.

[Yobbo]

11 hours ago, NewWorldDan said:

Has anyone tried cracking the window tiles with water pressure?

Anything that applies damage to the walls is nullified before it actually applies the damage. This includes water pressure. It will leak and crack, but then the cracks heal before damage is applied.

Well, i was testing on the steel wall, but as the windows have the same unbreakable behaviour in other cases it should be the same with this.

I also tried stacking meteors in the hope that if enough damage was applied at once it could still break. No dice, damage was not applied even when it was enough to destroy it instantly.

[calibayzone]

Uranium is much easier than steel. Liquid from 133C to 4132(!)C. The centrifuge even makes liquid U by default, 50 orders and it fills a metal refinery. Just make sure your plastic-containing centrifuge doesn't melt into sour-gas.