Introducing "Aerogel", making low-mass natural tiles that are perfect insulators..

[blakemw]

Aerogels are solid materials with extremely low density that make excellent insulators. Fortuitously it is possible to make an analog in ONI!

Have you ever wanted to have perfect insulation, but without having to tech up to rocketry and use a molecular forge? Well thanks to the developer's commitment to hardly ever fixing old exploits and introducing new exploits, now you can! The only technology truly required is the lowly Liquid Valve, though the Glass Forge is convenient.

So first of all, this uses the relatively new exploit that bottles, even very tiny bottles, turn into solid tiles when the liquid inside reaches freezing point. This is combined with the ultra powerful skill "Extract pipe contents" which you probably always get anyway, amirite? No? Well this exploit makes "Extract pipe contents" actually useful, which honestly it's probably the most incredible thing about this exploit.

With a pipe of liquid packets Valved to below 1000 g/s to avoid phase change in pipes, you can quickly and painlessly make a row of natural tiles by just ordering extract pipe contents then cancelling the errands as they are completed. It's fast!

But how do we make the tiles perfect insulators?

Well we exploit the fact that if a tile has a mass of smaller than 1g, it will not exchange heat via conduction with other tiles, debris or via flaking/partial evaporation. It will only exchange heat with buildings, such as Tempshift Plates and embedded pipes. The game in general doesn't really want to do allow such tiles to exist/persist...

But fortunately the developers in their boundless wisdom, blessed be they, foresaw such a need, and allowed the Liquid Valve to go all the way down to 0.1 g/s, so we can make tiny bottles that will turn into 100 mg tiles.

However a 0.1 gram packet of liquid won't exchange heat when in a pipe or bottle, so if you just took Molten Glass and valved it down to 0.1 g/s it will remain too hot to freeze in the pipe and too hot to freeze in a bottle, you'll just end up with 100 mg bottles of Molten Glass which never change temperature.  (to be completely accurate, sometimes the game does let 0.1 g packets in pipes change temperature, but it's not consistent)

So when one Valve isn't exploit enough, we need to use two Valves!

This is a picture of Nails standing next to two Valves. Sometimes a picture isn't worth a thousand words.

1. First Valve the Molten Glass down to 1 g/s, at which size the packets are large enough to exchange heat, but small enough to reach ambient temperature basically instantly, and at this flow rate 1001 packets will need to accumulate to reach enough mass to break the pipe.
2. Then put the now cold 1 g packets, through a second Valve set to 0.1 g/s, which will emit 0.1 g packets already below freezing and ready to become perfect natural tiles, and you don't really have to worry about "wasting" these packets or letting them escape, you can let 10000 of them accumulate at the end of a pipe before a pipe breaks, and a single Glass forging operation allows 250,000 packets to be produced: enough to fill the entire map with natural tiles twice over. In short, just let the 0.1 g packets be free-flowing.

The result is perfect 100 mg tiles, that will never exchange heat with other tiles.


Build Notes

When you extract the contents of a pipe, the bottle can appear and freeze in different places. For a free floating pipe the bottle will either freeze on top of the pipe or it'll first fall one tile then freeze below the pipe - it seems to be just random. However you can force the location to be on, above or below the pipe by placing constructed tiles to catch the bottle or force it up/down:

Sometimes it is useful to embed pipes in the natural tiles, as a radiant pipe made of lead/gold has about 1/50th the heat capacity of an Insulated Pipe (this is not an exaggeration) and will achieve thermal equilibrium much more quickly. However if you don't want embedded pipes, then you should ensure the tile is created with no pipe inside it, as deconstructing the pipe will leave the debris trapped in the tile.

Columns

It's very quick and easy to make rows of natural tiles, but columns are a bit more annoying, this is because bottles of molten glass act sort of like falling sand: if a bottle of molten glass lands on a glass tile, it will merge into the glass tile rather than making a new tile on top. For this reason, columns have to be constructed from the top down:
 

There are a variety of other techniques for building vertical walls of natural tiles, including the use of constructed tiles as catchers or to force the glass tile to appear to the side.

Uses
 

• Simply as an early game low-cost alternative to Insulation Insulated Tiles, or the bulky double-walling strategies.
• Reducing time to cool down builds like liquid oxygen production: as the tiles don't exchange heat, they add no thermal mass to the system.
• To perfectly insulate pipe contents.
• When making pip planted wild plant farms, it's often desirable to maintain a fixed temperature through insulation. Making the natural tiles themselves perfect insulators reduces the insulation requirements and makes the build more compact.
• When flaking/partial evaporation may be problematic, in fact even Insulation Insulated Tiles can cause partial evaporation under the right conditions.
• Surrealism: like making a Magma cistern out of ice.

[Gurgel]

I see the "insane contraptions" spirit is back! This is both ingenious and pretty funny. 

Of course you can already perfect insulation by vacuuming things out. I use that now and then. So now for the real question: Can you pip-plant in "natural" glass tiles? ... Ah, I see you can. Excellent!

 

[6Havok9]

I like my frost burger with glassy sleet wheat. Those extra crunchy shards always leave a big bloody red smile on my dupe face.

[Ceos]

My God you brilliant devil... and the name as well <chef kiss>. For a really quick low heat way to making pip plantable tiles alone this is genius... for a sleet wheat farm this is nuts. You rock.

[Jann5s]

On 3/5/2022 at 3:43 PM, blakemw said:

This is a picture of Nails standing next to two Valves. Sometimes a picture isn't worth a thousand words.

This cracked me up so hard, thank you.

[ghkbrew]

On 3/5/2022 at 10:43 AM, Gurgel said:

Of course you can already perfect insulation by vacuuming things out.

There's a lot of utility in being able to contain hot gasses with perfect insulation. Something you can't with vacuum airflow tiles. This lets you contain gasses hot enough to melt diamond before you have insulation (everyone has that problem right??).

[hackcasual]

This would work great for building reactor shielding for mutating plants. Do this with enriched uranium, the natural tiles should only block 9% of the rads, and you can plant just 1 tile away from nuke central

[Pedro_L]

On 3/5/2022 at 1:11 PM, 6Havok9 said:

I like my frost burger with glassy sleet wheat. Those extra crunchy shards always leave a big bloody red smile on my dupe face.

How can you make 1000 grams of bread from a 0.1 grams tile we may never know