poi Planetoid Feature: Mechanical Shine Bug

[UberFubarius]

The idea here is to give more reason to colonize another planetoid that provides benefit to your colony.

Introducing, "Mechanical Shine Bug", an artificial fusion shine bug that can provide additional light to all your colonies (for power, or for recreational purpose) but has a fairly difficult startup cost.

"Mechanical Shine Bug" consist of 5 buildings. A 3x3 reactor building shaped like a metal shine bug, and 4 3x2 control units flanking it, for a building that's a total of 11x3 in size.

The 4 control buildings are simple. They can be set to "point" to a planetoid individually (more than 1 can be pointed to the same planetoid, and will build up "Calibration Drift" at 40% per cycle, and the building will shut down at 100% drift and needs to be calibrated by dupes. The calibration level can be set similar to oil well at a specific percentage.

The main "star" of the show is the center reactor unit. It has a liquid input port that takes water, a power input port, and an automation input port. The reactor also requires a clear straight path to space over it's 3 tiles width otherwise it won't start. It has an internal "store" of 5 kg of water and 10 kJoules of electric storage(10 seconds at 1 kW of consumption).

For reactor to function, it must be supplied with 2kW of power.

The reactor produce a new element called "Protofotonium" (the word proton and photon combined) that has interesting property that will be listed later. The elements are produced by consuming 1kg/s of water and produce at the rate of 8.89 kg per second that's then stored internally, and production can be stopped by sending a "green" signal to the automation input. Stored Protofotonium decays constantly at the rate of 3.33 kg per second, producing 1kDTU of thermal energy that's dumped to the reactor itself (which will heat transfer to the the center tile it's sitting on).

Reactor has 3 states.

Contained: Reactor is powered and is <2000C

Uncontained: Occurs if reactor loses power or if reactor reaches 2000 C. In this state reactor will dump 2 kg of stored Protofotonium per seconds at 7000C to the environment as liquid (as you will see in the Protofotonium section, this would be catastrophic). If no Protofotonium is there Uncontained is no different from the reactor being Off.

Running: reactor is in running state if it has more than 10 tons of Protofotonium, a clear LOS to space, and fulfills the "Contained" condition. reactor in running state produces light (see below on Lux production) and consumes 556g/s of Photofotonium and internally produces 1 kW (so in total, running reactor consumes 8.89kg/s of Protofotonium that balances out production, and reduces power consumption to 1 kW). 

 

Lux Production

While reactor is in Running state

1. Emits a 3 tiles wide beam all the way out to space at 200,000 lux in the beam path (don't stand in it unless your dupe want instant sunburn. The lux level quickly drops off to 0 linear about 3 tiles front eh edge of the beam.
2. Planetoid the reactor is on will have it's illumination from space increased by 70,000 lux as long as the reactor is running (day and night).
3. Planetoid that the "control building" is configured to aim at will receive 10,000 lux (so you can increase a planetoid light level, day and night, by 40,000 lux permanently if you point all 4 control buildings at it).

 

Protofotonium

A very exotic material that technomagically solves the fusion problem that has some weird and very exotic properties. Protofotonium is a very low density substance, only holding 10kg per tile in liquid form, with water like viscosity and has more heat capacity and thermal conductivity then super coolant.

1. Protofotonium has no phase transition, only liquid and gas form.

2. Liquid Protofotonium will off gas over time like polluted water, with a pressure threshold of 10kg (it can push away up to 10kg of gas to off gas).

3. Protofotonium will lose 0.1% of it's mass per second and raise it's remaining mass temperature by 10C if it's below 8000C. 

Essentially, Protofotonium will melt just about everything before they "sublimates" into nothing.

[degr]

Very nice idea, and pretty balanced preconditions.

Only things to improve it is - you need to fed mechanical shine bug with alive critters and meat, until it will consume 1000.000 kkal, and as outcome, it should irreversibly destroy planetoids.

[UberFubarius]

5 hours ago, degr said:

Very nice idea, and pretty balanced preconditions.

Only things to improve it is - you need to fed mechanical shine bug with alive critters and meat, until it will consume 1000.000 kkal, and as outcome, it should irreversibly destroy planetoids.

I like the idea of making shutting it down dangerous. Maybe not outright explosive after a set period of time.

Idea: During Shutdown phase (lost of power/heat outlet to space), the reactor building will start to generate 4 million DTU/s of heat and exchange it with stored water. Water reaching vaporization point will be release as steam. During this phase, the reactor can consume up to 10 kg/s of water for cooling (in short, you need to feed it near freezing water like at 5 degree C to have enough cooling to dissipate all the heat), heat not dissipated will heatup the reactor.

Instead of the "lost 1% per seconds", the reactor simply will have an internal store of something like 24 billion DTU of thermal energy it needs to dissipate if it's in shutdown, and change the operating rule to it needing 24 billion DTU of thermal energy to start generating light. (so 10 cycles of feeding near freezing water to cool it down). 

If the reactor internal temperature reaches 7000 C, it will start to spawn "Protonium" debris at the reactor temperature at about 10 kg per second.

Protonium has high heat capacity (higher than water) and thermal conductivity (higher than super coolant), and has a special property in that it's phase transition is reversed and will spontaneously lose heat (1% per cycle) over time until it becomes a gas, at which point it tries to pin itself at 5500C (if it goes below 5500 C, it will lose mass to "concentrate" the remaining heat energy into itself to reach 5500C).

At <6500 C, it liquifies into liquid "Protonium".

At <6000 C, it evaporates into gas.

The idea is that since it starts out as a debris, it will fall down, the high temperature means that it will rapidly heat up and tiles it sits on, melting it through and keep falling. The reverse phase transition also means that once it reach bottom and cooled enough (as it's also self cooling, trying to keep it in vacuum won't work), it melts, and the vaporizes, becoming a problem on the way up as it vent to space. In short, explains why the planetoid is just giant blob of ice. Most solid block are melted/vaporized due to an accidental shutdown in the past.

 

You know what? I'm going to rework this to make it simpler to understand and make shutdown danger more streamlined