Any tips, tricks or workaround for oil reservoir in other asteroids?

[Tranoze]

I dont feel like manually teleport/rocket dupes every 4 cycles just to empty oil tanks.
And leaving a loner dupe in a wiped out asteroid with no job isn't good either.

Rover module also doesnt help as they require manual input to deploy them on the asteroid.

[blakemw]

Within the constraints of the question, the only answer is to eliminate the use oil reservoirs.

Glossy Dreckos can produce plastic, and plastic can be turned into naphtha (which can replace petroleum as a coolant) and natural gas.

Petroleum rockets can consume reasonable amounts of petroleum, but can be largely substituted for with Steam, Radbolt and Hydrogen rockets. Prior to Hydrogen Engines, the only unique thing about Petroleum Engines prior to Hydrogen Engine is they can achieve 30 range, but you likely don't need to launch many 30 range rockets as they are fairly niche, the number of 30 range petroleum rockets I launch in a game could be provisioned by a single Liquid Cargo Tank of crude.

Slicksters are a poor option for producing crude/petroleum, existing mainly to make Leaky Oil Fissures look impressive. A full, groomed ranch produces a mere 80 kg per cycle, though this might suffice for very low usages of petroleum, with Glossy Dreckos doing the heavy lifting (the same number of Glossy Dreckos would produce 400 kg of plastic, and can be glum).

Petroleum is mainly only non-substitutable for making Supercoolant. A single mission to collect crude/petroleum would probably provide all the petroleum you ever need for Supercoolant, and slicksters would probably also suffice.

But if you want to consume petroleum in a serious way, such as for regular petroleum engine usage, you pretty much just have to arrange for a dupe to de-gas the wells from time to time.

[SackMaggie]

You can just build 2 rocket both have oil tanks.
Say you take one rocket from home base to the oil asteroid, you land and take the other one back with you (with full tank oil) and just repeat

[Sanchozz]

there should have been a proposal to leave one dupe to specifically service these wells.
but because of a strange corrupted Google search, it was not possible to find the English version of this meme Fallout 3.
The dude says: It's time to get to work

Spoiler

 

 

[babba]

Klei, it would be great if we could lay pipes and cables through space to our "home base" from other planets

I would love it if the space map looks like Bob-the-Builder The required material to build space pipes and space cables would be "Super Space Mesh".

"Super Space Mesh" needs to be manufactured from a dozen high end materials. If you also add Sparks/Combustion/Fire to the game, which can be caused by dupe welding ( or certain substance mixing, at certain temperatures ), fire would be a nice "endgame" hazard risk player challenge.

I`m posting the suggestions here, as it can be tiresome for some players to constantly shift materials via rockets or the interplanetary launcher. I enjoy running a mega-big-home-base where all the magic happens.

[Jurij I. Gorkij]

Not trying to be smart ass, but you could try to solve your problem other way around - i have loner dupe there, whos in charge of emptying of oil wells and because only 10 kg/s can be moved trough teleport, I am using rest of oil in sour gas boiler. Some produced gas is then sent back to main planetoid, but rest is used by natural generators to provide clean water for wells. This produce a lot of electricity, so i've built few factories to give my dupe more things to do.

So he's manufacturing diamonds, grooming slicksters, sometimes cooking for himself (I haven't moved animals/fishes, so meat is sometimes provided) etc. No more idleness...

[Gurgel]

Well, some things require dupe labor. You simply cannot do them without a dupe. My advice is to accept that and move on.

[NNOUS]

A way to do it is cooling the crude oil/petroleum to solid and Carry it with a super cooled Rocket cabin or storage units.

But to produce such thing at least 1200w is required daily

[Tranoze]

2 hours ago, NNOUS said:

A way to do it is cooling the crude oil/petroleum to solid and Carry it with a super cooled Rocket cabin or storage units.

But to produce such thing at least 1200w is required daily

It's not about bring those liquid back home, i can make an infinity liquid storage inside rocket, or use teleporter to transfer the liquid, it about the dupe requirement for empty oil tank in oil reservoir.

[zealyahweh]

fully automatic oil reservoir is possible but quite complicate.

basic idea is you need to :
1.stop input water into oil reservoir

2.cool down oil reservoir below -182.6°C and wait till the nature gas inside become solid methane

3.remove the solid methane by auto sweeper

4.heat the temperature above 0 °C so the input water won't freeze

5.start oil reservoir

6.wait for some cycle and repeat step 1

I managed to do this in sandbox but i'd say that this too complicate and consume very much power, and it takes a long time to cool down nature gas (about 2~3 cycles). just doesn't worth that effort in vanilla game.

[Tranoze]

1 hour ago, zealyahweh said:

fully automatic oil reservoir is possible but quite complicate.

basic idea is you need to :
1.stop input water into oil reservoir

2.cool down oil reservoir below -182.6°C and wait till the nature gas inside become solid methane

3.remove the solid methane by auto sweeper

4.heat the temperature above 0 °C so the input water won't freeze

5.start oil reservoir

6.wait for some cycle and repeat step 1

I managed to do this in sandbox but i'd say that this too complicate and consume very much power, just doesn't worth that effort in vanilla game.

Does water freeze in pipe or form debris inside oil well? if only in pipe, i can use isolation pipe and freeze the room, (same as water inside planter box wont freeze even below 0)
Thank for the idea!

I'm fine with crude oil freeze + auto miner for half the mass for the no dupe trade off.

[zealyahweh]

Just now, Tranoze said:

Does water freeze in pipe or form debris inside oil well? if only in pipe, i can use isolation pipe and freeze the room, (same as water inside planter box wont freeze even below 0)
Thank for the idea!

water in pip doesn't matter as long as you use good insulated pip (ceramic or better)

but the waters in the reservoir is a problem, if environment is under 0 °C the water will freeze into an ice tile and entomb the reservoir

so you need to stop water supply before start cooling, even though you still get some remaining water after the reservoir stops and those water will freeze first then entomb the reservoir (this can be solved with a auto miner, not a big problem)

the true problem is the cooling process takes too much time (about 2~3 cycles), that makes the reservoir very inefficient

i tried many ways to speed it up but all failed, it seems the heat exchange don't respect the normal game rules

[Tranoze]

9 minutes ago, zealyahweh said:

i tried many ways to speed it up but all failed, it seems the heat exchange don't respect the normal game rules

What do you think about limit water input at 1kg/s so any incoming water will instantly be used thus wont from debris, and keep room below -183 for solid methane + solid crude oil? Haven't tested this yet.

[zealyahweh]

Just now, Tranoze said:

What do you think about limit water input at 1kg/s so any incoming water will instantly be used thus wont from debris, and keep room below -183 for solid methane + solid crude oil? Haven't tested this yet.

tried, do not work, water freeze into ice before getting consumed

the fact is oil reservoir do not start work until it have about 4~5kg water storage, just like it will stop working even it have more than 1 kilo water in it's storage

and as i mentioned before, heat exchange between storage and environment do not respect basic game rule, 

submerge the oil reservoir in 9999kg -272°C super coolant do not cooling faster than only a singe drop -272°C super coolant on second left bottom tile ( the tile where oil reservoir exchange heat with environment)

[blakemw]

 

On 9/19/2022 at 1:45 PM, zealyahweh said:

fully automatic oil reservoir is possible but quite complicate.

 

So this is pretty fascinating approach.

Playing around with it in sandbox, one approach seems to be like this:

Keep everything in vacuum.

Put a solid tile under the "tile of interest" so the water bottle and natural gas bottle exchange heat with it. A Plastic Tile is enough to max out heat transfer with the natural gas but exchanging less heat with the water (debris heat transfer is always limited by the lowest TC of the debris and the tile). This tile should be cooled by a Supercoolant loop.

Once the Oil Well stops, the water, because it's no longer "flowing", will eventually freeze into an ice tile, this ice tile will entomb the Oil Well disabling it, but that doesn't matter because it's not working anyway, and more importantly entomb the bottle of natural gas, increasing heat exchange with it considerably compared with it just sitting on the solid tile. It is suffice to say MUCH easier to just entomb the natural gas in ice than trying to arrange for a drop of supercoolant, and the heat exchange is just as fast.

After a very long time the natural gas will condense and emerge as a drop of liquid methane on the left side of the ice tile and should be allowed to drip (through vacuum) down to a collection area, make sure there's nothing it can exchange heat with while dropping (if it beads) or make sure that anything it can exchange heat with is at liquid methane temperature not hotter or colder. A hydro sensor can be used to detect this drop of liquid methane (work out the details, maybe using a step that detects the momentary increase in depth as it flows off), activating a Robo Miner for a moment (via BUFFER gate) that destroys the block of ice, allowing the Oil Well to start pumping again. There's no need to heat anything back up, it's no problem if the Oil Well remains at -200 C, it's all vacuum anyway and the bottle of water is only exchanging heat with the tile under it.

The main downside is it really does take a long time for the natural gas to condense, BUT, it's overall a pretty simple setup and doesn't require that much cooling, just a small amount of "parasitic" cooling of the water that is being consumed plus that to condense the natural gas, which isn't much. And if you set it up on multiple Oil Wells you'd get a respectable throughput.

edit: Further testing. My estimate for the time to chill the natural gas is around 12 cycles but that's an extrapolation from cooling 40 kg of natural gas. Given that it takes 4 cycles to fill the Oil Well with natural gas, this would reduce the throughput to about 25% of that a manual release Oil Well.

Furthermore, it would be highly advisable pre-chill the entire left side that the liquid methane is going to drip into, or make it out of airflow tiles: as even Insulated Insulation tiles can cause partial evaporation. Given that you already want a 0 K cooling loop it's probably simpler to just freeze the liquid methane using the same cooling loop as the Oil Well and ship it out on conveyor.

edit2: A basically working setup in sandbox, where the box of supercoolant on the right represents the cooling source.

This would be reasonably blueprintable, if the conveyance stuff is made of low SHC materials (gold or such) it doesn't vaporize the initial charge of liquid methane, not with supercoolant running behind it anyway. So no pre-chilling is required. If my calculations are correct each setup would consume about 10 kDTU/s of cooling so a single ST/AQ would be able to cool far more of these setups than there are Oil Reservoirs on any map, and so a shared Supercoolant loop could be used for all of them. In the above variant the Robo-miner would eventually overheat, but it only digs 1 tile about every 16-17 cycles so would probably take tens of thousands of cycles to actually overheat. It could be easily arranged to cool it with the crude oil if perfectionism demands it be cooled.

[zealyahweh]

On 9/21/2022 at 4:41 PM, blakemw said:

Put a solid tile under the "tile of interest" so the water bottle and natural gas bottle exchange heat with it. A Plastic Tile is enough to max out heat transfer with the natural gas but exchanging less heat with the water (debris heat transfer is always limited by the lowest TC of the debris and the tile). This tile should be cooled by a Supercoolant loop.

awesome. you reminder me that the storage material is treated as an entity (debris).

I said "heat exchange between storage and environment do not respect basic game rule" but it's totally wrong, that thing is just work as intended. Nature gas have very low thermal conductivity 0.035 (DTU/(m*s))/°C and quite good heat capacity 2.191 (DTU/g)/°C makes it very difficult to cool down when treated as an entity.

Another reason I said it is not respect game rule is I saw a strange temprature change on the tile on bottom of cell of interest (where you place the plastic tile): everything in vacuum, in oil well water is 25°C, nature gas is 300°C, the tile is 20°C but it's temperature still keeps dropping.I thought it is a bug but after some study i realize that the tile is exchanging heat with the oil reservoir (not oil well but oil reservoir, oil reservoir do not change heat with tiles it is in but exchange heat with the tile below the cell of interest)

Right now knowing there is no bug. everything working as intended, also knowing there is no way to speed up the cooling (at least in this approach), now i can focus on the automation design and calculate to max out the efficiency.

how much time we need to cool down 80kg nature gas from 300°C to -164.5°C (full pressure)

it does not help anything, just curiosity:

T1=300-[300-(-164.5)]/2=67.75  T2=-270  TC=0.035

so on average heat transfer every 0.2 second is (67.75+270)*0.035*1000*0.2 = 2364.25 DTU

SHC=2.191 Mass=80000

total heat to transfer is (300-(-164.5))*2.191*80000= 79664760 DTU

time to cool down is 79664760/(2364.25*5)=6739 seconds = 11.2 cycles

 

And here is my design:

I will test it out and share the detail later (if it works good)

 

 

[Tranoze]

4 hours ago, zealyahweh said:

 

 

 

 

On 9/21/2022 at 3:41 PM, blakemw said:

 

 

 

When water first form ice in tile of interest, you dont need to dig it, let ice tile there to max out heat transfer with natural gas, it might speed that up. Materials inside a tile transfer heat much faster than material on top of a tile.

[zealyahweh]

4 hours ago, Tranoze said:

 

 

When water first form ice in tile of interest, you dont need to dig it, let ice tile there to max out heat transfer with natural gas, it might speed that up. Materials inside a tile transfer heat much faster than material on top of a tile.

this is included, i use automation wire to disable auto miner

this design and calculation are both based on cooling with the ice block

[blakemw]

13 hours ago, zealyahweh said:

Another reason I said it is not respect game rule is I saw a strange temprature change on the tile on bottom of cell of interest (where you place the plastic tile): everything in vacuum, in oil well water is 25°C, nature gas is 300°C, the tile is 20°C but it's temperature still keeps dropping.I thought it is a bug but after some study i realize that the tile is exchanging heat with the oil reservoir (not oil well but oil reservoir, oil reservoir do not change heat with tiles it is in but exchange heat with the tile below the cell of interest)

 

Both the Oil Well and Oil Reservoir have non-blocking tiles that nevertheless are part of the "thermal bounding box" of the "building" and so exchange heat, this is similar to the Steam Turbine and of course the most well know example, the Tempshift Plate.

[zealyahweh]

Here we go, after several loop test, this build is working good at 25% efficiency of a normal oil well.

I tried to make it as compact and easy to build as possible, and use as less rare material as possible.

How it work:

① intake water controled by 4 liquid valve, each allow 500kg water to pass (that is 2000kg water in total, oil well can take 2400kg water to max out it's nature gas storage, but I leave 400kg as a buffer)

② once all 4 liquid valve reach it's limit, signal output become red. The buffer gate is to give oil some extra time to consume water in pip, so buffer time is pip length * 10, in my case it's 5*10 (including last valve output tile and oil well input tile) , and i will give it another 5 seconds as buffer, so 55 seconds total.

③ buffer gate end, output red signal to miner, oil well, and mechanized airlock. oil well should already stopped due to out of water, disable it just in case. miner is disabled prevent it drilling the ice block. mechanized airlock is closed so right now the purple block is connect to the cooling tank by the tempshift plate.

④ now the nature gas start cooling, the remaining water will freeze to an ice block first, which will speed up cooling. this takes about 8~9 cycles.

⑤ once nature gas cooled to -164.5°C it drop out and become liquid methane then turn into soild methane immediately. and picked up by auto-sweeper. when the methane passing conveyor rail element sensor (set to detect methane), it reset all the liquid valve.

⑥ reset liquid valve output red signal, then turn into green signal by not gate, it turns on auto miner and oil well, auto miner mine the ice block (picked up by auto-sweeper) so oil well can start to work, green signal also open the mechanized airlock so the purple block no longer connect to cooling tank, and then heat by new generated nature gas, prevent inside water from freezing.

⑦ loop to ①

 

 

[Tranoze]

10 hours ago, zealyahweh said:

Here we go, after several loop test, this build is working good at 25% efficiency of a normal oil well.

I suggest another cooling loop with liquid thermo sensor to cool both water and natural gas to 5~10 C during running time

[zealyahweh]

4 hours ago, Tranoze said:

I suggest another cooling loop with liquid thermo sensor to cool both water and natural gas to 5~10 C during running time

i tried, but not work.

the thing is, while oil well is running, the nature gas and the water inside only exchange heat with the purple marked tile. this heat exchange is very slow, about 1/4 speed compared to cooling with the above tile.

even i keep that tile on -270°C, since the oil well keep generating 300°C nature gas,  the final temperature in storage will be around 285°C. not to say 10°C, it just no impact to final temerature of nature gas.

in fact in this build when it start a new loop, purple marked tile is about -270°C, and after 4 cycles working it is about -1xx°C. way lower than 10°C. it even not able to freeze the water in the container, (that's why i removed the step "heat the machine about 0°C" in this build)

[Tranoze]

1 hour ago, zealyahweh said:

i tried, but not work.

the thing is, while oil well is running, the nature gas and the water inside only exchange heat with the purple marked tile. this heat exchange is very slow, about 1/4 speed compared to cooling with the above tile.

even i keep that tile on -270°C, since the oil well keep generating 300°C nature gas,  the final temperature in storage will be around 285°C. not to say 10°C, it just no impact to final temerature of nature gas.

in fact in this build when it start a new loop, purple marked tile is about -270°C, and after 4 cycles working it is about -1xx°C. way lower than 10°C. it even not able to freeze the water in the container, (that's why i removed the step "heat the machine about 0°C" in this build)

I present to you liquid tile, which provide the same cooling as solid tile during cooling pharse, and even give more cooling during running pharse, by the end of running pharse, natural gas inside would be around 170~190C, instead of 285C

The down side is you lost about 20g of super coolant per run, as when water freeze it delete some super coolant.

I think there a better way to put super coolant there without being deleted when ice block form, but super coolant are very fluidity and only stay if below 40g, and when it travel to new tile and split, if it below 10g, it got delete.

[blakemw]

On 9/24/2022 at 10:58 AM, Tranoze said:

I think there a better way to put super coolant there without being deleted when ice block form, but super coolant are very fluidity and only stay if below 40g, and when it travel to new tile and split, if it below 10g, it got delete.

Hmmm, so basically use a Liquid Meter Valve to drip 10g of supercoolant onto that tile, using the same signal that gets the Robo-miner to destroy the ice block, but with a Memory Toggle to send only a very brief green pulse (I think the signal has to be shorter than 0.5 s or something like that to only emit one packet). The 10g will get cleanly destroyed when the ice block forms.

edit: In other news, how about a low-tech version? Also some food for thought for if supercoolant is available:

Basic idea is to have a Thermo Regulator (Gold Amalgam is fine) which is just being cooled by the crude oil and thermal mass.

A Hydrogen Thermo Regulator can easily keep up with the heat generation of the Oil Well (natural gas + building heat only), which is about 36 kDTU/s while it is running, slightly less than the Thermo Regulator at 33.6 kDTU/s but the Thermo Regulator can bank cold while the Oil Well is not running.

The Thermo Regulator will be slightly slower than an Aquatuner using Super Coolant, because its temperature is limited to about -245 C, compared at close to -270 C, though it's not too much worse.

In general an Aquatuned design could also just oil-cool the Aquatuner rather than bothering making an ST/AQ, this build puts so little load on an Aquatuner it would seem quite justified to just not bother with recovering like 60 watts of power from a Steam Turbine when you can dump the heat into the oil. Of course if you have another reason to have an ST/AQ then sure, but really all you need is a Gold Amalgam Aquatuner and like 100 kg of Supercoolant.

[zealyahweh]

23 hours ago, blakemw said:

I just realized that the plastic block can keep the whole system in extreme low temperatue but don't freeze the water in oil well.

that's really a nice idea! i will definitely use this skill in my build.

For use hydrogen cooling, i just did a calculate that compare with super coolant it spend about one more cycle to complete the cooling process. From 11.2 cycle to 12.1 cycle. Not a big issue, but let us can access free oil very early on.

For the litte drip on cells of interest, Tranoze hope this trick can keep nature gas on 10C while oil well is running but it won't really work. super coolant need to be very cold to keep nature gas on 10C (in fact it is not possible) and the water will freeze in that case.