Conveyor Rail Lock Up Due to Low Mass

[tuxii]

Somehow my auto-sweeper managed to pick up less than a milligram of gold here and because the game doesn't let anything less than a milligram change temperature it has jammed my my gold tamer's outlet.

Why can an auto-sweeper even pick up such a small amount of mass, especially when it can do this?

[meekay]

There was some discussion about this recently, see my comment here.

If you're going to use a conveyor shutoff to meter how hot material can be before it gets out of the room, you'll need to arrange the conveyor to make a continuous loop using bridges. You'll also need to add a timer that flushes the loop periodically if micro-quantities get into it; gold volcanos in particular are susceptible to this, as you've discovered. I've found a timer that is (# of conveyor segments in room) ON and 10 cycles OFF works pretty well, and since I wind the conveyor all around the room it's approximately equal to the size of the room.

 

 

Here's an example of a gold metal tamer from my current game. Since the conveyor view makes it hard to see the paths I've added arrows to show where each of the bypasses are. You can use bridges to create "shortcuts", "onramps", "offramps", and to control the direction of flow.

1. The sweeper loads hot material into the loader at the top, which goes one tile into the wall and then jumps to the center of the room.
2. From there it makes its way around, jumping over the loader to help enforce flow in one direction. It avoids the two spaces on the volcano where the hot material comes out and lands, and makes its way over to the temperature sensor.
3. If the material is less than 200°C, the shutoff redirects it down into the cooling pond. Otherwise, a bridge jumps it back into the hot loop.
4. If the cool loop has a slot open a bridge will "shortcut" the material directly into it and save some energy. Otherwise it dumps the hot material onto the floor of the pond.
5. Sweepers can pick up hot loose material from the pond floor and load it onto the cooling loop, using the same "onramp" as above.
6. If the material is down to <35°C, it's allowed to escape the loop and sent to a storage/sorting room.
7. There are two steam turbines; one is tied to a smart battery (30-80) and the other is that input OR steam temp >180°C. I keep the steam pressure at about 10KG/tile so that the maintenance hatch can be vacuumed out with a high pressure exhaust vent.

I've shown this with a metal volcano but even a 4x10 steam room configured this way can handle 4T of liquid tungsten from space mining, or 27T of magma dumped from a construction trip to the hot planet. For aluminum or copper volcanos you may want to go to 5x10 if you don't yet have niobium, as those llquified metals tend to retain more heat, but a small magma volcano would still be fine.

[tuxii]

18 hours ago, meekay said:

There was some discussion about this recently, see my comment here.

If you're going to use a conveyor shutoff to meter how hot material can be before it gets out of the room, you'll need to arrange the conveyor to make a continuous loop using bridges. You'll also need to add a timer that flushes the loop periodically if micro-quantities get into it; gold volcanos in particular are susceptible to this, as you've discovered. I've found a timer that is (# of conveyor segments in room) ON and 10 cycles OFF works pretty well, and since I wind the conveyor all around the room it's approximately equal to the size of the room.

 

 

Here's an example of a gold metal tamer from my current game. Since the conveyor view makes it hard to see the paths I've added arrows to show where each of the bypasses are. You can use bridges to create "shortcuts", "onramps", "offramps", and to control the direction of flow.

1. The sweeper loads hot material into the loader at the top, which goes one tile into the wall and then jumps to the center of the room.
2. From there it makes its way around, jumping over the loader to help enforce flow in one direction. It avoids the two spaces on the volcano where the hot material comes out and lands, and makes its way over to the temperature sensor.
3. If the material is less than 200°C, the shutoff redirects it down into the cooling pond. Otherwise, a bridge jumps it back into the hot loop.
4. If the cool loop has a slot open a bridge will "shortcut" the material directly into it and save some energy. Otherwise it dumps the hot material onto the floor of the pond.
5. Sweepers can pick up hot loose material from the pond floor and load it onto the cooling loop, using the same "onramp" as above.
6. If the material is down to <35°C, it's allowed to escape the loop and sent to a storage/sorting room.
7. There are two steam turbines; one is tied to a smart battery (30-80) and the other is that input OR steam temp >180°C. I keep the steam pressure at about 10KG/tile so that the maintenance hatch can be vacuumed out with a high pressure exhaust vent.

I've shown this with a metal volcano but even a 4x10 steam room configured this way can handle 4T of liquid tungsten from space mining, or 27T of magma dumped from a construction trip to the hot planet. For aluminum or copper volcanos you may want to go to 5x10 if you don't yet have niobium, as those llquified metals tend to retain more heat, but a small magma volcano would still be fine.

I know there are work-arounds, but we shouldn't need a work-around because the condition shouldn't exist.  The game should just work and not be programmed to jam in this way.

Just code in an exception that any material on a rail can change temperature regardless of its (lack of) mass and let players never have to worry about these jams ever again.

[cyberwarlord]

On 12/20/2023 at 9:40 AM, tuxii said:

I know there are work-arounds, but we shouldn't need a work-around because the condition shouldn't exist.  The game should just work and not be programmed to jam in this way.

Just code in an exception that any material on a rail can change temperature regardless of its (lack of) mass and let players never have to worry about these jams ever again.

Sounds like user error.

[DolphinWing]

On 12/19/2023 at 10:29 AM, cyberwarlord said:

Material will bypass and merge I believe.

Solid materials don't merge. Only gases and liquids can.

[cyberwarlord]

4 hours ago, DolphinWing said:

Solid materials don't merge. Only gases and liquids can.

Yeah your right. I may have worded it poorly. Just ment merge with the loop again but still same issue. So looping is no good, looks like it needs a purge then. I'm amazed I've never encountered this problem.

 

 

Alternatively just let it pass if it's under a certain amount. It can't be a whole lot of thermal energy.

[Charletrom]

Two consecutive thermal sensors wired in series solves this problem