Radiation newb here - [H] questions [W] advice/discussion

[myxal]

Hi all. I'm tipping my toes into industrial-scale radbolt production. I'm harvesting radiation from beetas, (hat tip to u/grimmekyllling) essentially turning CO2 and ethanol/petroleum into radbolts. I have set the individual generator thresholds to fire roughly at the same time - the setup far exceeds my current needs and is quite the CO2 guzzler (13-15 critters in the room). I'm not running petroleum generators so my CO2 stockpile is a bit limited to dupe production, CO2 vents output, and whatever I found in the frozen core.

• Sometimes I notice an explosion - here it was inside (all the bees were sleeping), and at one point it happened outside of the room, above the mid-level radbolt chamber.
  
  What's going on? Do radbolts collide mid-flight, or does the input port on the reflector/joint plate close for a split second after accepting a radbolt?
• Any recommendations on the chamber automation? I don't suppose the simple switch is up to the task - it takes a while for the radbolts to arrive, enough for the chamber to fire a 2nd shot, which is wasted or looped around.
  

Now onto the primary consumer - rockets/radbolt engines.

• When colonising unvisited planetoids, is it viable to go > 1/2 the engine's range, and refuel at the destination? I mean, I saw Francis's last playthrough with the compressed nuclear waste, but I'd like to try whatever non-exploity methods first. The beeta radbolt setup is a beast, but frankly a huge PITA to get up and running. Wheezeworts look like they'd take ages and a lot of power/cooling to refuel the engine, what else is there? I did stumble upon an episode from an older FJ playthrough, which brings me to ↓
• The DB/wiki says that the engine produces radioactive contaminants, but no word on how/where. From a quick sandbox session I see that the 9x3 deposition rectangle below the engine is still there, but trying to deposit contaminants in a bath of liquid below the engine, I get a LOT more radiation from the fallout that condenses and settles down in the bath as waste, and sometimes even more from a small puddle that spills over:
  
  BTW here too I've had a radiation explosion, would really love to know why.

EDIT - some additional questions:

• I don't suppose it's possible to completely empty a radbolt chamber without disconnecting it from power? Or being lucky/sneaky with the radbolt paths - as any partial bolt will be stored (the UI is misleading in presenting stored radbolts as integer) cannot be fired, but will make the chamber consume power regardless.

[asurendra]

Radbolt port needs about a second to properly consume radbolt. If in this exact second another radbolt moves in, consumption aborts and usual radbolt explosion happens. I guess this is what you see. Nothing really catastrophic here, but both radbolts will be lost. If your production exceed your needs you can ignore that entirely

 

Upd. Do not let your radbolts fly to nowhere. They will hit out-of-bounds neutronium, decrease its mass and, sooner or later, break it entirely, leading to weird effects. Better return them to chamber or build a wall from cheap material which you can repair

[myxal]

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction - what I didn't know is that radbolts will collide with other radbolts. So tweaking the thresholds so that the generators fire simultaneously is the cause of explosions inside the bee room. Outside, it's the ports. It's not just any input port that's a problem - a reflector, joint plate, or a building with enough storage to consume all radbolts will accept radbolts flying 1 space apart with no issue:

What is a problem is a pair of radbolts flying past an input port of a consumer that isn't full, but can't accept the entire dose of the first bolt - then the input port will consume the 1st bolt, generate the remainder radbolt just as the 2nd bolt is flying past the port, resulting in a radbolt collision.

Unlike a collision with solid tiles/cells etc. radbolt collisions produce hot fallout, so I'll definitely be sorting this out, just to avoid the mess of unexpected liquid blobs being where they shouldn't be. And definitely put the chamber's automation input on a timer.

[Primalflower]

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