What application for Mercury did you find?

[pether]

I played DLC chilling with my dupes, building nice bases and slowly exploring new content. nothing crazy. In my game, I could not find any application for new Mercury element, any buildings made with it melted on spawn. However, I didn't dig deep into excel calculation to find best application for it.

I wonder - did you guys find any interesting application for it? Or does it mean to be inconvinient and useless? 

[RuiPalhas]

I thought I'd use it as a way to melt some ice by heating it up in the Metal Refinery but it only worked as coolant when producing more mercury, otherwise it heated up too much and would vaporise on exit immediately...

So gave up and used it as a liquid lock instead 

[sakura_sk]

I found a use! Checking how quickly dupes can go through their tasks to build something.

Method: build an automation wire (or other building) out of mercury (refined metal, not liquid, although it doesn't matter much). When it is built, you will get a notification  

(the notification: building melted)

[Knurek]

Mercury is nice for an automatic mopping gym as it can be delivered to bottle emptier by an auto-sweeper.

[Carib94]

Building temp minimums is the problem here and they probably need to tweek the Mercury melting point. But I mainly use it for liquid locks, but in Space Out it can be use for rocket platforms at least it has some use there.

[NewWorldDan]

Rocket platforms. They don't exchange heat with the environment, so although they're built at 15C, the game never checks to see if they've melted. 

I guess you could feed it to plug slugs, but the temperatures don't overlap, so either they freeze or the mercury melts.

I've tried, but I can't really find a use for it other than liquid locks.

[imazined]

As a heat exchange medium it's nice.

[Tigin]

- Great insulator for single liquid locks for accessible steam rooms. You don't need a double liquid lock since it barely exchanges heat

- It's convenient to get liquid Mercury on the floor for say a steam turbine. Just build a bunch of radiant pipes made of Mercury (no moving bottles needed)

- Rocket buildings and platform

- Power chips if it's cold enough where it doesn't melt in transit

 

[imazined]

Great insulator? It has a high TC and a very low SHC.

[Tigin]

30 minutes ago, imazined said:

Great insulator? It has a high TC and a very low SHC.

Precisely, so it'll hit the upper limits of heat transfer easily. For example, 90C of 39g (approximate rest mass of mercury)  contacting with 200C steam has a maximum cell-cell heat transfer of (200-92)/4 x 39/1000 x 0.14 or 0.14742 kDTU per tick, which is about 0.7371 kDTU/s of heat leakage.

[imazined]

We use very different formulas to calculate this. I get to heat transfer into the mercury of 26.4 kDTU / tick according to this formula. This would overshoot the temperature of the steam. Is this clamping in your calculation included?

Some sandbox testing. Left top 30g mercury, left bottom full cell of mercury (600kg) and on the right controls with 30g of crude oil and naphtha.

30g of mercury are actually a better insulator than 30g of naphtha. But 600kg of mercury are still a really good conductor.

And that's where my confusion came from. I was thinking about a liquid lock like this:

And I would like to understand your used formula

[StarvingAngler]

I think the primary purpose of mercury is to encourage keeping things at cold temperatures, as that seems to be a big psrt of this dlc. However, because tenperature build minimums exist, everything is built hotter than subzero, which is kinda stupid and invalidates mercury as well as a lot of what this dlc is about.

[Tigin]

1 hour ago, imazined said:

And I would like to understand your used formula

https://oxygennotincluded.wiki.gg/wiki/Thermal_Conductivity#Upper_limits I just plugged the numbers in there. Experimentally my volcano tamer's 1-tile entrance barely changes temperatures in the surrounding areas. 

[Gurgel]

I think Mercury is usable as high-temperature airlocks, since the (comparably) high evaporation temperature. Other than that? No idea. Wires in space that never get touched by any gas?

[2tallyGr8]

8 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Wires in space that never get touched by any gas?

Doesn't the 15C construction heat floor immediately melt those?

[Gurgel]

6 hours ago, 2tallyGr8 said:

Doesn't the 15C construction heat floor immediately melt those?

Hmm. Good question. For buildings it seems to do. No idea whether wires are affected.

[Holld_w117]

Maybe I'll use mercury to build a thermoaquotuner from golden amalgam. In liquid mercury, it will not overheat, with a steam turbine.

[Moondrake]

At the moment, Mercury is even more useless than Chlorine, and that's REALLY saying something. And to add insult to injury, it's been included in MASSIVE quantities. Materials in the game have always been of SOME use, so what gives? Frankly, having to deal with so much of the crap is a pain in the ass and not fun at all.

[goetzjam]

I found a use, power plant chips, only issue is you must make them in a vacuum or really cold place and deliver it to wherever you need otherwise.

 

That being said, the sooner I can remove these from my map the better.

 

 

[Gurgel]

I expect there is a use we do not yet see, i.e. that is not yet implemented. There is too much of the stuff for anything else to be the case. 

[Thorlax]

I used mercury with a thermoaquatuner to keep the new plants in their proper temperature. Done this without the use of a steam turbine, just a thermoaquatuner with a layer of brine along the floor. Can post picture when I get home.