Is this theory technically correct? Selfsustaining system

[Shmobi]

Hello,

 

i've just started playing and was wondering if it is possible, to create a completely self sustaining base. So i played a bit with a few ideas and looked around on the internet and found this, which basically is just that. But it wasn't build without cheating:

So i tried to build something similar in a normal game and had more or less success. It's half done by now and i am not sure how to continue now. So i tried to use my brain for once and figure out some sort of blueprint how i could make it work. And my solution is pee and puke! This is what i came up with:

It basically is all based on recycling pee and puke into clear water, oxygen and energy. The names of the machines etc. are not entirely correct i imagine and might be hooked up wrong, since in the wiki the connection etc. are not really listed.

 

Here is the question. I am not sure if this could possibly work or if i understood some mechanics wrong and i'd like you to tell me if it's possible the way i thought of it and how it could be improved. Note that i want it to be completely automated and do not want to have to do anything my self. I want them to survive a year without me laying a finger on them.

 

Thanks

Shmobi

[Mast3r07]

Hello, buddy!

I recommend you to check the next update:   http://oxygennotincludedfr.blogspot.com/2017/03/klei-preview-of-first-content-patch-of.html

You will most likely have temperature issues if you put dupes near hot equipment. And how on earth will you be able to constantly run 18 thermoregulators if you dont include more wheels and coal generators? 

And dupes dont produce enough water to keep even one electrolyzer going.

This is just my opinion.

[Shmobi]

Well as i said im pretty new to the game. It's hard for me to judge what consumes how much power. The thermo regulatores can be switched off and on again. Also saw constructions where only 1 regulator was used in a loop to spare energy. This in combination could have  a high impact.

Also please note that this is just a blueprint without any proportions. The type off wall and the distance between the rooms should of course not be the same in the game as  on the blueprint.

Idk how much exactly but i guess you can make them puke at least 2-3 times a day + 1 time peeing of 3 dupes could be enough to run one no? And i guess you can run 3 wheels the whole day since they got nothing better to do in there besides collecting food.

[Mast3r07]

For the "pee" question, check this topic: (it talks about cont water, too)

One thermoregulator uses 240 W, and 18 means 4320 W. One wheel provides 400 W and one coal generator 600 W. You will need more than 3 wheels to maintain this active. You can build like 80 batteries and wait untill they are full of energy, then switch on the 18 thermoregulators. When you reach, lets say, 3KJ on each battery you should turn it off.

[Mast3r07]

Btw, I am using just one thermoregulator(bottom left corner of the screen):

[Shmobi]

I think i've actually already seen your base on another of your posts. Well there would be enough batteries to run it since i use them for clean water production and oxygen cleaning. So the batteries should be there and they should be filled by the electrolyzer and the 3 wheels.

 

Ohh and please be so nice and merge posts instead of post multiple times keeps it cleaner. Unless you answer to another question than your last post.

[bzgzd]

3 hours ago, Shmobi said:

Also saw constructions where only 1 regulator was used in a loop to spare energy.

 

2 hours ago, Mast3r07 said:

Btw, I am using just one thermoregulator(bottom left corner of the screen):

 

I am also using one thermo regulator in a loop to make liquid oxygen for cooling my base, but I don't think it is saving energy.

Compared to 17 regulators in a row it uses around 17 times less energy but needs to run around 17 times longer.

 

[Mast3r07]

Bring in some physics and resolve the exercise. 

It depends on how much time the only thermoregulator is used and the lenght of the enclosed circuit, compared to 17 thermoregulators.

[Shmobi]

I just saw that the material "Abyssalite" stays on -272.16 degrees celcius. Wouldn't it be enough to run normal pipes with the oxygen in it through it? Do pipes cool the transported gas down if the envoirement is cooler than the gas?

[Saturnus]

10 minutes ago, Shmobi said:

I just saw that the material "Abyssalite" stays on -272.16 degrees celcius. Wouldn't it be enough to run normal pipes with the oxygen in it through it? Do pipes cool the transported gas down if the envoirement is cooler than the gas?

Abyssalite has 0(zero) thermal conductivity. Basically it's a solid material that behaves like a vacuum.

[Shmobi]

Which explains why all the matter arround it has average temperature. Thanks for the hint, should have seen that in its details.

[Nativel]

22 minutes ago, Shmobi said:

I just saw that the material "Abyssalite" stays on -272.16 degrees celcius. Wouldn't it be enough to run normal pipes with the oxygen in it through it? Do pipes cool the transported gas down if the envoirement is cooler than the gas?

The materials have termal conductivity, you can find this info in details window of any material in the game when you select it, those parametrs used as multiplier between material are close enought to start termal exchange, also all materials have weight but to understand how much thermal capacity it have you have to multiply weight on heat capacity factor, for abyssalite it will be 1 on 100 kg however look at termal conductivity of abyssalite it's 0 with is mean you will gain 0 termal transfer between abyssalite and rest materials in the game. Hope you will understand, cose I'm russian.

[bzgzd]

3 hours ago, Mast3r07 said:

Bring in some physics and resolve the exercise. 

It depends on how much time the only thermoregulator is used and the lenght of the enclosed circuit, compared to 17 thermoregulators.

Physics??? Noooo ... debug mode!

Start situation - 15 fully loaded batteries 40.0 kJ all and 100kg oxygen ready in pipe.

First method 17 regulators:

http://i.imgur.com/hL15VvW.png (no overlay)

 

Second method one regulator loop with filter:

http://i.imgur.com/pmk1XxX.png

http://i.imgur.com/csIsinl.png (no overlay)
http://i.imgur.com/sdHC1xE.png (pipe length optimal for 100kg)

 

And the result is:
17 regulators left 15.6 kJ in each battery http://i.imgur.com/lZBYvHB.png
1 regulator left 12.6 kJ in each battery http://i.imgur.com/gKmEYr8.png

Those regulators are somehow "intelligent" and don't use power when gas is not going through them so more energy used in loop is probably result of that filter using energy too.

 

Sooo who is using loop is noop like me...

 

[Shmobi]

Nice one, thanks! But wouldn't you be able to disable the power via a switch only for the filter and put it parallel to the loop so if you turn it on a part of the gas is extracted and otherwise it will stay in the loop? That way the filter wouldn't work permanently. Or even better putting it parallel and have both lines with a vent which decides if the filter or the direct loop will be used.

 

Btw how does one start the debug mode?

[SpoonsOnMyElbows]

9 hours ago, Shmobi said:

Hello,

 

i've just started playing and was wondering if it is possible, to create a completely self sustaining base. So i played a bit with a few ideas and looked around on the internet and found this, which basically is just that. But it wasn't build without cheating:

So i tried to build something similar in a normal game and had more or less success. It's half done by now and i am not sure how to continue now. So i tried to use my brain for once and figure out some sort of blueprint how i could make it work. And my solution is pee and puke! This is what i came up with:

It basically is all based on recycling pee and puke into clear water, oxygen and energy. The names of the machines etc. are not entirely correct i imagine and might be hooked up wrong, since in the wiki the connection etc. are not really listed.

 

Here is the question. I am not sure if this could possibly work or if i understood some mechanics wrong and i'd like you to tell me if it's possible the way i thought of it and how it could be improved. Note that i want it to be completely automated and do not want to have to do anything my self. I want them to survive a year without me laying a finger on them.

 

Thanks

Shmobi

Hi Shmobi, that's my design in the first pic
Although it was created (mostly) in debug mode, it's perfectly viable without using cheats of any kind.
I only did it to speed up the testing / building, and i have made a completely self sustaining base (smaller) without debug (see the single prison cell post, although i have made others with oxygen that have not been posted on here too).
The hardest thing to do in such a base is the oxygen cleaning.
Although you don't actually need to, as the dupes can breathe contaminated oxygen just fine.
The reason the clean oxygen is so hard to get going is because of the power requirements.
The only way to get it to work is to have dupes with the "Diver's Lungs" trait, so they use less oxygen.
If you use regular dupes, and you want them to only breathe clean oxygen, they will produce slightly less power that what they need to live.
There are also some other things you could do to micromanage their oxygen consumption.
For example, dupes only need to be breathing half the time. They can hold their breath half on, half off.
So you could design your base with areas that don't have any oxygen at all, and have them hold their breath while passing through, or doing actions in these areas (such as food production / eating areas / etc).

Also, looking at your design, i think you overestimate the amount of water you are going to be producing, as well as the amount of hydrogen, and the amount of power your 1 wheel and hydrogen gas are going to produce.

You will never produce anywhere near enough water to run the carbon cleaners, even with 50 dupes, as every dupe you add will be spending 90% of their time powering up the oxygen cleaning systems.
You can however get rid of unwanted gases by pumping them through a loop, which destroys a little each time.
Or by closing an airlock onto the gas, which will destroy those 2 blocks of gas that it closes on.

One other major problem with having open areas like this, and a gas input feed to the puft room, is temperature.
If there is flow into your food and puft areas, how will you control temperature?
The air from your base is going to be hot. Your dupes wont mind, but your plants, and pufts will.

Pufts are very fragile, and there is no way of getting more in game (even with debug mode!), and there are usually only between 5 and 9 on the entire map, with maybe half of those being viable options to try to capture in regular game mode.
The slime they will produce is not going to be anything significant, and to turn it into algae for oxygen, it's going to require a bucketload of power.
Keep in mind that to run just 1 algae deoxydizer, you need 10 bio distillers running non stop.
This not only requires around 5 dupes working constantly (and not producing power) as they need to pick up the algae dropping from each machine, every 10 seconds, and dump it in the deoxydizer, the 10 bio distillers also need 1200W of power (+ another 120W for the algae deoxydizer).
This means that at a bare minimum (if the dupes didn't consume oxygen or any other resource), you are going to need 4 to 5 for just the power to the distillers and deoxydizer, plus 5 to pickup after the distillers. This would require 10ish dupes, for a maximum oxygen production possible of 600g/s. But this is only if you had a massive room full of pufts, which is not possible.
Realistically, you would be looking at more like +120g/s of oxygen, which is about 1 and a half dupes with the divers lung trait, but it will take up to 10 to run.

Also keep in mind that the carbon scrubbers / filters don't clean the air. They destroy it.
Oxygen will be destroyed in this process (as in the O part of CO2, not clean oxygen), this means that you are losing oxygen in your system that isn't being replaced. So it's not self sustainable. Over time, you will run out of oxygen.
Slime does not produce contaminated oxygen out of nothing, it loses mass and turns into contaminated oxygen.
This means all it's doing is undoing the work the puft did. It's not creating something new.
You need to have something creating oxygen, or contaminated oxygen, or water out of nothing.
The production of contaminated water from vomit / accidents / etc can't be converted into clean water very fast, and especially wont be enough to supply your water requiring machines. It wont come close.
I would suggest adding in some morbs to the puft room, as they create contaminated oxygen from nothing at all.

Goodluck!

 

[bzgzd]

1 hour ago, Shmobi said:

Nice one, thanks! But wouldn't you be able to disable the power via a switch only for the filter and put it parallel to the loop so if you turn it on a part of the gas is extracted and otherwise it will stay in the loop? That way the filter wouldn't work permanently. Or even better putting it parallel and have both lines with a vent which decides if the filter or the direct loop will be used.

 

Btw how does one start the debug mode?

Disabled or not powered filter is not working at all so gas would stop in pipes before it and form 10kg blocks in pipe queue.

But more important thing for people using many regulators in line:

I tested 17 regulator setup with much smaller input and then it is not good and all batteries power is used for much less oxygen. I used valve to limit incoming contaminated oxygen to 100g/s and all 15 batteries where empty after just around 10kg was cooled to liquid and 90kg still in pipes before valve.

So therefore when input is less than 1.2kg/s (i am not sure what exactly is the maximum thermoregulator can take) it is better to disable or switch off first regulator in line (or all of them) and wait for incoming gas to accumulate in pipe before regulators are turned on.

Or in other words thermoregulator uses same power to cool down 10g oxygen block in pipes or 1200g oxygen block so therefore big enough input is needed and probably best is to use incoming pipe filled with some 10kg gas blocks as input buffer.

 

 

[SpoonsOnMyElbows]

24 minutes ago, bzgzd said:

Disabled or not powered filter is not working at all so gas would stop in pipes before it and form 10kg blocks in pipe queue.

But more important thing for people using many regulators in line:

I tested 17 regulator setup with much smaller input and then it is not good and all batteries power is used for much less oxygen. I used valve to limit incoming contaminated oxygen to 100g/s and all 15 batteries where empty after just around 10kg was cooled to liquid and 90kg still in pipes before valve.

So therefore when input is less than 1.2kg/s (i am not sure what exactly is the maximum thermoregulator can take) it is better to disable or switch off first regulator in line (or all of them) and wait for incoming gas to accumulate in pipe before regulators are turned on.

Or in other words thermoregulator uses same power to cool down 10g oxygen block in pipes or 1200g oxygen block so therefore big enough input is needed and probably best is to use incoming pipe filled with some 10kg gas blocks as input buffer.

 

You would only ever use the thermos when you have the gases fully built up to max pressure. Using it any other time would actually lose you oxygen overall.
That's why you would generally have it on a switch.
It produces so much oxygen that you only need to turn it on for a few seconds at a time. Definitely don't leave them on all the time, or as you are saying, you would be pumping tiny bits of gas around for the same power cost of large amounts of gas.
And the power consumption is the biggest limiter in oxygen cleaning.

[Shmobi]

I basically built it now in debug mode. Seems to work fine even when i run everything permanent. Didnt try it on a long run yet tho. What i ve noticed is, that for some reason the base-tiles are spawned in with -31 degrees which causes my plants to stop growing and my oxygen to get rlly cold. since the regulators are only used when there is contamined oxygen they dont run that often, even when they are toggled on permanently. ofc it would be more efficient not to do so, but it seems to work. my 3 dupes run permanently in their wheels unless they are busy eating, peeing them self or pukeing.

But the -31 degrees rlly are a problem.

[SpoonsOnMyElbows]

14 minutes ago, Shmobi said:

I basically built it now in debug mode. Seems to work fine even when i run everything permanent. Didnt try it on a long run yet tho. What i ve noticed is, that for some reason the base-tiles are spawned in with -31 degrees which causes my plants to stop growing and my oxygen to get rlly cold. since the regulators are only used when there is contamined oxygen they dont run that often, even when they are toggled on permanently. ofc it would be more efficient not to do so, but it seems to work. my 3 dupes run permanently in their wheels unless they are busy eating, peeing them self or pukeing.

But the -31 degrees rlly are a problem.

It will 100% not work
Just try doing the math to see why.
You will run out completely.
Think of it this way, the pump will only pump something to the regulators when there is 10g of cont.oxygen.
This means you will use roughly 8000W to process that 1 unit (10g) of cont oxygen.
The maximum this 10g can turn into, it 10g of clean oxygen.
10g of clean oxygen is 1 tenth of a second of air, for 1 dupe.
To power 8000W for that 1 unit, it would take a dupe on the wheel 20 seconds.
This means is needs to become 200 times more efficient just to break even.
One way to increase efficiency is to increase the size of a gas unit down the chain.
The max under normal conditions is 1kg per unit, as the pressure at the gas pump will only reach 1kg.
This is 100x more efficient, but only for a split second. Then it rapidly drops down in efficiency.

And again, where is the oxygen production coming from, not the recycling.
I mean, where is the EXTRA oxygen coming from?
You are losing oxygen with CO2, so unless it is replaced, it will just keep getting lower.

As for the cold tiles in debug mode, place diamond with the painter tool BEHIND the tiles at 300 degrees Kelvin.
The tiles will still say -31 degrees, but they will not change things from room temperature.

 

[Shmobi]

I tried the trick with the 300 degrees k block and the air seemed to stay on room temerature. However my planter boxes kept ejecting the seeds with the reason that the surrounding is to cold. Planterbox it self and air arround it was both at about 25 degrees c. The air behind the planterbox was at -25 degrees c and even when i painted 30 degrees c warm air over it, it would reset for some reason.

[lemmethink]

On 3/11/2017 at 7:02 PM, bzgzd said:

Physics??? Noooo ... debug mode!

Start situation - 15 fully loaded batteries 40.0 kJ all and 100kg oxygen ready in pipe.

...

And the result is:
17 regulators left 15.6 kJ in each battery http://i.imgur.com/lZBYvHB.png
1 regulator left 12.6 kJ in each battery http://i.imgur.com/gKmEYr8.png

Those regulators are somehow "intelligent" and don't use power when gas is not going through them so more energy used in loop is probably result of that filter using energy too.

 

Sorry, but two questions;

1. the longer the output air pipe, the more it cools? Is this a game bug we are taking advantage of?

2. what does the gas filter, filter? O2? I understand that there is suppose to be dirt output as well....

The power requirements to run the Cont-O2 -> O2 is outrageous..... This is a bit like taking the subway all the way to the terminal and around to go back one stop instead of taking a train the opposite direction. Yeah, it gets you where you're going, but it ain't easy....

[Somafied]

I have a self sustaining colony here.

Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iAHjQ5W3X0&t=23s

[bzgzd]

11 hours ago, lemmethink said:

Sorry, but two questions;

1. the longer the output air pipe, the more it cools? Is this a game bug we are taking advantage of?

2. what does the gas filter, filter? O2? I understand that there is suppose to be dirt output as well....

The power requirements to run the Cont-O2 -> O2 is outrageous..... This is a bit like taking the subway all the way to the terminal and around to go back one stop instead of taking a train the opposite direction. Yeah, it gets you where you're going, but it ain't easy....

1. No game bug. Cooling is done by regulator -14 °C every time gas goes through it.
2. Dirt is created when making steam from contaminated water. Here is no dirt made.

This was to compare energy usage between using one thermoregulator in loop versus 17 thermoregulators.
Filter is needed in loop because gas would stay in loop forever so it is used as switch to let gas out of the loop when it has right temperature (after about 3 days looping and getting cooler and cooler in this case).

But 17 regulators in a line are more energy efficient than loop.

 

[lemmethink]

6 hours ago, bzgzd said:

1. No game bug. Cooling is done by regulator -14 °C every time gas goes through it.
2. Dirt is created when making steam from contaminated water. Here is no dirt made.

This was to compare energy usage between using one thermoregulator in loop versus 17 thermoregulators.
Filter is needed in loop because gas would stay in loop forever so it is used as switch to let gas out of the loop when it has right temperature (after about 3 days looping and getting cooler and cooler in this case).

But 17 regulators in a line are more energy efficient than loop.

 

So, the long output pipe is not necessary? what is the filter set to filter out?

I tried a number of different ways to create clean o2, and i used up to 16 regulators, which made a little o2 and one or two pieces of ice and a lot of energy. I tried looping it with 4 regulators which didnt eat a lot of power but didnt generate a lot of clean o2 either.

I'll try 17 and see if that works better. (missed it by THAT much).

I think they should change the name of the building. Its air-con, not thermo regulation as there isnt a temp control on it. There isn't any regulation at all.

[Smartbird]

why do you want water?