Blast door cleaning

[chemie]

I tried having air lock doors (sideways) with one open tile between them and the blast doors.  Automation cycles them closed-open three times to clear debris once the storm is done  (kind of exploit but whatever).

However, sometimes debris teleports through the blast doors even when closed.  Where ever this happens, the doors then disappear on the cycling step.  Not sure if they melt or break.  But no more air lock door which defeats the purpose of the system since now you have to micro dupe rebuilding. Note this is all done in vacuum to avoid overheating which is also a pain.

So solar right now seems silly.  No power during storms or night.  No way to automate debris removal so micro to dig out debris.  Plus the steel for the blast doors takes 100's of cycles to make enough egg shells (I actually used sandbox for the first time; I hate self cheating but I spawned some steel out of frustration on that broken steel tech tree).

So is there a viable debris removal system?

[Neotuck]

Nope, like all new content there is a lot of balancing that needs to be done

Just look at the steam turbine, it's been out since the job update and it's still not balanced enough to be worth it

[JonnyMonroe]

They really need to introduce some kind of boring arm that functions like a sweeper arm but digs out tiles in it's area.

[Neotuck]

Just now, JonnyMonroe said:

They really need to introduce some kind of boring arm that functions like a sweeper arm but digs out tiles in it's area.

With a higher than 50% efficiency so it would be more effective than dupe miners

[chemie]

3 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

With a higher than 50% efficiency so it would be more effective than dupe miners

I care more about not having to micro vs speed.  You have no idea when the storms are done so if you are busy elsewhere, you dont even know to dig it out.

[Neotuck]

Just now, chemie said:

I care more about not having to micro vs speed.  You have no idea when the storms are done so if you are busy elsewhere, you dont even know to dig it out.

I know dupes will auto dig if there is a blueprint over tiles

Perhaps you might be able to figure something out with this

[JonnyMonroe]

56 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

I know dupes will auto dig if there is a blueprint over tiles

Perhaps you might be able to figure something out with this

could work. lay out a blueprint for something then lock away the materials so it becomes unbuildable? I'll have a play with the idea and see what I can come up with.

 

Still a bit of a janky solution though.

[Coolthulhu]

1 hour ago, chemie said:

No way to automate debris removal so micro to dig out debris.

Put a building blueprint on it. Make sure it can't be completed. That way dupes will clear it as if to prepare for building, at priority equal to building priority.

Oil well is expensive but always works for this. Other buildings may require an extra layer of doors and may actually be built even if you open the doors. Not sure why and when - I had identical door/compost pairs, with all doors open, and some of them got completed while others complained about lack of foundation (as it should be).

[chemie]

3 hours ago, Neotuck said:

...

Just look at the steam turbine, it's been out since the job update and it's still not balanced enough to be worth it

That's my worry.  If they keep throwing stuff in and then not care it is broken.  The steam turbine has been broken since they released it and they dont seem to care.  At least, in theory, solar is not totally broken.  Steel is technical not broken, just not practical at any scale.  Will they fix or just move on like before?

[Neotuck]

3 minutes ago, chemie said:

That's my worry.  If they keep throwing stuff in and then not care it is broken.  The steam turbine has been broken since they released it and they dont seem to care.  At least, in theory, solar is not totally broken.  Steel is technical not broken, just not practical at any scale.  Will they fix or just move on like before?

Or they fix exploitable bugs that actually make the game more playable

[0xFADE]

I just send people up there to dig em out.  All I can do right now.  Some sort of melting plan would be pretty sweet though.  There is way too much vertical space needed between the solar panels and the sensors so there is plenty of room to try something exotic.

[JonnyMonroe]

10 hours ago, 0xFADE said:

I just send people up there to dig em out.  All I can do right now.  Some sort of melting plan would be pretty sweet though.  There is way too much vertical space needed between the solar panels and the sensors so there is plenty of room to try something exotic.

If you make your Windows out of diamond you could use molten glass to melt out the regolith but you would need to use an extra heat source to keep the glass molten (A volcano could work). The molten regolith on vacuum would just get deleted.

Yeah i think i could build that. Regolith has low thermal capacity so it takes little heat to melt it but it does need to be over 1400c. Build a closed pipe loop and fill it from a glass forge, run it past a volcano to keep it hot enough and then pipe it over your diamond window ceiling. If you build your blast doors on the very, very top row of the map you get slightly less regolith to deal with as the piles can only go 2 tall and then get deleted. I'll do the math now to figure out how much thermal energy is needed to do this and thus how viable it is. It would be a fairly complex build as you need to keep the volcano clean of solid igneous rock or the glass might get too cold, and although rego has low heat capacity you would need to melt a lot of it each shower (I'd guess about 9t per solar panel). I'll post results when i have them. On the plus side this has 0 power cost once the glass forge is done so it doesn't eat into your solar gains.

 

Edit - Not really viable. It's possible to melt out regolith in this way but the game doesn't provide you with nearly enough heat. Even a top end volcano would strugle and heat multiplying methods won't work as they all rely on phase changes that occur below the heat range we're working in. If you had enough sources of lime you might be able to generate a lot more heat by running the molten glass through a metal refinery that was refining steel with 100% up time but that's not feasible either.

 

[0xFADE]

It is worth giving it a try but the sheer amount of regolith that falls from the sky changes the whole oxygen generation game.  It is so much you can set up rooms that you fill with polluted oxygen and use tons of air deodorizers to produce clean air and turn the regolith in to clay which you can then turn in to more ceramic.

Or use the regolith in the sieve to make polluted dirt to do whatever with.  You can use sweeper arms to be sure those things don't get sand delivered.

Those tools become more valuable when you have an infinite supply of filtration medium.

[JonnyMonroe]

38 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

It is worth giving it a try but the sheer amount of regolith that falls from the sky changes the whole oxygen generation game.  It is so much you can set up rooms that you fill with polluted oxygen and use tons of air deodorizers to produce clean air and turn the regolith in to clay which you can then turn in to more ceramic.

Or use the regolith in the sieve to make polluted dirt to do whatever with.  You can use sweeper arms to be sure those things don't get sand delivered.

Those tools become more valuable when you have an infinite supply of filtration medium.

Whilst this is true, even a small area with regolith digging will supply a huge filtration demand and the rest will still need dealing with. The point of the melting discussion was to reduce dupe and player labour time cleaning solar panels. Blueprint tricks can help with the issue of players needing to manually maintain it but it feels like a very hacky solution, not to mention ugly. I'm still looking Into a melting solution though. Anything workable on a reasonable scale will require heat breeding and probably a 2 step melting process (1 heating loop that keeps the diamond Windows at 1100 or so and another to melt the regolith. This would reduce the amount of heat taken from the glass loop and thus stretch the useful amount you can get from volcanoes and refineries)

[chemie]

I see melting as an exploit or at least a crazy work around for a broken game design.  Just like steam gen.  Yes, there are crazy designs to make it work in theory but they don't work for normal players.

[JonnyMonroe]

2 hours ago, chemie said:

I see melting as an exploit or at least a crazy work around for a broken game design.  Just like steam gen.  Yes, there are crazy designs to make it work in theory but they don't work for normal players.

Not sure how you would class it as an exploit but as a solution to the problem I would agree it's crazy. The time and resources needed to make a working rego melter are silly (not impossible though.)