CO2 Control

[WanderingKid]

So while I'm stuck here with a couple of my projects waiting to figure out when the ever increasing pressure problem for my designs will be addressed or fixed, I've been thinking.  This, usually, is the first sign of trouble.  The second is when I get a few ideas in my head... then it's all over.  Sorry for the wall, it's been on my mind a bit.

Let's skip Chlorine for a moment.  If there's an eventual reason for it the devs have in mind, we don't know it yet.  It's in the way and there and can easily be controlled by liquifying it, since the only chlorine production locations are Chlorine vents, which is much simpler to avoid using if you don't have some use for the chlorine (such as a squeaky puft farm or something).

So that leaves us CO2.  CO2 is hard to control in a liquefier. Yes, it can be done, and I think I have a pretty well tuned, modular system for it for it's g/s control.  It also costs 240w for every 250-275g/s you want to be able to control.  It's certainly not the most efficient approach.  The problem with alternate approaches, such as an aquatuner, which can move a lot more heat mass around, is that … well... it can move a LOT more heat mass around.  CO2 is rather temperamental in traveling between gas and solid, and shipping systems so far don't have a pickup option for frozen CO2.  Any frozen gas, for that matter.  So, it needs to make sure it stays as a liquid and can't adjust.

With some plastic and enough space, we can high pressure vent it.  This gives us a fine place to hold it for a while until we need to use it.  Getting the plastic though basically requires you to already have a place to put the CO2 and the vent up.  Even then, volume can only do so much.  A petro generator puts out 500g/s of CO2.  Ignoring the cost of moving the CO2 somewhere useful, that means every 16s you're pushing 8kg into your storage.  How large was that storage again?  It becomes unwieldy, at best.

So storing it in gas, liquid, or solid form all have their own downfalls, some more significant than others.

We can vent it.  There are ways we can setup drifts from the bottom of the base to use compressor vents to a giant tunnel to the vacuum of nothing. If you want to be specific about it we can just send all our pipes up there.  It's a HUGE mass reduction, however... but does that matter?  It would really depend on the length of your expected game.  Assuming you're trying to recover as much of the 'useless' mass of CO2 eventually, this venting tactic would not be sustainable.

We can wash it.  Skimmer + Sieve.  Endless loop producing polluted dirt.  300 g/s of CO2 becomes 200 g/s of Polluted dirt.  Certainly not mass neutral, but it's only a 33% mass loss.  Forget the expense in power of getting these things done.

So, can't store it, can't vent it, and we can't clean it.  What the heck can we do with it?  How can we handle CO2 without mass loss that doesn't require dives into the oil pits armed with plastic pitchforks and hugging nets attached to our exosuit belts?

I'm at a loss, honestly.  Right now my best approach costs 240w for 250g/s of storage, which means I'm costing around 1/4 of the power of a petro generator in gas pumps, thermo regulators, and the occasional liquid pump push to move the PH2O around.  Nevermind cooling the thing, that's a different concern altogether. 

Nat Gas Generators are obviously much less painful to output control for multiple reasons, if for no other reason then the cost of storing them requires 240w*# of gas pumps required and you typically already have systems to handle the PH2O, if for no other reason than to store your pacus.

At the beginning of our ride into the lands of CO2 is the Coal Generator.  His measly 20g/s is almost laughable in the face of petro generators, but it's also early enough in the game that unless you're planning to do a terrarium build, that's enough to make sure you build with care and expecting to dump pit the CO2 for a while.

So, where's all of this going?

Well, I suppose it starts with have I missed anything in the early game for CO2 controls?  The skimmer/sieve is typically a first step for atmo controls on a base, but I'm wondering if there's a simpler way to get it cleaned up earlier, other than dig for Moria.  Also, what late game controls do you use for heavy CO2 volume, and what do you considered to even be a heavy CO2 volume.  I'm mostly talking about play bases, sandbox gets to break a bunch of rules and it's fine for testing for me, but I've tried to keep all my playthroughs sandbox free, so I suppose I'm running into things that I just don't hear about often.

[Neotuck]

Given how dirt is now valuable best make a loop with carbon skimmer and water sieve.  Then compost the polluted dirt

1kg CO2 = 666g dirt

[Zarquan]

CO2 is pretty benign, honestly.  It doesn't stop your plants from growing.  Generally, I dig a deep pit and put one of my algae deoxidizers at the bottom.  I find that helps compress the CO2 in the short term.  I also sometimes pump from the pit in to a room I want CO2 in, like a farm or a food storage place..  Usually, my first order of business is to dig as far down as possible and get a couple wild slicksters at the bottom of the pit.  Then I build a ranch with the slicksters and have them eat all the CO2.

If you are not above exploits, you can also infinitely compress by putting a vent in water less than 2 kg. 

[Miravlix]

After cosmos, you always can find a reason to use all CO2 on a map, even if you have geysers creating it.

 

Chlorine seems good for creating clean rooms, like slime->algae factory or just cleaning storage.

 

Though I'm wondering if it doesn't have good uses because it heat and cool slowly, I added a wort to my clean storage and the gas is getting really cold, cooling down the containers and preventing high heat stored stuff from cooking the environment. I guess it result in the stored items temperature change is slowed?

[Sevio]

In most of my survival games the last few updates, I haven't needed to do much CO2 control beyond digging down so it has a place to go. But I also run my bases with relatively few dupes and stick with hamster wheels and hydrogen for a long time until I can send the Co2 to slicksters.

If I would run with more dupes and/or dip into coal generators or get an early NatGas setup, I'd probably take the solution of cleaning it with carbon skimmers so I can produce more dirt with the sieve.

For late game Co2 handling, a ranched slickster can eat up to 33.33 g/s of Co2 and you get oil or petroleum out of it so that is by far the best way to handle it. And it should be enough to let you handle whatever Co2 output your base can produce.

[PhailRaptor]

8 hours ago, Miravlix said:

Though I'm wondering if [chlorine] doesn't have good uses because it heat and cool slowly, I added a wort to my clean storage and the gas is getting really cold, cooling down the containers and preventing high heat stored stuff from cooking the environment. I guess it result in the stored items temperature change is slowed?

Chlorine makes a very poor coolant.  It has both a low Heat Capacity (how much heat it can store per gram) and a low Conductivity (how fast heat moves into or out of it).  The only real advantage to using it is "thermal inertia".  That is, when you want to avoid changes in temperature, it can take a really, really long time with Chlorine.

But you are greatly limiting the overall output of any system you use Chlorine in instead of Hydrogen, especially as it relates to Wheezeworts.  The thing about Wheezeworts is that they remove temperature based on degrees, not actual heat energy.  When it processes a 1 kg packet of Chlorine, a Wheezewort will remove a substantially smaller quantity of heat energy from it than it would Hydrogen, despite both packets having their temperature reduced by the same 5 C.  This is because Hydrogen has a much higher Heat Capacity.

Really, Chlorine is only useful for 2 things -- growing Balm Lilies for your Woolly Dreckos to convert into Phosphorite, and for feeding Squeaky Pufts to get Bleach Stone for Hand Sanitizers.  Phosphorite is unquestionably useful.  Hand Sanitizers are questionably so.

[WanderingKid]

14 hours ago, Sevio said:

For late game Co2 handling, a ranched slickster can eat up to 33.33 g/s of Co2 and you get oil or petroleum out of it so that is by far the best way to handle it. And it should be enough to let you handle whatever Co2 output your base can produce.

Oddly enough, I just realized slicksters are a 50% mass consumer.  To supply a petro generator full time, at 500g/s of CO2, would require ~15 slicksters.  Let's assume molten slickster, for ease.  At 20kg/cycle in, you expect 10kg/cycle out (on average).  That means you'll get 150kg/cycle of petro out.  At 2kg/s petro in, that'd require 1,200 kg/cycle.

I guess I needed to do the math, I'd thought the slicksters were a lot more powerful.  They're more cleaning system than fuel supplement.

I've played around with chlorine coolant systems and as @PhailRaptor mentioned, the heat transfer rates are miserable compared to other options.  Also the volume is a bit low for anything but small systems unless you're tapping a vent for it.  My current modular build I'm trying to perfect has yet to even get 2,000kg for the initial primer systems, nevermind fill the storage tank.

[Zarquan]

23 minutes ago, WanderingKid said:

Oddly enough, I just realized slicksters are a 50% mass consumer.  To supply a petro generator full time, at 500g/s of CO2, would require ~15 slicksters.  Let's assume molten slickster, for ease.  At 20kg/cycle in, you expect 10kg/cycle out (on average).  That means you'll get 150kg/cycle of petro out.  At 2kg/s petro in, that'd require 1,200 kg/cycle.

I guess I needed to do the math, I'd thought the slicksters were a lot more powerful.  They're more cleaning system than fuel supplement.

I've played around with chlorine coolant systems and as @PhailRaptor mentioned, the heat transfer rates are miserable compared to other options.  Also the volume is a bit low for anything but small systems unless you're tapping a vent for it.  My current modular build I'm trying to perfect has yet to even get 2,000kg for the initial primer systems, nevermind fill the storage tank.

Generally, it is better to boil the crude oil in to natural gas in a late-game scenario,  You get far more energy and water, but less return on CO2 for the slicksters, but it still has greater returns on power and water.

Slicksters used to be much more powerful.  They got nerfed when we gained the ability to breed them because the old version would have been far too powerful if they weren't nerfed (especially with the old nat gas generators).  But there is also no harm in having slicksters because the CO2 does need to be removed and you can eat their eggs when you have more than you need and meat when they die of old age.  Therefore, not only do you get rid of CO2, but they can likely be your primary food source, saving you water or dirt on plants!

[Carnis]

I'm facing My first co2 crisis after 500hours played.

55natgas gen, 76 duplicant. Produce 2.7kg per second.

Turned off The water producing generators, but Even just breaking Even vs dups Will need to delete 1.5kg CO/second.

Slicksters are the obvious solution. Ive a system of 3 x96 ranch throughput the entire oil biome. One conveyor loader and one sweeper per ranch can remove all eggs / expecting, If you Limited the floor to 9 tiles.

Growing all eggs + incubating on 7 incubators, co2 rising still =]. It will eventually go down and se can stop all farming until CO levels normalise. One slickster is 666kcal/cycle as barbeque. I plan to freeze them in subzero oil.