melter The Meteor Magmaficator Mk 2 - Regolith to igneous rock and steam power!

[Sevio]

Another progress update! The building phase is done, now it just needs to be heated up.

Plumbing overlay in the spoiler:

Spoiler

I ended up adding a vacuum area below the steam turbines so I could have room to put a vacuum storage for hot regolith from the surface and the auto sweeper and loader. The door towards this area is only opened during the evening so dupes don't keep running back and forth when a lot of regolith gets melted. There's also a service corridor to get to where the igneous rock is ejected and I poured petroleum on the floor there so I could build a large battery bank to hold all the steam power.

I've already melted 800 kg of copper by making a tempshift plate diagonally next to magma and pumped it into the metal refinery, so that's ready to go. Now I'm pumping 1 kg/s magma from the bottom of the map through the glass forge pipe to heat up the melting chamber.

To pump up the copper and magma, I put a storage compactor into my wheezewort room, holding 100 kg of plastic to cool down as much as possible. I then had to seal away all the rest of my plastic from my dupes with door access so they would be forced to use the cold plastic to make the mini pump as below:

It started at 15 C but I'm not sure if it will last long enough to pump up that entire top row of magma, if not then I'll have to get creative or just leave it there forever, as I don't want it to drop into the magma and turn into natural gas.

The diamond hotplate in the melting chamber has reached 740 C in a few cycles, once it gets to 1100 degrees I could use the metal refinery to get it heated up even faster. I guess it's time to get a max size stone hatch farm started...

[Sevio]

Several cycles later and some creative pipework to drop some petroleum on my mini magma pump to cool it down again, I've heated up the Magmaficator to the point where it could melt regolith. I ran into a small snag though:

The regolith that melted from the left compactor would turn back into igneous rock instantly every time, so I had to set the compactors to only accept igneous rock to keep more igneous rock from stacking up. Turns out that the left Compactor (made of ceramic) had not heated up to magma temperature yet so it was causing the magma to freeze repeatedly.

The solution was to just keep adding heat until the compactor was heated up, to do that I added an atmo switch next to the metal refinery that I could use to override the safeties and force hot liquids through the hot plate. Making some glass, ordering some refined carbon at the kiln and making steel in the refinery really helped and now it's chugging along quite nicely!

[blash365]

How many cycles did it take your work force to build it? How big was your workforce?

How many resources would you prepare before starting? Why did you not close the gap in the wall down by the turbines?

[Sevio]

3 minutes ago, blash365 said:

How many cycles did it take your work force to build it? How big was your workforce?

I'm afraid I forgot to keep track, but I would put the building itself at somewhere 30-50 cycles. My total population is 7 dupes but there were only 4 exosuit docks allowing access into the vacuum area. A bunch of that time was spent vacuuming the area and pumping out 2 polluted water lakes into my water sieves so progress was slow at times because of that, although I did try to build what I could while waiting around. And of course there was the preparation to dig to the surface for regolith and to create a vacuum area just above the magma biome to make the molten copper and prepare to pump the magma.

The heatup phase took a few cycles too, but not nearly as long as the building.

19 minutes ago, blash365 said:

How many resources would you prepare before starting?

I checked with debug mode to see how much stuff the build used in total but this only counts cell masses so here's a rough estimate:

• Abyssalite: 30 t (But it's safe to say you'll need another 80-100 tons or so just to make an insulated pipeline to the magma biome.)
• Petroleum: 14.9 t (Probably don't need this much in the heat buffer for the turbines but I like it stable there)
• Diamond: 10 t (I only dug out about 2 pockets of it and that was enough)
• Gold Amalgam: 4 t
• Gold: 6 t
• Wolframite: 4 t
• Tungsten: 1.5 t
• Iron Ore: 8 t
• Iron: 6 t
• Naphtha: 30 kg
• Ceramic: 15 t (you can cut this down by replacing all the nonmetal pipes in the turbine area with igneous rock, or even in part of the heat exchanger if you're brave, or bite the bullet and use more abyssalite, insulated or not)

 

25 minutes ago, blash365 said:

Why did you not close the gap in the wall down by the turbines?

That gap is what I used to give my dupes access to help balance out the petroleum that was slightly overfilled on one side of the pool. Since the whole area is vacuum, there wasn't really a point to closing it up, but I could always put some abyssalite back just in case of a breach.

[Sevio]

So I've let the Magmaficator chug along nicely, it's nearly hot enough to be able to start the first turbine. it doesn't take much from the refinery to keep running but now's the point where I want to make sure I use up the hot rocks that I create with it. So I put down some auto sweepers and conveyors to move it to a nearby Rock Crusher I set up, as well as to a distant stone hatch farm.

The Crusher has an auto sweeper that can supply it but whenever I queue up some sand from igneous rock, the sweeper does nothing and a dupe still comes over to bring rock from the main base. How can I make sure the sweeper is always the one that supplies the rock?

[psusi]

Rather than use tons of insulated abyslite pipes for the magma, why not just run normal piles through a vacuum tunnel?

When hot rocks are crushed, does the sand keep the same temperature?  Or does it go to the temperature of the crusher?

 

[Sevio]

2 hours ago, psusi said:

Rather than use tons of insulated abyslite pipes for the magma, why not just run normal piles through a vacuum tunnel?

Non-insulated abyssalite pipes do exchange temperature with their contents and any solids/liquids they are under. It's already noticable with geyser water so if I did that, the magma would heat up the abyssalite and itself cool down so it wouldn't be as hot when it got to the melting chamber and if it ever bunched up to more than 1 kg in the pipes it would also freeze and break the pipes. You would also be heating up your base quite a bit.

2 hours ago, psusi said:

When hot rocks are crushed, does the sand keep the same temperature?  Or does it go to the temperature of the crusher?

I looked closely once when I ordered it crushed and I think the sand keeps the same temperature as the input.

So far the best I can do is set the receptacle to manual use and priority 9, so the dupes will take rocks from there instead of my base, but I still can't force the sweeper to do it instead.

[psusi]

17 minutes ago, Sevio said:

Non-insulated abyssalite pipes do exchange temperature with their contents and any solids/liquids they are under. It's already noticable with geyser water so if I did that, the magma would heat up the abyssalite and itself cool down so it wouldn't be as hot when it got to the melting chamber and if it ever bunched up to more than 1 kg in the pipes it would also freeze and break the pipes. You would also be heating up your base quite a bit.

How would you be heating up your base?  If the pipe is in a vacuum, it can't exchange heat.

[Sevio]

Just now, psusi said:

How would you be heating up your base?  If the pipe is in a vacuum, it can't exchange heat.

Fair point, you would just be heating up the abyssalite. However the abyssalite has a lot of heat capacity so you would have to pump a lot more magma and it would still risk freezing. Also making a vacuum tunnel all the way from the bottom of the map to the middle isn't exactly trivial either. In my estimation you can dig out enough abyssalite for the insulated pipeline faster than making the vacuum tunnel.