Automated solar energy farm in EU

[TunderLock]

TLDR: With split shifts, it's now possible to build and forget a solar farm to generate energy without user input. 

I took a big break from the game and when I came back, I was excited to see solar panels had been implemented, but most of the posts on the forums dealt with how pointless it was in the testing branch. My experience in building in the live cosmic upgrade (CU) was really positive and now in the expression upgrade (EU) the solar farm is completely hands free. 

For those reading older posts, the following drawbacks are no longer present (i) need to cool blast doors (ii) need to manually dig out regolith (iii) high power cost of blast doors (iv) high frequency of asteroids (v) low output of solar panels. All of this has been updated and fixed by the time CU went live. 

How it works

(A lot of what I explain here aren't new approaches, but I'm not sure it's well know so I'll explain it all now. Even WinterNewt (hey mate, love your stuff) declared in a video that "space sucks", which is almost a firey fury of language for a guy that chill.)

The basic three tier approach continues to be staple for a solar farm.
1. Blast doors take the impacts during meteor showers
2. First layer of glass caches regolith when blast doors open.
3. Second layer of glass creates a vacuum layer above it that fully insulates the asteroid heat from the pressurized solar farm below.

The trick has always been dealing with all the regolith, and this is tackled in the following way:

1. There are priority 8 build orders above the first layer of glass (doesn't matter what, it never gets built).
2. Only dupes with the build skill disabled are allowed through the airlock into space. These dupes will infinitely clear all regolith from the build zone but never be able to actually build and block the sunlight.
3. New in CU: you can now split the shifts of your two "clearance" dupes so that at least one is always awake to run up and clear the priority 8 clearance zone. Before CU, a poorly timed afternoon meteor shower could cause issues when your clearance team was asleep.

Additional tips

From my time building this (no debug or sandbox), I have a few extra tips:

1. Step one is build the blast doors, don't bother doing anything unless you're under blast doors. 

2. Don't try sweep any of the debris. There's thousands of tonnes up there. Once you have cleared the build space, lock a dupe up there and use them to build tile and "nudge" thousands of tonnes of debris either (i) up onto the vacuum insulated glass (ii) into a single block you wrap in abyssalite.

3. Don't build the wall tile for creating the pressurized room until after you have cleared the debris. Wall tiles are 500kg of thermal mass each and take a long time to cool down from the 400C if you build them before the hot debris has been dealt with. All the cooling in the picture above is not necessary at all, it's just that I didn't figure out this point until too late and had to delete the heat in my wall tiles. 

4. In the image above, I would shift the first glass layer down 2 cells. Between the two glass layers you only need a 2 high crawl space for dupes to move through. The width of it is irrelevant for insulation as long as its a vacuum. But for the space between blast doors and glass, I think a gap of 6 would be useful, reason being that you want all regolith to fall through when the blast doors open. If there isn't enough space below and they try close on regolith, the door breaks. This happened twice to me in 300 cycles in the extreme rare case of back to back asteroid events and a clearance team dupe that was busy on some priority 9 rescue I had set elsewhere. I bigger gap would nullify this risk.  

5. Build a battery bank for brief night period and enjoy a 100% solar powered base.

6. You don't need to start this big to get net energy gain. Only the right side of my picture was commission from the start (6 panels and 2 satellites) and it was still generating plenty of net energy. 

Possible extension
I think it would be possible to build some sort of logic that, over many cycles, could determine when the meteor season is, allowing you to turn off your satellite array for the 4 cycles of peace season, saving another 4/14 = circa 29% of the power. 

Is this too easy now?
Generally, I feel it is not game breaking. It is free, infinite energy, but the capex to get here is damn expensive; this is a 500 cycle 10 dupe base for me. Even once you've paid for the blast doors and solar panels, dupes still have to head up on occasion and clear debris (even if if they do it automatically). 

It feels a little powerful that once you have gotten here, you can just extend left and right and harness mountains of power. Perhaps if there was a mechanic to limit the marginal gain of extending this set-up e.g. an increasing likely hood that other orbiting asteroids cast shadows as you move away from the centre of the map. Or perhaps more content will come and the room we have up on the surface will be valuable for more than solar panels creating a decision for us to make in how we utilise the space. 

What I would not like to see is some fix that breaks the "infini-build" approach we use to clear the debris automatically. Yes I feel it is kinda cheesy having dupes forever preparing to build but never able to, but I'd much rather see a developer endorsed paint brush tool that lets us declare clearance zones, than a fix that breaks this approach. Having to scroll up every 2 minutes to see if I need to clear debris would not be enjoyable for me, and I understand why people not aware of the infin-build approach never bother with space. 

Note

The bug of regolith not falling through open blast doors will apparently be fixed in the upcoming hotfix. 

[Tranoze]

11 minutes ago, TunderLock said:

2. Only dupes with the build skill disabled are allowed through the airlock into space. These dupes will infinitely clear all regolith from the build zone but never be able to actually build and block the sunlight.
 

 

I never realize this trick, it trouble me so much to clear the regolith by hand.

Also your build need a layer of conveyor rail (need to be as high as possible so regolith wont overheat the conveyor while stack too high) to sweep all the iron down to the base. Regolith is unneeded, but sweep those iron always help. I cant implement it before because i dont have any idea how to automatic clear those regolith.

And detector system shouldnt be on the same layer as solar layer is, this is how i detect meteor with the best efficient(open every 1/4 cycle for 1 secs, if there are meteor incoming it close immediately). And no need to close them at night since it cost more power than it needed.

Dups can easily climb on top of all the tiles, and and power will automatic shut when no detection door is close.

 

[abud]

19 minutes ago, TunderLock said:

I think it would be possible to build some sort of logic that, over many cycles, could determine when the meteor season is, allowing you to turn off your satellite array for the 4 cycles of peace season, saving another 4/14 = circa 29% of the power. 

We can, and it is not so complicated to do so. But I wonder if that really good solution because my solar arrays still generate positive power even in meteor season (solar generated - bunker door - scanner). Probably because I didn't scan continuously, but only 3 seconds scan followed by 60 seconds off.