ghkbrew

This is my take on the (hot) steam vent tamer. I call it optimal because it never wastes heat or power. Meaning that it 1) never runs the steam turbines unless your grid needs power, 2) the steam turbines are never run with steam above 200C and 3) the vent is never over-pressurized. I don't think I've seen any builds that have all 3 of these properties. The design makes use of a few "advanced" concepts, but is entirely pre-space materials. The best way to describe is probably by tracing the path of water through the machine. When the steam is emitted from the vent it is quickly sucked up by the first bypass pump. An un-powered door pump then moves it into the 4x4 storage chamber. The bypass pump is necessary to remove steam from the vent chamber fast enough to prevent over-pressurization. The door pump is needed because during long periods of over production steam pressure can easily go above 1000kg/tile and block the liquid vent. From the "storage" chamber the steam passes through 3 pressure sensor controlled mechanized airlocks. All 3 are set to open if the pressure is below 20kg. These are act as a pressure regulator and prevent high pressure 500C steam from being pumped into the turbine steam chamber and raising its temperature above 200C. The steam is then pumped into the steam turbine chamber by a second bypass pump which is controlled by a temperature sensor. Whenever the temp goes below 180C hot steam is injected. The 95C exhaust water from the turbines passes by a pressure sensor controlled liquid vent. If the pressure in the chamber is below 20kg the water is emitted cooling the chamber. If the steam pressure is already at max (since we're injecting steam from the steam vent) the liquid vent is disabled and the exhaust water leaves the tamer. Automation: Plumbing Overlay: Power Overlay: One other nice thing about this design is that it's entirely accessible. If the mechanized doors are opened, a dupe can enter though the steam vent chamber (which is in near vacuum unless it's actively erupting) and access the entire internal space. The bypass pumps double as liquid locks :)

I've also heard you can bait them with regolith debris. Just make sure you sweep up all the other free food they have access to. This is of course hearsay, since I just make a priority 8 dropper for shove vole eggs which drops into my wild starvation farm and the problem sorts itself.

I've been using a modified version of @Nxf7's farm here. One of it's (many) cool features is a very reliable 1kg/cycle feeding method. The idea is to load the algae onto a shipping rail in 1kg chunks, then once per cycle open the conveyor chute for 1s to drop out exactly 1 chunk. I've played around restricting the sweeper by automation or with doors and it seems to be much more finicky. The length of time the sweeper has to be active seems to depends on how far the arm has to move. If you interrupt the sweeper in the middle of an action it will drop the algae, so you have to give it exactly the amount of time to perform 1 action (no more no less). What's worse is the needed time seems to be game speed dependent.

Like @TheMule said, it's there's not much difference between the two in terms of heat dissipation. The thermal calculations for debris are identical whether it's on a rail or not. What's nice about the rail method is you're processing 20kg chunks at a time. So you can cool each chunk down to a usable temperature before processing the next bit. If you simply put everything in a door, all debris combines into a single pile and you end up with a massive pile of partially cooled (but still hot) debris. My advice: if you want a massive heat battery and don't care about recovering the material (geothermal power) use the door method. If you want the cooled material (metal volcano) use the rail method.

Actually that might have done it by itself. Don't rockets shake the debris on the floor below them? They no longer deposit regolith on the opposite side of 1 tile thick walls. The debris shaking with impacts seems to be unchanged.

I see you built a rocket silo around the critical point. Is there any chance a meteor hit the wall next to the debris? I know the impact from a meteor can jostle debris around 2 tiles below a blast door. My guess would be something similar happened here. A meteor struck and glitched most of the debris into the solid insulated tile where it stopped transferring heat. Then on reload the game notices there's debris in the wall and pops it out to the right.

In addition to pumping the magma you can do something like this to get to the bottom of the core to drain it from there.

The LOH and LOX are flaking (aka partial melting/ partial evaporation). It allows 5kg of a liquid to phase up if its next to a hot solid. Unfortunately it also completely ignores thermal conductivity. So it will continue to happen until the walls have cooled to LOX temperatures. The consensus seems to be to use gold tiles surrounded by vacuum to avoid it. ( they'll cool down fast and stop flaking the liquids). You'll probably need to separate they two tanks so the no longer share a wall.

On second thought, regolith falls... regolith tiles moves down by opening doors, debris moves up on rails = counterflow heat exchanger!

You can't mine the regolith with doors, but you can use them to clear the debris. Regolith tiles will sit on top of vertical doors (even when they're open), but debris will fall in. So a single line of vertical doors can be used as a power-free door pump to move all the regolith debris to a single collection point. The only way to avoid that i think is to melt the regolith tiles directly. It would be would take a ton of heat input since you can't counterflow the regolith with the cooling igneous rock, but it seems like something we should try. For science.

The problem is that nothing solidifies in the ideal pre-space range of 125C - 325C. That means for this to work without thermium we either need to use a different heat source or fundamentally change the build. A few possibilities I'm considering: 1) Replace aluminum with lead and use metal refinery heated petroleum as the heat source 2) Go all in on the refinery heating and use molten steel for the coolant and replace aluminum with iron or magma. This would work on Terra and technically be pre-space, but probably too complicated for a newbie. 1 & 2 We could easily due right now, it's just a question of if they're a good idea. These require some R&D 3) Start using the almost identical bug with condensation by evaporting/condensing phosphorus using a steel AT (Note if anyone has a efficient way to quickly evaporate and condense liquids I'd love to hear about it for use in a molten salt reactor) 4) Counterflow debris and molten metal. By using the molten metal to reheat the debris we can reduce the needed heat input to approximately 0, making less efficient high temperature heat sources feasible (kiln, glass forge, metal refinery).

I've tried this in sandbox but had trouble getting high temperatures from it. The issue is that you have to put in low temperature coal which cools the kiln room off. You have to run the kiln in a vacuum to really get it hot, but then there's no way of getting the heat out. I guess you could periodically flood it with molten steel to extract the heat, but that seems complicated. Does anyone have a good auto-kiln set up for high temperatures? It isn't for this setup. The thermium AT is putting out 1e6 DTU/s. A kiln does 20DTU/s.

Ha. I think that did it. 204.5 in both the far left lower tile and the far right lower tile.

OCD successfully un-triggered: The left side is still a couple degrees cooler than the right, but I think I'll just have to live with that FreezerFurnaceDouble 003.sav

Oooh I like. I considered using the bottom tile, but discarded the idea because it's in contact with the heating chamber. In retrospect that's not an issue with the near vacuum quantity of molten lead. Very nice!