My regolith powered steam turbines are producing a BLISTERING 80 KW.
…
I’ve been robbed! LOL
Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been
Oh wait, there’s hardly any steam in there yet. Phew. I was wondering why it was so low. The average density is only 30 g/tile. It needs to be much higher to power a turbine effectively (I think I read somewhere about 1.5 kg/tile minimum).
224 grams of super coolant escape into my water supply. Oops. Someday a dupe is going to be taking a drink of water and be like “I found the missing super coolant.”
Sometimes when I’m playing this game I feel like I’m in Asimov’s Foundation universe and I’m facing a Seldon crisis.
“By now, you should have food and oxygen production mastered. But to truly grow you need electricity. …”
Man, now I want reread Foundation again.
I think I have more of The Martian in mind when building. Heat, water, food, air–all constantly on the verge of failing and me doing everything in my power to keep the pieces together.
I can see The Martian comparisons too. Man, loved that book as well.
Did you read his second book Artemis? It wasn’t as good as The Martian but still a good read.
This shall no longer be known as the Space Biome! No, it will now be known as the Drywall Biome.
Sure it taking a long time to build all that drywall. 
Yeah, agreed. The protagonist wasn’t quite as compelling, and the setup not quite as believable… but I still enjoyed it.
That reminds me of another ONI wish list item. The most annoying thing about drywall is that you can’t build walls on top of it. If you ever have to move a wall around, you have to deconstruct the old wall, exposing your base to vacuum, then deconstruct the drywall in the new place (for more vacuum), then reconstruct the wall and drywall in the new place. Drywall should be its own layer, allowing me to just build it everywhere in a region and then build normal walls on top.
Yes, I would love this. I’m not looking forward to actually building the living areas and such. It’ll be a pain. Even if it would just replace the drywall in one go, like when you build a different tile on top of another tile would be a huge improvement.
Yeah, that would be fine, too. The weird part is that it feels like an artificial restriction; drywall (and tempshift plate) is clearly already a sort of special case since you can put normal buildings in front of it. And yet it somehow still collides with normal tiles.
Any idea why my cargo bays come back about 75% full? I’m going to a carbon asteroid, so everything is solid. I would expect my cargo bay to be full no?
There are two possibilities I know of:
- You’re close the max range of your rocket. At a certain point, your rocket will sacrifice cargo to make it back to the base. I think it’ll tell you this on the left-hand status panel in the starmap.
- You’ve pulled too much mass from the target. If you keep going to the same destination, it’ll deplete and you won’t get a full load back after that. It slowly refills over time, but if you want more frequent missions you’ll have to spread out the targets. I think it’ll say in the rocket status if you won’t get the full cargo capacity back.
Ahhh, so the max range indicator doesn’t include cargo weight. Makes sense now. So I need to add a bit more fuel to carry the cargo back. Thanks!
Hmm. I think it is actually that I overvisited. I knew about the overvisting mechanic but I wasn’t really tracking it.
Almost ready to start moving in.
Just about done moving to the new base on the surface.
I just need to move my industry to just under the main base. Basically, anything that needs a dupe skill will be just under the base, everything else will be elsewhere.
The idea is to minimize travel time for my dupes.
OK, I’m still not as far along in the game as everyone else, but I do have my first aquatuner/steam turbine setup going. I’m using it to chill a big cistern of water I plan to use to cool other things. That cistern may be bigger than I need it to be; the aquatuner’s been running continuously for a long time, but it’s close. I plan to keep it around 1 degree. The problem is, the steam turbine gives me disappointingly little power back. Even with the aquatuner running continuously, the turbine only runs maybe 1/8 of the time, and when it does run it only gets up to about 240W. Does this setup just not get any more efficient until you get super coolant, or did I do something wrong?
Farming sleet wheat?
Big cisterns are good. Lots of buffering for when you use a lot of water at once and it needs to refill. Same net energy use, aside from the initial chilldown.
You didn’t say, but I predict you’re using oil or petroleum as coolant. Otherwise, the water would be freezing in the pipes if you’re shooting for 1 C.
Oil has miserable heat capacity, and so the aquatuner just doesn’t put out enough heat to drive a turbine at more than around 250 W. Water as coolant is much better at ~600 W. And of course supercoolant is best, and can drive a turbine at full blast and then some (>1000 W).
If you aren’t farming wheat, can you get away with warmer temperatures, like 15 C? Then you can use water directly as coolant. Otherwise, either live with the low efficiency of oil or get some supercoolant.
Just realized something: polluted water has a significantly lower freezing point than water (-20 C), but the same heat capacity. That means you can use it as a coolant for temperatures near 0 C. You have to be a little careful that you don’t get it too cold, so you need some thermostat automation, but it can work.
Just as a reminder in case you aren’t aware–one pass through an aquatuner cools by 14 C, regardless of the fluid. That’s why if you’re cooling to 1 C, you need something with a lower freezing point, since it’ll come out of the aquatuner at -13 C. That’s also why you want a high heat capacity–the mass is fixed (10 kg/s), and the temperature difference is fixed (14 C), so the heat capacity is what controls the amount of heat that the aquatuner moves.
Keep in mind as well that the turbine cannot convert heat into electricity that doesn’t exist. You’re only moving heat, not creating it. So if the area your cooling isn’t very hot, then the turbine won’t run for very long. There’s not much heat to convert. So the steam turbine will always do what it can.
The other factor to keep in mind is the material of the aquatuner. A steam turbine will only convert steam of heat equal to or higher than 125 C. But a gold amalgam aquatuner usually should be shutdown around 125 C (that’s the overheat temperature). You can get away with spiking it up to 130-135 C for a moment of two but that’s about it. So, it is difficult for the aquatuner to maintain the steam turbine reaction. Once you have steel, you can easily heat the aquatuner up to 250 C (275 is the failure point), and hence maintain the reaction … except remember point #1 above. You can only convert heat that actually really exists. If there’s no heat, then there’s no reaction.
So yes, depending on the situation, it is entirely plausible that the steam turbine might not engage that much. But I wouldn’t worry about it too much either. In such a situation, the aquatuner should be hardly running.
Note, that there is an initialization cost as well. Again, since the steam turbine can only work on 125 C steam, you have to pay the upfront cost of getting the initial supply of water up to 125 C. So hot water is best (if you have a vent with 95 C water use that). If you put 7 C water in there, you’ll have to pay to heat it up. What do I mean by pay to heat it up? Well, your aquatuner will have to run with basically no return.
So your cooling unit might still be in the initialization phase, where your still paying the bulk of the cost to get up to a reliable temperature, and there may not be too much heat in the area to sustain it.
In this case, what I do is extend the piping such that I’m cooling a larger area. Cooling a larger area means I’m absorbing more heat. More heat means a more sustained conversion. It is all a balancing act. You don’t want to cool so much of an area that you cannot keep up (more of an issue with gold amalgam than steel or thermium).
As an example, my steel aquatuner in my new base is cooling the entire living area plus the kitchen. But there’s not really that much heat there, that’s why I’m doing the whole thing. I have a couple of electrolyzers, jukebot, espresso machine, a few light bulbs, and the stoves. So that one cooler is very capable of cooling that entire area and the combination of all of those devices produces some decent heat to convert. However, if I had run the cooling only through the kitchen, then there might not be enough heat to absorb.
I was actually considering last night to turn cooling into one giant relay. So rather than separate systems, have one LONG pipe that runs through coolers (aquatuner+turbine) in different areas. That way I’m guaranteed to absorb all the heat, and I’ll make the temperature in the entire base smooth (i.e. some heat from hot areas will be transferred to overcooled areas) instead of being so spikey from blue to green.