Guide to Atmospheric Synthesis

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Additional information: The information on this guide is accurate but incomplete.

Tagged by: Alexkar598 (talk)

Note: This guide was created more than 6 months ago before monstermos and has simply been moved from sandbox to live wiki. Some discrepancies may result, but the most useful bits of information remain. Ignore any statements about LINDA as monstermos has replaced it.

Introduction

Gas synthesis is a precise science, requiring practice, brain cells and more than a fair bit of autism. This guide assumes that you have all three in ample supply, as well as the patience to relentlessly optimize your gas setups for incremental gains. Here, you will learn how to synthesize the gases in large batches, well past the standard amounts you are normally used to, as well as the more faceted aspects of atmospherics that always give you something new to try out.

What you'll need:

• Understanding of basic atmospherics.
• The ability to explain what each piece of piping and machinery dispensable by your RPD does (roughly), especially Heat Exchange systems.
• You must also know how to make an effective turbine engine that doesn't waste too much gas.

Gas Production

Each gas has different reaction requirements. Fulfilling those requirements to synthesize a small amount of gas is quite easy, making them in large batches in excess of 1000 moles in a timely and fuel-efficient manner is what this guide is about.

Tritium

Tritium is the most frequently produced gas in the turbine and for good reason. It is the most energetic non-fusion gas reaction, producing enough heat for the nitryl reaction, heating up fusion canisters to the requisite temperatures, generating radiation for the pluoxium reaction without the use of a supermatter crystal and is required in all the higher level gases. It also makes for great practice, since mastering the techniques required to produce large amounts of it touches on one of the essentials of every other gas reaction. Due to this, it is a good idea to practice tritium synthesis as you'll find it useful for all other reactions.

Tritium is produced when plasma burns under a high concentration of oxygen, specifically, a threshold (known in the code as the super saturation threshold) 96 times more oxygen than plasma. For this reason, only a 1 unit of plasma mixed with 96 more units of oxygen will burn to produce tritium. This is true if we only consider one reaction tick, however the experienced among you know that you can get away with a 97:3 oxygen:plasma ratio and still get tritium. The reason for why this is is because of the oxygen burn rate being low enough that the oxygen replenishment rate rapidly ramps the concentration of oxygen to the point that the feed-in rate of plasma places the ratio of plasma to oxygen above the super saturation threshold. If this isn't clear enough, try understanding the following table:

Fuel component concentrations over time with a 97:3 oxygen:plasma burn.

Tick count	Units of Oxygen	Units of Plasma	O2:Plasma Ratio	Generating Trit?
0	97	3	32.33	N
1	191	3	63.66	N
2	285	3	95	N
3	379	3	126.33	Y

This table is not 100% accurate due to LINDA and other aspects of atmos that complicate the calculations, but demonstrates the point.

As you can see, plasma is always burned off at a rate of 1:1 with the oxygen, resulting in the plasma mole count remaining very low while oxygen keeps ramping up and increasing, eventually to the point that the ratio reaches the super saturation threshold and producing tritium. This applies to any atmos mix. This is very important because you can ramp up the plasma percentage of the feed in gasmix and still remain above the super saturation threshold. It is very common to have a mixture of 85:15 oxygen:plasma once a large amount of oxygen has accumulated inside the burn chamber, resulting in a tritium generation rate that is 5 times higher than the usual 97:3 ratio used by beginner atmosians. Peak atmosians generally start off with a lower concentration burn mix like 93:7, then switch to 85:15 after the reaction has been going on for a while to maximize the amount of time that the chamber spends above the super saturation threshold.

This phenomenon is dubbed the "oxygen accumulation rate", or oxyrate for short, and can have very interesting results when tinkered with. Just as the oxyrate being positive results in a higher and higher O2:plasma chamber ratio, turning your oxyrate negative should lower the chamber ratio. You might wonder why this is desirable, but another optimization trick that is performed by peak atmosians is short duration negative oxyrate burns. This is performed when the accumulation of oxygen inside the chamber has gone on for so long that the engineer operating the system pushes up the plasma percentage to something insane like 40% plasma and 60% oxygen, burning away excess oxygen with a negative oxyrate burn while still remaining above the super saturation threshold and producing tritium. As long as the ratio remains above the super saturation threshold, this strategy is viable and more often than not results in large bursts of tritium being accumulated in the cooling vessel. Do note that this should only be performed with a high capacity cooling vessel.

Cooling your tritium

This is something the atmosian should be familiar with already - scrubbers work best when removing cold gas or dumping into a large bank of cold gas.

The reasoning is simple, they can cram more moles in if the pressure is lower, but cooling is not the only answer to fast scrubbing, there is another that one should learn to use effectively: Volume. Volume dictates pressure in the ideal gas section with a linear inverse relation, as any atmosian should know, and connecting your scrubbers directly to a high volume pipenet will allow them to harvest even more gas per tick.

Any atmosian who has studied the SM will now understand why the spaceloop is so useful, it provides both volume and cooling. The same applies to your tritium, except it's even hotter than your SM (though thankfully less dangerous), dumping all the gas into a large spaceloop is the best method of harvesting it, even better than freezers. In fact, freezers are completely outclassed by spaceloops in this department, regardless of how well upgraded the freezer is. The spaceloop may not be able to compete with the freezer in reachable temperature, but it makes up for that fact by having 2 orders of magnitude more volume. A spaceloop of 20,000 volume has 100 times the volume of a cooler, and since its cooling speed scales linearly with the amount of tiles it spans (which also increases volume), they are a far more effective cooling solution than a fully upgraded freezer ever will, at least in this situation. Plus, a large spaceloop can be built in 5 minutes with an RPD, while a freezer requires science to do their job, miners to do their job and for you to have access to said materials. This usually occurs at the 20 minute mark at best. The spaceloop can be completed by the 15 minute mark while tritium harvesting is underway. This 10 minute gap clearly makes spaceloops far more effective for the job - you will only need the freezers if you for some reason need the gas at temperatures below 22.7K, such as for making hypernoblium bombs or portable tritiumfloods in a tank for traitor activities.

Water Vapor Waste Removal

Note: The actions described by this section are not required due to the introduction of supersaturated steam. It is still useful however for non-Yogstation codebases and situations where hydrogen is bred alongside Tritium.

Water Vapor is a waste product produced by the combustion of hydrogen isotopes with oxygen, this is modeled in game by the tritium burn reaction. This is an extremely frustrating reaction that burns away the vast majority of your tritium before it gets scrubbed into your cooling vessel, upwards of 85% of tritium is lost in this manner and there is no way to get the tritium back. The water vapor also increases the stochiometric heat capacity of the gasmix in the burn chamber and is instantiated at T20C, causing a net loss of energy and much colder fires.

The removal of this waste product is necessary if you wish to maintain high-temperature fires for fusion or nitryl synthesis, but doing so in a manner that does not compromise your tritium harvesting is impossible without cutting into your time budget for minimal yields. The methods of removal are generally a tradeoff between maintaining oxyrate equilibrium and being fast, for fast fusion (presumably for traitor activities) the latter is necessary, for hypernoblium synthesis it is generally preferred to use methods that preserve oxyrate equilibrium.

Venting

The simplest method you can use, it's a simple activation of the auxiliary turbine blast door, spacing all the contents of your chamber into oblivion, removing all that waste water vapor as well as all that precious oxygen. This method is generally not advisable as it removes your oxygen gasbank, forcing you to restart from a lower concentration plasma burnmix. It is however used if you simply want to achieve fusion without regard for obtaining large amounts of tritium.

Scrubbing into injector

A simple method consisting of adding a dedicated scrubber connected directly into an injector set to scrub only water vapor. This method works but is incredibly inefficient. Scrubbers dump their scrubbed gases directly into their parent pipenet, with the amount harvested based on the volume, given that a scrubber and injector pipenet with only a few bits of connective piping has incredibly little volume, the removal of water vapor occurs at a rate that is incredibly low compared to the rate it is generated at, even if all that gas is removed by the maxed out injector, which it is not. This also consumes precious scrubber space within the burn chamber, lowering tritium yields and is generally not useful. This technique is, however, the basis for more efficient methods.

Pulsing the tritium scrubbers

A far more common method due to its balance between efficiency and time costs. Instead of building a dedicated scrubber and injector pipenet for the water vapor, a hybrid tritium + water vapor scrubbing system is used instead. This consists of adding a reflow filter to the existing tritium cooling vessel, with the output connected to an injector, usually the prebuilt one in the incinerator, this allows for the retention of tritium in the cooling vessel and the expulsion of water.

Be warned however, that tritium and water vapor harvesting cannot be done at the same time without drastically lowering the rate at which tritium is scrubbed as water vapor comprises a far larger percentage of the chamber's gasmix by percentage compared to the tritium and actually causes so much water vapor to enter the cooling vessel that it clogs, preventing further harvesting. For this reason, the scrubbers are pulsed instead, this means setting the scrubbers to scrub water vapor until the cooling vessel fills to capacity, then turning it off until it cools down and allows for more water vapor. This minimizes the scrubbing window in which the scrubbers clog and creates a more stochiometrically favorable gasmix for further scrubbing pulses. This process requires manual control and cannot be automated; it also relies on thermal queues that require some training to spot.

An active burn chamber with a bluish white flame and a green tritium overlay is generally a healthy flame over 10000 kelvin and a low percentage of water vapor in its gasmix, once it turns orangeish, or worse red, the water vapor has accumulated to the point that it is degrading the temperature of your fires - it is at this point you begin pulsing the scrubbers for water vapor. A well designed cooling vessel can accumulate a large amount of water vapor before clogging, usually causing the heat pipes to turn orange or red to reflect the added heat, it is generally at this point where the vessel clogs and water vapor scrubbing should be stopped, completing a single scrubber pulsing cycle. It usually takes many cycles to recover from a red fire, but not as many to recover from an orange fire.

Dedicated scrubber with dedicated cooling vessel

The most expensive water vapor removal process in terms of both time for construction and valuable scrubber space consumed, but also the most effective one. The design is rather simple, adding a completely separate cooling vessel with a completely separate injector and scrubber pair to remove water vapor. This is very rarely utilized as it significantly delays tritium production and slightly lowers tritium harvesting yield from the loss of dedicated tritium scrubber space but comes with the benefit of being fully automated, no pulsing required! It is generally advised to only use this on a green shift, or if you have another atmosian helping out.

Natural dissipation

Water vapor naturally decreases at a rate of 20 moles per tick when on any turf. This means it will take absolutely forever for accumulated levels of water vapor to dissipate, but it's entirely possible. Do not rely on this method however, it is instead best to resort to the next method described.

Turning off the fuel and scrubbing out the vapor

Self explanatory. Without heat being produced, the water vapor is much colder and easier to scrub. Furthermore, as no tritium is being produced, you can do this without worrying about any tritium-vapor scrubbing contention. This is a lot better than simply venting since you preserve the oxygen, but does take a bit more time. This also resets the temperature of the chamber to near room temperature and so is not advised to being performed frequently if thermals are your objective. They are however, best performed if you wish to clear a burn chamber in preparation for heating to fusion temperatures for your fusion can.

Remember that the round-start injector in the incinerator is not maxed out, bottle-necking you if you forget to max it out.

Nitryl

Nitryl is not particularly interesting, the speedup murders your lungs and is best used in short bursts, but is not worth the time investment to manufacture. Stimulum however, a nitryl prerequisite, is far more valuable and may be worth it depending on your situation. The manufacturing of nitryl requires Nitrogen and Oxygen with some N2O catalyst and a large amount of heat. The requisite temperature of 11,194.5K can be reached by tritium burns, but efficient mass production requires prolonged exposure to temperatures in excess of 20000 where the conversion speed is fast enough to fully convert more than a thousand moles of the stuff. For this, a good tritium burn under negative oxyrate with active water vapor scrubbing is advised.

Oxygen

Oxygen is a wonderful gas that everybody loves (except filthy uncivilized ashlizards) and nobody will ever try to stop you if you tell them that you're embarking on a project that makes a lot of brand new gas that is breathable, safe and definitely won't kill you. Until you tell them that it involves setting the SM on fire or alternatively, creating a planetside vacuum that has the potential to harm cargo miners and piss off the local wildlife, especially the more hissy and sentient ones.

Crew protestations aside (when did that ever stop you?), two methods will be discussed:

Lavaland Gas Mining

Lavaland turfs emit gases all of their own accord to prevent vacuums; this can obviously be exploited to farm delicious oxygen. Simply add a bunch of scrubbers set to siphon all air at the edges of the orbitally inserted mining drop base, connect them to a bluespace pipe then send it on its merry way planetside. Optionally, inform the miners that the Aux Base is a complete vacuum like space and entering it without a mining hardsuit will result in brute damage and if death. The gains from this method are small, but steady and only costs an aux base that miners rarely use. Ash lizards may venture into it out of curiosity, but it poses little risk of granting them any technological benefits unless someone decides to do so.

Supermatter Gas Mining

WARNING: This method requires a fair amount of skill to pull off without a catastrophic (and highly bannable!) result, maximizing the gas gain takes even more skill, so practice on a private server first, or have a mentor online to help you with the process when attempting it. Better yet, have another atmosian on hand in case things go wrong. Again I must repeat, if you fuck this up you will get noted at best and get banned at worst.

With that out of the way, this method relies on the ability of the supermatter to release large amounts of oxygen and a small amount of plasma when exposed to high temperatures. This means setting the SM on as hot a fire as you possibly can for as long as the crystal can hold, then quickly dousing the crystal until it restabilizes. You can already tell how fun this process is from that description, so here's a few things you need to know:

Heat Exchange

Having an extremely high capacity external spaceloop for cooling is an absolute must as your oxygen will come in very hot and at very high pressures. Similar to tritium synthesis, you want your scrubbers to dump into a good cooling vessel, unlike tritium however, the oxygen extraction rate is significantly higher and has twice the heat capacity of the trit, resulting in much higher cooling requirements. And as you will likely be using the same cooling vessel for the SM, the usage of plasma for ambient heat exchange cooling will likely be necessary. This gives you the rather unwanted situation of having a large amount of plasma being fed a lot of extremely high temperature oxygen into the same pipenet with only space cooling to counteract it. This can be modulated by controlling the oxygen extraction rate from the SM chamber, but results in a situation where you have to precariously balance the temperature of the spaceloop below 373.15K to prevent in-pipe combustion resulting in a SEVERE loss of cooling capacity that may result in total reactor meltdown and the in-chamber oxygen concentration levels going above the plasmaburn supersaturation threshold that it results in a tritium fire that is nigh unrecoverable. This can be helped by having a larger volume space cooling vessel (remember that saturating all three layers with HE manifolds is superior to expanding the pipenet to cover more space) and having more plasma in the pipenet to bias the stochiometric heat capacity upwards and to provide a larger thermal buffer between the loop temperature and the ignition point. It also helps having a manual purge on standby, such as by opening the chamber to space, covering the space tile with a holofan, then disabling the holobarrier remotely in case things get dicey.

Gasbank Composition

The in-chamber gasbank's composition is very important for determining the burn rate, temperature and energy of the supermatter crystal and means the difference between a fizzling supermatter that is barely unsafe, on fire or producing an amount of oxygen that's worth your time and a bright, warm white-blue glow with lots of oxygen coming in. Obviously, we will want to stuff the chamber full of energy-boosting gas such as CO2 to increase oxygen production rate and remove N2 as it counteracts what we want CO2 to do, but we also want to ensure that the crystal can hold for as long as possible. As such, it is advisable to dump a good amount of N2O into the chamber as it will raise the temperature at which the crystal begins to delaminate and also slows down the rate of delamination above that threshold. In fact, having N2O in the chamber is never a bad thing for any SM setup, unless you're a traitor. Add as much N2O as you want, as long as you don't hit the mole threshold for a singulo delam, or have so much N2O that you exceed the CO2 amount to the point the SM doesn't gain that much energy. Also note that your CO2 will constantly be burned off and converted to pluoxium, which while good for extra credit, will make it so that you need to constantly pump in new CO2 into the SM. If you ever get into the situation where you run out of CO2 reserves in atmos, you know you're doing a good job, but make sure you don't run out of it too fast.

An oxygen mining setup can also be modified to include a pluoxium filter to make it dual-purpose and much more profitable.

Emergency SCRAM Gas Reserve

An emergency reserve of superchilled gas in a canister in case of imminent FUBAR is an excellent idea to have as it may mean the difference between the less important but more imminent threat of a destroyed station with a raging Tesla on it combined with the less imminent but far more important threat of an angry banning admin, and a quick way of making sure you regain control of the situation. In fact some setups have one ready at all times in case they want to restart the cycle. It is never a bad idea to have one ready at all times, unless preparing one takes too much time for you that it hurts your deadlines. You can skip this step if you feel confident enough in your abilities to manage an active delamination, but it doesn't hurt to have one. A good canister would be one with about 10,000 moles of nitrogen and 5000 moles of N2O chilled down to 2.7K ready to be pumped in at a moment's notice, preferably already connected to the cooling line with only a closed digital valve between it and the cooling vents/injectors. That way, in case a traitor busts into engineering and murders you, the AI can flip the valve and return everything to normalcy.

Thanks to Colton/AutisticFroggy for this guide and all of his other contributions to this wiki and the ss13 community as a whole