Atmospheric Technician: Difference between revisions

=== Repressurization and Filtering ===

* '''Filtering''' - The default setting. Note that most scrubbers won't filter out plasma or other gases unless you set them to, so do that!

* '''Draught''' - This filters out air slowly, creating a draught. Useful if you need to drain a small amount of air due to overpressurization.

* '''Panic''' - This drains all the air quickly. Most of the time used to remove all plasma very quickly, or by a malfunctioning AI.

* '''Replace Air''' - Drains all the air, then replaces it. Try not to use it if there's nothing toxic in the air.

* Firesuits protect between 60 to 30,000 kelvin.

* Setting air vents to 0 kPa internal check (or just turning off the check) will make them pump out air like crazy, which makes it excellent to restore air to an area quickly. But be careful with the pressure on the vent tile itself; if the pressure in the outgoing distro loop is very high, it might be dangerous. ADDED: Don't max the vents. Set the vents to internal and desired pressure 0 instead. Maxed vents at 5000 KPA in a 100 KPA room will output 2450 KPA in the first tick, then 1225 KPA, 612.5 KPA, 306.25 KPA, 153.125 KPA,  etc. (assuming vents are always provided with max air). Zero'd vents will output 5000 KPA, then 5000 KPA, then 5000 KPA, etc.

* N2O knocks out in low amounts, suffocates in high amounts.

* If you're an atmos tech trying to repair a hull breach without a fire/space suit: Turn off the vents. No more air will be vented into the room, which means there won't be any space wind to fight against if you accidentally fall out the window.

* Atmos tech is actually an interesting job; disposal tubes give such wonderful opportunities for killing people, however it takes shitton of time to build everything you need.

* Any sort of air mix is survivable as long as it has at least 16 kPa of oxygen on the output. This means you can efficiently compute the release pressure you'd need for a given air mix by dividing 16 by the percentage of oxygen in the mix, i.e., for 20/80 O2/N2 air mix you'd need a release pressure of 16/0.2 = 80 to be okay.

# Turn off and unwrench Air to Distro and Waste In, two pumps in the northern area of Atmos where the distro loop and mixing are done and all that. They are labeled and easy to find. Keep them in place on the floor.

# Go to the atmos pipe dispenser a few meters away and vend two volumetric pumps. These are like regular pumps but almost literally better in every way whatsoever. They pump faster.

# Fit your volumetric pumps in place of Waste In and Air to Distro, making sure the red stripe lines up with how the pumps were fitted by default, so the flow goes the right way.

# Volumetric pumps are automatically set to full fucking power, so just turn on both of them.

# Set every scrubber in the loop around the room to 4500 kPa. This is full blast.

* You have now completely set up Atmospherics to be a beast in, like, three minutes. You can also do other stuff, like fit manual valves to the harmful gasses to hamper solo-AI floods, and replace other pumps in the bowels of Atmospherics with volume pumps, but really, that five-point checklist will do it. Ninety-plus percent of people don't know jack shit about Atmospherics, and it's so easy to set it up so that it actually does shit. It's so rare to see it happen that the CE actually sought me out for praise for doing it this way.

* For AIs, if no organics are around competent/willing to do this manually and your Engiborgs (if you have any) are busy, which is like a guarantee, you can do a simpler version of this; just turn Air to Distro and Waste In up to 4500 kPa and set each scrubber station to 4500 kPa too. It won't be as effective, but it's so much better than nothing. Cranking up the air available in the distro loop poses no threat to safety, and in fact, makes it harder to start up destructive floods since there's so much good air in the way in there. And since you're the AI, you can now use air vents (and scrubbers) as they were fucking designed to be used; to scrub, drain, and replace the air in rooms as necessary, and it fucking works. It is astonishing how little is required to turn a system so often seen as worthless into a valuable part of the station.

* Minor addendum: A maxed volume pump and a maxed regular pump at the same rate given ideal circumstances. The difference is the volume pump won't stop pumping once its output end is at 4500 kpa or more. This makes it excellent for waste in, where no matter how much gas the previous fire/atmos experiment clogged the filtering loop with, Waste In is still pumping waste out of the scrubbers pipes, and by extension, helping keep the scrubbers from getting clogged to the point of uselessness.

* For the record, the advice of adding manual valves to the plasma loop will result in you getting yelled at by an admin if there's no evidence that the AI is rogue. It's "spacing objectives tier", and for a good reason.

* Setting up atmos doesn't really matter that much anyway as long as you give the distro loop some pressure. The entire supply and equipment are designed for a space station that's supposed to last month. There are about two instances in which a proper setup is useful: massive hull breaches which will drain a lot of air (most of which will then uselessly disappear in space anyway) and station-wide plasma fires which might fill the waste loop (in which case you're at fault as an atmos tech for not keeping an eye on the system in the first place).

* If you are an atmos tech and want to reduce significantly the possibility of harmful atmos manipulations... or if you are an AI and you spotted a guy just turning valves to release plasma to distro:

** Open atmospherics console for specific chamber and toggle power on the output. 90% of players don't check this console. As AI, I laughed many times as sabotage was running back and forth, checking every pump 3 times, and still, no plasma appeared. In this way, you can also shut down harmful gases pumping when one is smart and changed pipes under grilles.

** Or put manual valves in front of every harmful gas, switch out some gas pumps for volumetric pumps, and repipe the mixing pipes to disallow the mix tank to provide into the distro. (Setting up Atmos in such a way it can't be sabotaged by the AI before there's a reason to think the AI might sabotage Atmos is not only metagaming, it is also bannable. If you see this happen, adminhelp it!)

* You can rotate a pipe in your hand by click on it.

* Fire extinguishers fit in firesuit suit storage.

* The Fire Axe Cabinet can be opened with a multitool.

* You can disable fire alarms by multitooling them.

* You can trigger fire alarms by shooting them with a projectile. ADDED: Or hitting them with anything.

* The incinerator can easily be used to create canisters of pure death.

* Plasma + N2O is exceptionally deadly if you can get someone to use it as internals/force them to use it. They won't even be able to scream.

* Wielded fire-axes break grilles and reinforced windows in one shot.

** And open unpowered doors and kill people reasonably reliably.

* You can change sensor settings on air alarms, so it doesn't cause an alarm by setting the value to -1, which turns that sensor off. Do it for all sensors, and you can get rid of pesky alarms that are pretty much already fixed, or hide atmos fuckery.

* Flamethrowers are incredibly devastating weapons when used correctly. A mix of fuel, fuel accelerant, and knockout gases in a chilled flamethrower setup allows you to selectively flood an entire room and reliably kill everyone inside. Make sure to protect yourself beforehand, however.

* Radiation is an invisible threat; in low amounts, it causes annoyances. At extremely high levels, it instantly husks anyone close by. Make sure to be immune to radiation in the first place before doing this.

** Note that radiation by its nature is highly contaminating, and if a husked irradiated corpse is dragged to medbay for cloning, there's a very high chance that half of medbay dies and cloning becomes inoperable. This is a very messy method that will not just raise the ire of Security, but also of the watchful gods. Tread carefully.