Guide to Atmospheric Synthesis: Difference between revisions

'''Colton's Guide to Atmospheric Synthesis'''

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What you'll need:  

*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.

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===Water Vapor Waste Removal===

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.  

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:

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.

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.

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.