User:Autisticfroggy/Sandbox: Difference between revisions

This is something the atmosian should be familiar with already - scrubbers work best when removing 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 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.  

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">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.</div>

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">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.</div>

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">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.</div>