Goonhub
07-14-2014, 08:46 PM
On the subject of engineering...
![[Image: DdbSGmt.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/DdbSGmt.jpg)
This setup is somewhat smaller than the current one, but as you can see it's quite a bit more complicated. I didn't put in all the various tools, or SMES units or control panels so thing would be easier to see. First and most obviously, the hot loop and cold loop have switched sides. Also, the inlet is on the bottom of the generator, not the top. You can tell by the green arrows on the passive gates. There's a lot more ways to move gas around, and if you don't know what you're doing you can be incredibly wasteful. Note that those two 4-way junctions with the pressure sensors are indeed a single set of pipes, not separate. I had to use quite a few crossing-over pipes to make this work with so little space. And yes, that's a cold loop tacked on to the hot loop.
Why would I put such a thing there? Well, it could serve a couple purposes. You can close off the hot loop so the gas all stays inside that one area, and you could use the cold loop to cool off the combustion chamber (that is, presuming those thermal pipes actually work in a way that lets them reduce the heat in their vicinity). You can also run both loops as cold, which may come in handy when the laser reactor is ready for implementation.
Of course, the biggest mess is down there around where the laser reactor is eventually going to be. With all those crisscrossing pipes, both sets of thermal pipes may be connected to either hot or cold loops, or both may be used separately. If we really do end up making fusion reactions with the occasional side-helping of anti-matter in there, it will most definitely produce a massive amount of heat. As it gets hotter, whatever reaction is going on may run out of control. That's why I put the extra cold loop on the hot loop, for extra heat absorbing capacity meant to counteract that runaway. Alternatively, the pipes could just run through whatever containment chamber makes up the core of the reactor instead. For now, that room can be set up as a second combustion chamber (though I didn't bother adding that to this design). Those three blast doors in the middle are meant to have no floor under them. They open directly into space so the chamber can be vented if it's used that way.
Now, you may say that all that is pointless right now, but I strongly disagree. Think of that mostly empty and useless 7x7 room with lots of unnecessary pipes as a promise, that the laser reactor will be completed.
I do think the thermal generator and laser reactor should be available to be used in tandem. But, the code should be reworked a bit so that crazy runaway thermal power is much harder to accomplish. The laser reactor is the shiny new toy for this map. It should be the station's primary power source, to fuel all the various power-intensive things on the station, like telescience, the arc smelter, and the asteroid magnet (Which, really, ought to consume a crazy amount of power. Maybe having a setting that determines how large an asteroid it pulls in? And it takes longer to charge up depending on how high it's set? But that's getting off topic.)
And yes, in the upper-left hand corner, that is most certainly what it looks like. A nexus of seven emergency repressurization ports. And a couple of them just happen to pass right over the north hot loop vent. See, the way I heard it, on the current map the two south gas vents were added pretty much solely for the possibility that they might rupture and spew searing hot gas into the corridors. But how often does that really happen? I say, what's needed is to septuple the potential mayhem. Who's with me?
A final note, this setup isn't all that much bigger than what's on the WIP map currently, but it does get pretty close to the central cargo router. This is what I meant before about it being a good idea to add a bit of width onto this thing using all that extra space the z-level now has.
This setup is somewhat smaller than the current one, but as you can see it's quite a bit more complicated. I didn't put in all the various tools, or SMES units or control panels so thing would be easier to see. First and most obviously, the hot loop and cold loop have switched sides. Also, the inlet is on the bottom of the generator, not the top. You can tell by the green arrows on the passive gates. There's a lot more ways to move gas around, and if you don't know what you're doing you can be incredibly wasteful. Note that those two 4-way junctions with the pressure sensors are indeed a single set of pipes, not separate. I had to use quite a few crossing-over pipes to make this work with so little space. And yes, that's a cold loop tacked on to the hot loop.
Why would I put such a thing there? Well, it could serve a couple purposes. You can close off the hot loop so the gas all stays inside that one area, and you could use the cold loop to cool off the combustion chamber (that is, presuming those thermal pipes actually work in a way that lets them reduce the heat in their vicinity). You can also run both loops as cold, which may come in handy when the laser reactor is ready for implementation.
Of course, the biggest mess is down there around where the laser reactor is eventually going to be. With all those crisscrossing pipes, both sets of thermal pipes may be connected to either hot or cold loops, or both may be used separately. If we really do end up making fusion reactions with the occasional side-helping of anti-matter in there, it will most definitely produce a massive amount of heat. As it gets hotter, whatever reaction is going on may run out of control. That's why I put the extra cold loop on the hot loop, for extra heat absorbing capacity meant to counteract that runaway. Alternatively, the pipes could just run through whatever containment chamber makes up the core of the reactor instead. For now, that room can be set up as a second combustion chamber (though I didn't bother adding that to this design). Those three blast doors in the middle are meant to have no floor under them. They open directly into space so the chamber can be vented if it's used that way.
Now, you may say that all that is pointless right now, but I strongly disagree. Think of that mostly empty and useless 7x7 room with lots of unnecessary pipes as a promise, that the laser reactor will be completed.
I do think the thermal generator and laser reactor should be available to be used in tandem. But, the code should be reworked a bit so that crazy runaway thermal power is much harder to accomplish. The laser reactor is the shiny new toy for this map. It should be the station's primary power source, to fuel all the various power-intensive things on the station, like telescience, the arc smelter, and the asteroid magnet (Which, really, ought to consume a crazy amount of power. Maybe having a setting that determines how large an asteroid it pulls in? And it takes longer to charge up depending on how high it's set? But that's getting off topic.)
And yes, in the upper-left hand corner, that is most certainly what it looks like. A nexus of seven emergency repressurization ports. And a couple of them just happen to pass right over the north hot loop vent. See, the way I heard it, on the current map the two south gas vents were added pretty much solely for the possibility that they might rupture and spew searing hot gas into the corridors. But how often does that really happen? I say, what's needed is to septuple the potential mayhem. Who's with me?
A final note, this setup isn't all that much bigger than what's on the WIP map currently, but it does get pretty close to the central cargo router. This is what I meant before about it being a good idea to add a bit of width onto this thing using all that extra space the z-level now has.