the engine pipes are horribly broken

[Rhydic]

so i guess the engineers did something weird and this was the result so i guess if philip and rafael could explain how they managed to break everything that would be nice

http://i.imgur.com/blbwtw9.png (huge picture so no point using img tags)

there were about 4 minutes lapsed between this picture (11 gPa) and the round end (17 gPa)

as you may have noticed from past experience the maximum pipes can usually handle is about 5-6 megapascals

17000 MEGAPASCALS IS NOT WITHIN THE REALM OF PHYSICAL OR LOGICAL POSSIBILITY THIS DOES NOT EVEN MAKE SENSE CONSIDERING ALL THE PIPES ARE RUPTURED AND YET THERE ARE NO LEAKS AND A RAPIDLY ESCALATING TEMPERATURE AND PRESSURE FIX IT BEFORE WE TEAR APART THE VERY FABRIC OF SPACE AND TIME ITSELF tia

[Nautilus]

in the right conditions you can have -1E7 kilopascels in the cold loop, with temperatures of about -2000 kelvin or more, I honestly can't remember just how 'cold' it got but it was well into the negatives.

Honestly its because ~byond~ decides that everything needs to be a signed value, including temperatures. If it wasn't signed, we might be able to really push out the temperatures before it goes to not-a-number territory. Also, thanks to 2's complement you might also go from 0 kelvin to the temperature of the big bang in an instant. You could probably implement a check to see if the atmospherics go below or above a certain threshold but jesus christ, atmospherics makes things laggy enough as it is and adding another check to that loop would only make it chug more.

With that situation, I'm assuming one of the two used the combustion chamber approach and didn't man the engine afterwards. You can get temperatures of absolutely insane magnitudes (after 1 million degrees kelvin it'd rise exponentially) and if the pressure isn't regulated at that point, you can bet your ass that it'd be over pressurized instantly. By the time the pipes looped to check their pressure, it was in the GigaPascel territory.

The problem is that broken pipes don't really let off all their contents, or if it does then it's at a fixed rate and its wholly dependent on the outside pressure. As the broken pipe expels the gas, that tile is now about the same pressure as the pipe on it until the next atmos tick. If there's plasma in the medium (As it always should be) then its going to cause a fire with the oxygen in the air and auto-ignite, causing a bit more pressure. The room now has a ton of pressure close to the pipe's and it'd expel less of its pressure.

There's a lot of problems with the pipes but thats more because of the limits of atmospherics than anything. I don't know how'd you manage to fix it all without straight up switching to a new game engine that can actually allow the atmospherics loop to be coded in an effective way.

[Cogwerks]

Crazy bullshit negative kelvin temperatures for the cold loop usually only happen if an admin dicks with with the thermal efficiency variables on the engine while it's running. If these are ever happening during regular player use, that's weird and bad.

Hilariously high temps, I like to think of those as just being from plasma reaching a fusion state.

[Rhydic]

well the thing i'm concerned about is pipes not realizing they're broken and need to vent and basically becoming invincible and allowing stupid pressures like this to even happen, if someone figured out how to do this in a controlled manner that's asking for trouble

you shouldn't even be past 10 megapascals before you start breaking everything but the pressures and temperatures this is accumulating while broken is horribly bad

i guess you could put a tamper on people breaking this by putting a cap on what the circulators next to the generator or the generator can take before they break and need spare parts to repair at like 50000 kpa or something way above what the engine can reach under normal circumstances but way under what it can get up to in its broken state

[Nautilus]

Question: Why?

The way I see it, the current system already penalizes you once its at that pressure and it you already have to move heaven and earth to try and get something out of it. Once it gets to that pressure, the TEG becomes totally inefficient and your primary concern at this point is to try and evacuate the pipes to a point that it'd be useful.

Fact of the matter is you should be attempting to get the engine to ridiculously high temperatures as an engineer. Just disregard the fact the pipes only burst under pressure instead of melting under the heat, it should be possible to have some way to atleast get rid of this excess pressure by evacuating the pipes directly. Perhaps have the QM sell an engine repair kit with that kind of tool so if the pipes are bugging out, there's a way to fix it.

[Infinite Monkeys]

Hilariously high temps, I like to think of those as just being from plasma reaching a fusion state.

hieng particles

[Cogwerks]

The pipes don't bug out and become invincible when they rupture, that's just silly. They leak their contents at a certain rate while still maintaining some gas flow inside the pipe too. If the pressure somehow gets ludicrously high, ruptured pipes are probably just leaking too slowly to counteract steadily-rising million+ kpa levels.

Also I dunno why you're stressing how horrible and bad it is to have a large number in a goofy game, it's pretty funny to see this happen. We've already established that the toxins mixer regularly operates at several times the temperature of the sun, the station should be a dispersed cloud of white-hot steel vapor most rounds when that thing is running.

I suppose I could be evil and make the engine break horribly and fire meteoract-ing chunks of debris all over the place if the internal pressure goes over a million, maybe. I dunno. I've intentionally been trying to avoid having any failure states that ruin the engine itself. This sure as hell isn't a standard situation for the engine anyways, there are maybe two or three players who've figured out how to reach plasma fusion.