Turbo air pump question

[Herby]

I am trying to get a turbo air pump to work for an airlock.
I filled the gas tank in a working derelict via reverse mode in order to have some reserve i.e. the atmosphere inside the gas tank is within temp and pressure limits (no alarms during filling). Although I could not find any hint about the alarm connection I installed an O2-alarm inside the airlock and connected it to the turbo pump. I switched on Turbo and Automatic.
From my understanding the system should operate as follows:
When ordering the exterior airlock to open the pump should suck (reverse) the atmo inside the gas tank before the lock is opened...O2 alarm ON. After the ext. lock is closed the pump should pump the atm back to the airlock....O2 alarm OFF. Same when coming back.
This is working somehow but...
I cannot see any difference of the gas can fill state. The pump is only pumping when the O2-alarm is ON and it is still pumping when the ext. locks of both vessels are open.
It seems that it only works when you open/close the locks manually i.e. waiting one lock to close before opening the second and waiting for pressure equilibrium when entering the int. air lock. It is not working with auto door operation.
Obviously the turbo pump is only reacting on the O2 alarm w/o consideration of open/closed doors or pressure difference.
I believe there should be a second "alarm"-connection for the turbo pump indicating the open/close state of ext. airlock. Also there should be an add. atmo supply from the vessel when the gas can is empty but the O2 alarm is still ON.
Without such a system it happens that PC is repairing some floors in a derelict and forgot to bring some repair materials while you switched time acc. to 16x. PC auto opens all doors and locks before you can react...draining your ship's atmosphere into void.
Now the question to Devs: Is it possible to include such a safe-system in future?

[Brandemihl]

This is great info! I wish they would of responded. By chance did you read 'environmental systems' in the PDF? I am about to..

[anderson_graham]

I must admit that I struggle with the turbo pump, I set mine to the N2 meter as I figured this was for restoring pressure more than oxygen, but maybe O2 is better. I've also noticed that some ships have 2 turbo pumps for the air lock.
The most useful thing for automatic operation is to have a small room as the air lock with a non vented door about 3 spaces behind the external airlock. When the external airlock is open only the small room depressurises and by the time you open the internal door the external one will be closed so you only vent a small amount of atmosphere. Obviously this works best for larger ships.

[anderson_graham]

OK, I've had another try.

I added a second turbo pump and swapped the N2 sensor to an O2 one.

I then opened my internal door and ran both in reverse in turbo mode with pumps set to on until they had about 100,000 kPa N2 (I think the O2 was around 25,000 kPa).

Then I turned them off, let the o2 recover in the air lock and then closed the door.

Finally I set the pumps to automatic and non-turbo mode.

After going through the external airlocks 10 times (5 ways each) the N2 pressure in the gas canisters was about 75,000 kPa so I guess this could be done about 40 times (20 times each way) until I would need to refresh the gas in the canisters.

The room pressurised almost instantly with the pumps not even in turbo mode, but sometimes went over 30 kPa O2, but I guess that isn't harmful.

It would be great if they could be set to work the way Herby described, but at least this is a work around.

[Frission]

Yeah I believe they're one-way only at the moment rather than functioning like an airlock should; that being the pumps vacuum out the airlock when you're disembarking so you don't waste good gasses.

Instead at the moment they operate on either in or out, not both. Hopefully eventually they'll get a bit more sophisticated, but it's not too hard to work around at the moment so long as your airlock isn't huge. You're not losing a ton of cubic meters worth of air anyways - the pressure will be relative to the size of the 'cabin' it's in.

Notably, I once vacuumed all the air out of a sealed derelict into my airlock's turbo pump reserve. Later I accidentally put it on normal flow rather than reverse with the turbo still on, and it filled my airlock to 1900 kpa XD

[Joshu]

Airlocks are a perfect example of a situation that calls for logic components for something essential/practical.

Eventually we want you to be able to automate stuff and use *some* logic, I'm not sure how deep we'll eventually end up going, but just the other day we were discussing how cars send data signals to different components, it's something we're taking some time to think about before committing to!