Asteroid base issue

[joefitts63]

I thought I would go up into space and build a base on an asteroid, thus getting into space but still being in easy reach of my home base. I knew, of course, that the lovely renewable energy resource of windmills would not be available to me. However, I expected solar to work fairly well. I got up there, built a battery and a solar panel (planning for more later, of course), built a basic refinery and assembler, and built another solar panel. By the time I got it done, I had no power, because the sun had gone behind the planet!

The wiki claims that the objects in the solar system don't actually move, so I thought that meant the sun would stay on my solar panels. What is the actual mechanic going on here? I need to know to figure out how to make the asteroid base work. (Have yet to find any uranium, so nuclear power is not an option.)

[Idomeneus]

This is one place where SE is a bit fanciful with physics. The sun rotates around the sky box, you don't rotate around the sun. If you've used the default, the sun will complete a full rotation in 2 real-time hours. Note that you can pick to build on asteroids that are above or below the planetary plane and the planet won't occlude the sun at any point. If you build on the "north" or "south" pole of the asteroid (or a planet or moon for that matter) you can track the sun full circle. Custom Turret Controller make building a tracking solar array super easy.

[joefitts63]

Thanks for the input. I am much too close to the planet to avoid it occluding the sun. But that puts me a mere 52km from my main base on the planet, so I will live with it. More panels, more panels, more panels, I suppose.

[MrBishop077]

Originally posted by REALRACE:

perhaps is also a h2 engine with ice a nightly solution (?)
(oh, and if there is no gas flowing - just restart the game :p)

Sometimes a quick tap with the grinder and then weld it back up will start the gas flowing into the Hydro Engines

[joefitts63]

I am worried about using a hydrogen engine. I created one to fiddle with for a bit on the planet, and it seemed to EAT ice (via O2/H2 generator, of course) at a prodigious rate. I am afraid I would wind up spending all my time mining ice if I try to run the base on one.

Related question: If I leave and go back to my main base on the planet, will my solar panels continue to charge my battery while I am gone, or is this one of those games that nothing happens at locations the player isn't close to?

[MrBishop077]

A large grid Large cargo container of Ice should last quite a while (after filling the H2 tanks) when hydrogen is used as supplemental power.
Add an event controller that turns on the Hydro Engine and O2 gen's when your batteries hit say ..50% then another event controller that turns the engines and O2 gen's back off when the batteries are at .. 90%ish. [as RealRace suggested]
and use solar for the rest of the time.


something to note about O2/H2 if your tanks are almost full and you have many O2 generators working they will waste ice as all of them will eat the Ice and use it to make a single unit of gas .. even if only 1 of many generators was needed to fill the last bit. this is why i use the 'new' event controller to turn off my generators before my tanks hit 100%

[Ronin Planetary Industries]

Originally posted by joefitts63:

I am worried about using a hydrogen engine. I created one to fiddle with for a bit on the planet, and it seemed to EAT ice (via O2/H2 generator, of course) at a prodigious rate.

You'll have to build a lot of solar panels. Use them to charge batteries. They are excellent at that. You'll have to be careful about running refineries. Limit their runtimes to avoid fully draining your batteries.

Using hydrogen engines to charge batteries is super inefficient and will plow through hydrogen. Don't do that. If you have plenty of ice/hydrogen, just build enough hydrogen engines to power your entire base. With everything running and your O2/H2 generators off, time how long it takes you to go through 5% of your hydrogen. If you have over 24 hours worth of hydrogen stored, then it's safe to leave the refineries running (assuming you can log in and manage your base every day).

[Dan2D3D]

Hi, we all had the same problem the first time going in space and the thing is :
-> What you will do, what will be your Engineer solution to overcome this problem and be able to survival in space ?

ME = I use a ship in space and I will build a station on asteroid only when I am Rich.
+
I go to the Moons first, because all ores can be found very early over there in survival so I become Rich very fast and can build all I need.

Note
I've tested the Trash removal not so long ago and it does not delete the unpowered Large Blocks (station blocks) placed into Voxel when the character moves away, tested in Offline mode survival world.

[Valen]

The sun will return to shine on your panels, don't worry. But it might take a while. However, yeah, if you are not on a random server, shut down (suspend) that trash removal through the AltF10 menu

[Idomeneus]

And to be complete and answer your "related question": The game engine keeps processing every block with a PCU value every "tick". So if you leave a base, it continues to operate. (If it runs out of power, there's a chance it could be cleaned up depending on grid size/voxel interaction and other secret Keen factors.) This is why cryo units exist - if a player left a game in space in an non-oxygen environment they would soon run out of oxygen as the server keeps computing usage. This isn't too big a deal in a local single player game as quitting stops everything. But on a permanently running server, it matters. Note that pirates and other automa continue to operate on such servers too. I've come out of cryo pods more than once to damage from attacks which occurred while I was "iced".

[EightSeven6]

Use the custom turret controller sun tracking functionality and add more solar panels. You can also just turn off sun rotation in the world settings, I guess