Compressing Liquids

[Zarquan]

A discussion (hopefully) about No-Electricity Passive Liquid Compression

[Zarquan]

Hello! I recently stumbled upon a cool little trick with water compression.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1184196711.

What is happening is there is a reservoir above flowing into the reservoir below. The interesting thing here, though, is that I have used debug tools to completely fill the top reservoir multiple times, and the lower chamber just collects all the water despite its significantly smaller size. The water is being passively (without duplicant or player interaction) compressed without the use of electricity.

The two tiles that are not water are different gasses (I used hydrogen and carbon dioxide). The square to the left of the top gas tile is about 30 grams of crude oil. (it is a corner waterlock that I use so that my dupes can into the tank to get). The water drips from the bottom tile and will empty the entire reservoir (and fairly quickly too). Using this, I am able to infinitely compress any amount of water into a finite space. You can do this easily with a pump scheme as well, putting a liquid vent in the gas.

It works great with water, but I am actually trying to get it to work in my attempt at a permanently sustainable colony that uses no electricity (meaning you can not use resources you can not replace or replenish at the same rate at which you use them). In the distant future on this colony, we will run out of dirt for the outhouses... Since there is no electricity, we cant use lavatories, so there will be an unfortunate consequence where I will need to remove large amounts of polluted water from the bottom of my base in a sustainable way without the use of pumps. I wanted to use this same method to passively compress it, but it wouldn't drip. (I am aware that if you spread it out enough with polluted oxygen or oxygen above it, it will evaporate as quickly as it comes in but that will take forever to construct and I like compressing liquids).

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1184196761

I also tried it with crude oil, and actually got a column of gas pressed against the wall, which looked kind of cool, but it didn't compress the oil in the bottom tile. I thought the wider surface area might make it flow, but apparently not.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1184230867

All of these are actually quire stable and can hold extremely high pressures (You can see the horizontal column of polluted water is quite pressurized). I would like to find a way to passively compress the polluted water to one tile (preferably under polluted oxygen to convert it to polluted oxygen). I think it has to do with the viscosity of liquids. I also have no idea why the gasses don't just flow out of the tube. Any ideas?

[PhailRaptor]

This may be related to the fact that Airflow Tiles can hold an unlimited amount of water, as long as there is any type of gas in any quantity that has flowed into the Airflow Tile first.