Cooling Robo-Miner

[Gregor]

Hi Guys,

does anyone know why my robo-miner is not getting cooled?
It is build on a glas tile in space.
I am letting cool water flow through it and build tempshift plates behind it.
Still it stays on the same temperature for 100 cycles.
Does anyone has an idea to cool it?

[L37]

It is in vacuum => no heat exchange. You will have to build drywalls behind it and vent small amounts of gas or liquid.

[Zefnoly]

Originally posted by Gregor:

Hi Guys,

does anyone know why my robo-miner is not getting cooled?
It is build on a glas tile in space.
I am letting cool water flow through it and build tempshift plates behind it.
Still it stays on the same temperature for 100 cycles.
Does anyone has an idea to cool it?

Get thermium and you never need to cool it again... Just a little bit of niobium can give lots of thermium.

[gussmed]

I just went through a series of hoops with this myself.

Robo miners need a fluid or gas with which to exchange heat to cool down. They can't directly interact with pipes, tiles or tempshift plates.

What I did was provide them with overheat protection, and put them in small pits with drywall and a few kg of petroleum. Then I ran radiant pipes behind them with cold liquid. The mechanism is coolant cools pipes -> pipes cool petroleum pool -> petroleum pool cools robo miner.

I had to add insulation tiles around the pits, because the hot regolith was heating up the tiles, and that was heating up the petroleum pools. It's a setup that's very unfriendly to solar panels.

Trickling cold gas on robominers works too, even for miners set up upside down on the ceiling, provided there's drywall behind the miners and the gas vents. The drawback is that you're destroying gas, and you have to guess at how much gas to use. You don't want to pump a full 1kg / second out, so you have to use gas valves to limit the flow to the vent cooling the robo miner.

This only matters while you're using steel. That was a long, long time for me, because it took me a long time to progress to petroleum rockets. Steam rockets don't have enough thrust to carry cargo unless you add solid boosters, and I decided to skip those.

Once you have even 5kg of niobium you can do the niobium + tungsten -> thermium -> niobium loop to convert as much tungsten as you want to thermium.

Thermium miners can be left naked. When they get entombed by regolith, that will cool them down if they're above 300 C. Provided at least one miner has overhead protection, and each miner can reach an adjacent miner, a row of miners can always clear itself of regolith. This requires about 50% more miners than a covered-pit approach, but is much, much friendlier to solar panels.

[Gregor]

Thanks for the ideas, I'll try it out.