Air circulation/air con after update?

[Nef]

So I've been trying to recover a Moon base with the new changes and nothing seems to work anymore, and I'm struggling to figure solutions that don't involve huge numbers of chips just for what should be basic atmospherics functionality.

First is air circulation; before I had 298K mixed air piped to an active vent, and an active vent nearby connected to an active vent that drew into the main waste filtration system, draught mode on a console managed this just fine, slowly recirculating air so the concentrations of O2/CO2 didn't get out of hand.

Now what happens, after diagnosing, is that the waste vent is pulling a lot quicker than the outward vent no mater what I do and draining the room. This is despite the internal/external safeties being written by the console so that the room shouldn't drop below 101. I'm wondering if I have to scrap the draught console (they were always unfinished anyway) and use a bunch of logic chips to set the safeties to, say, 103 outward on the air and 101 inward on the waste.

Secondly, unsurprisingly, is air conditioning. Before I had an A/C unit that filled from room atmosphere (manual loop charging with pollutant was fiddly and unreliable), and the coolant loop went outside and through a medium radiator. As expected, CO2 in that line is eventually condensing and blowing the pipes.

I know there's all these shiny new toys for complex systems but I'm just trying to get an up and running interim between the portable unit and that so I can actually set a greenhouse for a few days and get other base functionality up. What might work is having a filtration unit before the A/C and just pass the bulk nitrogen in; that's ~78% of the room atmosphere so will maintain temperature, and just having one gas in the coolant line, which is more stable over greater temperatures, should be OK, with maybe logic to bypass the radiator when it's at extreme temperatures.

Does anyone have thoughts on this? I know how single-stage VCRS works in reality but I can't see how that's controlled in-game, given the extremes of temperature involved (not always needing the cooling, and needing to evaporate all the refrigerant prior to recompression, without overshooting the room temp or losing coolant, I need this to be closed-loop).

[Khaylain]

Use a back-pressure regulator set to 100 kPa to pull out the air, and a pressure regulator set to 110 kPa to push air in. This should make sure your pressure is between 100 and 110 kPa, not over or under. These are pretty old and work reliably.

The cooling is something I can't help you with, so I hope someone else can take that part. But hopefully I helped with the air circulation part of the question.

[ulzgoroth]

If your outside atmosphere is absent or cold, just make a passive cooling system (a heat pipe with radiators on both ends) and an active heating system to stabilize the indoor temperature if it gets too low?

(I'm not used to using the Stationeers AC units, always felt like they cost a lot of power and I wasn't sure what the value proposition was.)

[LoboFH]

Well, in Stationeers you can solve problems with a lot of different systems, I tell you my solution.

In my safe room I have a small greenhouse, with a lot of ferns to produce my oxygen and some potatoes for food, so the main increase of pressure in this room is the plants oxygen. A filtration unit will filter oxygen to a pressure regulator (7000 KPa) conected to a canister and another pipe conected to a tank to store the surplus of oxygen.

You can control the room pressure with a back pressure regulator conected to the input of the filtration unit, 50-52 KPa is fine for your plants. You can also add code in the filtration unit with an alarm for filters and active-idle states, to save filters.

Now you need some CO2 for the plants (5% at least), in the Moon use Furnace gas (cool it down first), with a filltration unit, a pump and some easy coding. You can do also the same for Nitrogen with the ice crusher. On Mars you can get CO2 with a filtration unit in the exterior, I coded it so it only works when the temperature is 18-20ºC.

About temperature control a digital valve conected to pipes and radiators in the exterior will keep your room at a safe temperature, easy code too. You don't need heaters, as soon as you have plants and some machines in your safe room your only problem is cooling.

This is a very cheap system, energy wise.

[maxpayneovh]

Originally posted by Khaylain:

Use a back-pressure regulator set to 100 kPa to pull out the air, and a pressure regulator set to 110 kPa to push air in. This should make sure your pressure is between 100 and 110 kPa, not over or under. These are pretty old and work reliably.

The cooling is something I can't help you with, so I hope someone else can take that part. But hopefully I helped with the air circulation part of the question.

how do you set pressure to 100 when the pressure regulator max 65?

[Nef]

That's in MPa

[Zulban]

Originally posted by Khaylain:

Use a back-pressure regulator set to 100 kPa to pull out the air, and a pressure regulator set to 110 kPa to push air in. This should make sure your pressure is between 100 and 110 kPa, not over or under. These are pretty old and work reliably.

Funnily enough in my test game this setup didn't work very well despite it working alright in my base 2 years ago. Active vents not only have the same functionality as a pressure regulator when the safeties are set with logic with the same power draw as a regulator, but they seem to work a lot more aggressively so you can set the in vent to 105 or whatever and the out to 101 or 98 and the air will actually flow consistently. I don't know if I'd need to put some kind of pump on the waste side to vacuum the pipe out but it never got close to 1 mPa with all the filtration so I don't know what the deal was.

Originally posted by Nef:

First is air circulation; before I had 298K mixed air piped to an active vent, and an active vent nearby connected to an active vent that drew into the main waste filtration system, draught mode on a console managed this just fine, slowly recirculating air so the concentrations of O2/CO2 didn't get out of hand.

I'm going to assume this is just an error in your typing, an active vent connected to another active vent? You mean there's two active vents drawing into the waste pipe? You'd need to make sure that both vents have their external safeties set.

By the way, draught mode on a console? Is that some kind of vent control motherboard you're using?
-----
Okay just went in game to check, and I didn't know there was such a thing for consoles. After tinkering for it a bit it seems that in draught mode it allows me to select an outward/fill vent but will not allow me to select a inward/waste vent despite the F1 help menu saying that I should be able to select an inward and outward vent. I can only set both of the vents to outward/fill. It seems it does this using a gas sensor and not the built-in safeties of the vents because the console was giving me errors until I hooked up a gas sensor. It's possible that the console is just bugged or there's some vital step I'm missing here.

Originally posted by Nef:

Now what happens, after diagnosing, is that the waste vent is pulling a lot quicker than the outward vent no mater what I do and draining the room. This is despite the internal/external safeties being written by the console so that the room shouldn't drop below 101. I'm wondering if I have to scrap the draught console (they were always unfinished anyway) and use a bunch of logic chips to set the safeties to, say, 103 outward on the air and 101 inward on the waste.

As described above I think the safeties might not be set correctly by the console, are you looking directly at the vents to see what the safeties are set to? The 'inward safety' is the safety of the pipe connected to the vent and the 'external safety' is the pressure of the room atmosphere outside the vent, so a fill vent will fill up to its external safety and a waste vent will empty until the external safety pressure is achieved. If the waste vent's external safety is 0 then it will try to vacuum the room.

There are two easy ways to set the safeties without much hassle: using a logic i/o and a logic memory chip, or setting up a computer with a logic motherboard. I like the use the computer with the motherboard even if the interface is a bit wonky, as you use the scroll bar you have to mouse over the item you want before letting go of the mouse button or it will just close the drop-down menu.

What you want to do is add a condition (such as "computer: on") and the action set to 'vent name here' and then select the safety you want and type in the desired pressure. Then change the 'on' condition of the computer to off, then on again so that it actually saves and then look at the vent to ensure the safety is actually set.

If you want to go the logic chip route you put down a logic memory connected to a logic writer, set the logic memory to the pressure you want, then find the vent in the logic writer, select the pressure safety you're changing, and select the value as the logic memory. Turn the writer on and it'll save the pressure to the vent.

Once you've set the safety on a vent you don't need the logic chips or computer anymore since it's set internally on the vent itself, no need to keep constantly writing it.

Originally posted by Nef:

Secondly, unsurprisingly, is air conditioning.

Can't help much with air conditioning since I haven't really touched it much since all the phase change updates. Nitrogen seems to be a safe bet for cooling since it usually won't liquefy or freeze in your pipes unlike CO2. If you have an abundance of it then you can also use water cooling, but be careful of making the water too cold or the pipes will freeze, and you'll probably want a bit of nitrogen in those pipes anyways just so the water doesn't evaporate in the vacuum of the pipe.

[Lu5ck]

31 Jul, 2023 posts and topic.

[Zulban]

Damnit. I just assumed that it was a recent topic since it was on the front page. Bamboozled.