User:Studenterhue/Sandbox

Powering the station: the geothermal capture system

All about Hotspots

Hotspots are where magma is close enough to the surface to make magical geothermal heat energy. As you might expect, the hottest part of a hotspot is its center, and the temperature quickly tapers off the farther from the center you go. Each one of them is 10x10 or so in size, and there's forty or so of them on the map at any given time.

Occasionally, these hotspots move, though not all at once, causing quakes. You've probably noticed them before. If you've ever seen random burnt floor tiles with no apparent source or seen a message along the lines of "the ground rumbles softly" while walking through the station, then you've observed a nearby hotspot moving and quaking. Don't be too concerned; a single hotspot usually just causes tiny fires. Two is when they get annoying; together, they can outright throw you onto the floor, making you drop whatever items you were holding and giving you nasty bruises. Huge clusters of them are absolute clusterfucks; they can outright destroy plasmaglass in a single quake and can potentially ignite welding tanks.

Essential Equipment & Machinery

These items are essential to setting up the capture system:

Dowsing Rod - Required to detect hotspots and find their centers. You need at least one.
Stomper Unit - Pull this behind you. You need it to lock in hotspots.
Power Shovel - How else will you dig holes for the vent units? With a spoon? You can leave this in your backpack; you won't use it very much.
Unbuilt Vent Capture Unit - These actually generate the electricity. Keep one in your backpack for later.
Reinforced Wire - You'll be laying down fairly long lines of cable, so you'll need quite a bit of wire. These reinforced wire coils are a lot longer than your average cable coils. As an added bonus, they're also slightly explosion-resistant! Feel free to take a coil or two and keep in your pockets or backpack.
/ + Oxygen/Air Mix Tank + Breath Mask - Fish can breathe underwater. You're not a fish, so you need to breathe a tank of oxygen/air mix in your hand and a breath mask (or equivalent) to breathe underwater.

These ones are not absolutely necessary, but are nevertheless quite useful.

Flippers - Moving underwater (or in any fluid) significantly slows you down. Wearing a pair of flippers on your feet (or holding them--don't ask us how) negates that movement penalty, dramatically speeding you up.
Wirecutters - If you wire something in the wrong place or the wrong way, you can cut it away with these.
/ Wrench/Screwdriver - Two tools you might use to build vent units.
+ Engineering Diving Suit - You don't need diving gear to walk on the seafloor around the station, but you might appreciate the extra light from the helmet. Plus, it looks pretty cool.
Space GPS - This might help you get back to the station if you're lost.

Hunting for & Centering Hotspots: The Hard Part

Once you've equipment and tools ready, it's time to head out the airlock and start finding hotspots. To see if you're near a hotspot, simply plop down a dowsing rod on the seafloor. If it detects a hotspot, the rod will stay white, and you'll have to pick it up and lay it down elsewhere. Hotspots are fairly large, so try somewhere fairly farther out. If the rod does detect a hotspot, the temperature indicator light on the top will turn a certain color, ranging from blue to pink to red, with blue being the coolest and red the hottest. The rod will also give you an estimate of the distance to the center of the detected hotspot, and if you leave it there, it'll periodically broadcast said estimate to onlookers.

Get used to the blank white light. Though there's plenty of hotspots, they're all fairly spread out amongst Oshan Laboratory's huge map, so it's not uncommon to comb through huge swaths of the seafloor without finding any hotspots. Persevere and be patient.

Once you've finally discovered a hotspot, finding its center is fairly intuitive. If you take another reading in some direction, and the rod's estimate is lower, chances are that the center's in that direction. Conversely, if the estimate's higher, the center's probably in the opposite direction, and if it's the same, it's probably in completely different direction. For example, if you plop a rod northwest of the your previous spot and get an estimate of 8 when your previous one was 9, you should continue northwest. Conversely, if it's 10, you should head the opposite direction, southeast, and if it's 9 again, you should try another direction entirely.

The real challenge is when multiple hotspots are next to each other, causing the rods' center estimates to vary wildly. For example, you might plop down a rod in four different locations and get estimates of 10, 9, and 8, only for the next estimate to suddenly jump to 20. The rod isn't bugging out or anything; it's just adding up the distances. That 20 might mean 10 tiles away from the centers of two hotspots; that 8 might be 4 from two centers or 1 tile to one center and 7 tiles to the other.

In these cases, it's recommended to ignore the distance estimates entirely and rely upon indicator light alone. Lots of Engineers have their own little techniques on how to do this, with different amounts of rods and different ways of setting them up. As you gain experience, you'll likely develop your own.

Doppler Shift

Remember how we said that hotspots move? Because they move, this actually causes the vibrations they produce to clump up in some places and spread out in others, affecting how dowsing rods estimate distance. This is what the "Distance readings may fluctuate based on the frequency of vibrational waves." bit in the Examine text for dowsing rods means and what the Manual calls "Doppler shift". Don't be deceived by use of a physics term; this version of Doppler shift is a simpler, more "gameified" version of the real life phenomenon. You don't need to learn any actual physics, and if you do want to anyways, a simple example or illustration will be more helpful than a textbook or lecture.

Every unpinned (that is, not locked in place by a stomper) hotspot has a general direction it'll go in and thus a path of squares its center will be in the future. If a rod is within this path, it will report that it's closer to the center than it actually is. In contrast, a rod directly opposite or "behind" the path will estimate that it's farther from the center than it actually is.

You can see this best in the picture above, which shows a hotspot heading northeast and with the center circled in red. As you can see, some of the rods northeast of the hotspot say they're right on or close to the center, even though they actually aren't. Meanwhile, the rods in the southwest say they're three or more tiles away from the center, even though they're directly adjacent to it.

What are the practical takeaways?

If you find a square that the dowsing rod claims is the center, it might actually be where the center will be in the future, rather than where it is right now. In fact, you can often find whole patch of places with 0 for the distance to center estimate.
To determine if the square actually is the current center, you can:
- Look for adjacent tiles with unusually high distance estimates. It'll likely be something like above example, which has two 3s and one 4 next to a 0.
- Leave a dowsing rod on the square and use the stomper unit on it. If it was the actual center, the hotspot will cheerily beep and proclaim "Hotspot pinned." If it wasn't, the hotspot will move, dragging the dowsing rod with it. You can then walk towards the rod and try stomping a different 0 square.

Harvesting Hotspots: The Easy Part

Once you've finally found the center of the hotspot, everything afterwards is pretty easy.

Drag the stomper unit directly over the center of the hotspot or directly adjacent to it (i.e., usually where the rod reads 0 or 1).
Click on the stomper unit to lock the hotspot in place. Remember, hotspots occasionally move, so if you don't lock it, your vents will eventually lose heat and power. If you've correctly found the center, the stomper will beep out that the hotspot was successfully pinned.
Dig a hole in the hotspot center with the power shovel to make room for the vent unit.
Construct the vent capture unit. Thanks to imcoder magic, you can either:
1. Stand over the center of the hotspot and click on the unbuilt vent capture unit kit, as if you were constructing a table.
2. Plop the unit over the center and use a screwdriver or wrench on it.
Click on the vent unit while holding some wire to place some cable under the unit.
Click on the square the unit's on to place some wire under you.
Lay wire from the vent back to the station power grid. The safest practice is to connect it to the fork of wires just outside the Power Room, but wiring it to the super-convenient cable line connecting the Research Outpost to the station or any random wire is usually fine, so long as the connected vent(s) isn't/aren't outputting too much electricity.
- Pro-tip: Click on the wire while it's in your hand to start laying down cable as you move. Now, instead of constantly stopping every tile to lay down cable, you can just mosey down back to Engineering

If you've wired it to the prong outside Engineering, don't forget to set up the SMES units in the Power Room. One vent unit at the center of a hotspot produces 330k watts, so you can afford to set input to max and set output fairly high.

Boosting Power Generation

One hotspot on its own provides plenty of power. With a few techniques, all of which are compatible with each other, you can jack it up even higher and turn the engine into multiple-megawatt beast for the PTL--and without a raging inferno!

Adding More Vents

Mechanically speaking, there's nothing stopping you from simply adding more vent units. All you have to do is dig more holes, construct more vent units, and wire them back the station. The vent units can share one cable, and it doesn't matter if a vent is over a line or "nub" of wire. It's that easy.

However, there's a catch: adding additional vents increases total power generation but decreases the individual power output of each vent units. Adding a second vent actually decreases total generation, but the third and fourth increase it by several tens of thousands. Afterwards, however, you get diminishing returns. Once you have six or seven vents, additional vents add only a couple thousand watts to the total.

Mining Under a Hotspot

If you go to a hotspot's corresponding location in the Trench and mine out the rock there, you can tremendously boost the hotspot's heat and power generations. Breaking just one square of asteroid adds tens of thousands of watts. If you take the time and effort to mine out all the rock, you can easily send the hotspot's power output into the megawatts.

Find the GPS coordinates of any part of the hotspot. - Take any of the GPS units lying about Engineering and stand anywhere over the hotspot. Click on the GPS and scroll through the list of coordinates to find the one associated with your GPS's identifier, which is in the top. It helps if you turn on your unit's distress beacon or give it a unique identifier like "HSPT" or "SPOT".
Go to those corresponding coordinates in the Trench.
- For instance, if you've found a hotspot at (89, 201), you've to enter the Trench and go to wherever (89, 201) is.
- This is really the only difficult part. You might encounter a dangerous fishdrone on the way, and if your sub skills aren't up to par, you'll likely crash into the rock walls a lot and damage your sub.
Break the rock there. - If you're in your departmental minisub, switch your Industrial Utility Arms to Plasma Cutter mode and just start digging. The more rock you break, the better. If you see sparks fly when break the rock, then you've definitely found a hotspot.

Stacking Hotspots

If you activate the stomper in any place besides the center, it'll push the hotspot away from the stomper. If you push multiple hotspot centers into the same spot, or at least the same 3x3 area, you can drastically boost heat and power generation.

This is harder than it sounds. First, the stomper unit usually only moves the hotspot one tile, so relocating hotspots takes a fairly long time. This is partially the reason the stomper has an automatic mode. Second, when you get the hotspots to overlap, the stomper will move both of them,so you actually have to keep track of two hotspots. However, the results are very well worth it. The extra hotspot multiples the effects of other hotspots, sending head and power output through the roof.

To Do:
*Find out how much digging out the asteroid boosts power gen (MBC : each hotspot has a 'base heat value' of 1000. Disturbing an asteroid below adds 95 to this total. So you could say about 9% more heat per rock.)
*Find out how much adding more vents reduces each unit's power gen. There might be some funky marginial output and total output curve going on (MBC : yeah its some curve. Diminishing returns and all that)
* (MBC note : also it appears you have confused doppler shift and stacking. Stacked hotspots just print out the summed value from all hotspots touching the tile being dowsed. the doppler shift, however, exists for all hot spots. It reflects what direction they are drifting relative to the center. Here in the screenshot [[1]], you can see an example of a hotspot with the center labeled, moving NE. Note how Ahead of movement, it reads 0. Behind the direction of movement jumps right to 3 or 4. And in direct perpendicular lines to the direction of movement, the values indicate the exact distance. The doppler shift is eliminated once you have Pinned a hotspot.)
* this is probably a bad explanation, ask me in discord if you don't understand what I'm saying. if you do, find a better way to explain this than I just did.