User:Studenterhue/Sandbox

Powering the station: the geothermal capture system

All about Hotspots

Hotspots are where magma is close enough 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. 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.

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.

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, and as you gain experience, you'll likely develop your own.

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.
Place some wire over the center, then click on the bit of wire created to place some wire on the square you're standing on.
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.
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.

Boosting Power Generation

In fact, there's not just one, but three relatively simple ways to increase power output.

First, you can simply add more vent units.

Second, you can mine out the rock under a hotspot. It's pretty simple; just follow these three steps:

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.

Finally, you can "stack" multiple hotspots by moving them close together with the stomper unit. This is a bit harder than it sounds.

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. 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.