Supermatter and you!

[moltenkore]

I bid you welcome my friend to this house of learning, aka the engine room. This guide will show you the ways of the supermatter and how to set it up with efficiency! "But.. I like the singularity engine better" I hear you say. Well! After the secrets hidden within this guide are discovered you may find yourself loving supermatter a whole lot more. After all, if it isn't super.. it really doesn't matter™.

I will be using an imgur album I created so if you would like to follow along in more detail, here is a link http://imgur.com/a/RQltA

"Hello everyone, this is your friendly learning robot T.E.S.T! Today I will be showing you the art of supermatter."

 

"This is the layout we're aiming for today, as you can see there are quite a few components in the supermatter setup. If you cannot see the entire image don't worry, just download it using this link to your NT provided PDA (( http://imgur.com/oTidQLn ))."

 

"Supermatter generates power by using TEGs or Thermal Electric Generators. I am currently standing behind one now. If we look at the panel we can see all the different datasets surrounding TEG operation, or in laymans terms the flashy flashy numbery things that do stuff. TEGs generate power by temperature differentials, the left turbine in this case will have hot gas flowing through and the right turbine will have cold (colder) gas flowing through. The heat from the left turbine will be transferred to the right turbine during operation. Another factor of TEGs is flow! Without any gas flow, the TEG will do nothing.. but more on that later."

 

"First things first! We need to put our gases in the hot and cold loops. For this setup I will be using Carbon Dioxide for our hot loop and plasma for our cold loop. The hot loop's gas will be heated directly by the supermatter, whereas the cold loop's gas will be isolated from the supermatter and cooled by space. So as you can see in the provided image, we have two canisters of each gas in their respective loops with the pumps turned to max."

 

"Next up is setting the flow pump for our cold loop. Without this the gas will sit still and not help us in anyway.. so simply turn on the pump and slap it into max setting."

 

"Filters! These are very important as they remove the waste gas from the supermatter chamber (aka the hot loop). In this case we want to remove the byproduct oxygen as bad things can happen if we allow the oxygen to build up in the chamber. Bad things include reaction acceleration, explosions and radiation! The top filter's output we want to go south and the bottom filter's output we want to go north, this makes sure the gas we still want in the hot loop doesn't get filtered into the waste canister."

 

"Speaking of waste canisters.. we need to set that up now. Press the little shutter button on the wall and drag in some form of canister, be it nitrogen or plasma and set that down on the waste gas cooling port. The purpose of this little cooling station is to reduce the hot waste gas's temperature so we can store more of it in our waste gas canister, which we will need to setup next..."

 

"Set down an empty canister on the shown port and set the pump to on and max, the gas will be cooled and stored in this section of pipe and the canister we put down."

 

"After all this preperation it's finally time to start up the supermatter! Head over to the emitter, raise the shutters (if they are down) and give the thing about 9 shots of lasery goodness. The supermatter reaction will start now!"

 

"Head over to the control room and watch as the temperature slowly increases, congradulations, we now have power! Keep an eye on the value every ten or so minutes to make sure there's nothing gone horribly wrong. The temperature should not exceed 4000 kelvin with this setup."

 

"No we have the supermatter going we have to setup some SMES, or our station peeps will not be very happy. Head over to the engine room SMES and set the values. We can either go 200k in / out or 100k in / out. The choice is yours!"

 

"Similarly we have to head over to the main station SMES, either set the values 800k in / out or 900k in / out depending on what you set the engine SMES to."

 

"One more SMES to set, this one is rather important as it powers atmospherics. People like breathing! Set the values to about 80k in / out this will give those grumpy atmospheric technicians enough to play will."

 

"OH! I almost forgot.. you organics need radiation protection! Please wear radiation suits at all times in and around the main supermatter room. You will also need masons goggles or you'll go mad! The supermatter crystals give off some light that is... oh... shiny..."

 

Thus concludes the epic how to on suppermatter and you. If you are faced with imminent death please consult your in-game book for further instructions.

Remember.. if it isn't super, it doesn't matter!™

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Setups to try!

[H]ot loop, [C]old loop

H: Plasma, C: Plasma - /Very stable/ boringly stable.. but it produces a lot of power.

H: Nitrogen, C: Nitrogen - Meh.. this is for scrubs.

H: Oxygen, C: CO2 - Dangerous.. I've not fully tested this one. Depending on what code base you're on things could go boom!

H: 20% Nitrogen, 80% Plasma, C: Plasma - Runs a bit hotter than pure plasma thanks to the nitrogen, it's a good setup if you want a hot hot loop.

H: 50% Carbon Dioxide, 50% Plasma, C: Plasma - You'll get a bit more bang for your buck.

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This is my first guide, please let me know what you think and if there are any mistakes or things that should be changed. Thanks!

Edited March 6, 2016 by Guest

[Gollee]

Super matter and you:

 

In all seriousness, I'm 99% sure this is all correct from what I remember with supermatter.

[coolbc2000]

Aye its all correct and well done.

Remember kids, watch what buttin you press! It could be the core eject!

[Guest]

Can confirm, entirely correct.

Sticky this, please. Very good guide.

[K0NFL1QT]

Except you should put phoron in all the ports, because you get a safer engine that can produce more power and is harder to sabotage. Shoot it with the emitter for as long as you like.

[Guest]

Except you should put phoron in all the ports, because you get a safer engine that can produce more power and is harder to sabotage. Shoot it with the emitter for as long as you like.

 

Yep, actually, this is much less wasteful and it works efficiently. It's not "top-optimization-efficiency" but it's safe as fuck.

[K0NFL1QT]

Yes, forgot to mention; on a phoron core, put your omni-filters to cycle phoron back into the north/south pipes too. This setup should produce practically no waste and you'll pull around 1.8MW easily. I pushed it to about 2.8MW before the TEGs were fritzing out too often to increase output over what they were dropping when they overload. And in the event that you push the engine too hard and it gets to delamination heat, just dump another canister of phoron into the core to cool it down. The phoron only setup does have a weakness, but it requires atmos knowledge. And if the worst happens, you can always vent the core and then refill it with phoron only again.

EDIT:-

Done this often enough and never took pictures. I will take some pics next time to better show a phoron setup.

[Shadow]

I'll "sticky" (I hate this word) this guide for a while.

[Blingx3]

Thank you for a well-written, well-rounded guide. I have been spanked by mods for writing a negative post, so here's my positve one. I used this to learn my way around the engine, and it couldn't be any better.

[Jboy2000000]

You say in the guide that the gas is cooled by spess. Is it possible to use a gas cooler to make gas colder than what you get just from sending it through space?

[Guest]

I hereby motion that we move this guide to the Official Guides subforum!

[Nikov]

You say in the guide that the gas is cooled by spess. Is it possible to use a gas cooler to make gas colder than what you get just from sending it through space?

 

No.

The gas coolers are terribly power-hungry. Any gains made will be lost to power the gas cooler. If you could power the engine on a gas cooler, then you'd be breaking thermodynamics, and I'd report it as a bug/exploit.

Most of this is good, but I do things differently. I find a phoron hot loop undesirable. I prefer to keep nitrogen in the hot loop. Not only is nitrogen inert in case of a leak, but the more you pulse the supermatter, the more radiation and the more energetic the supermatter becomes. The core venting on a very energetic supermatter is a problem you may not have time to fix. Its better, in my opinion, to run as mild a supermatter as possible using three cans of nitrogen as a base and filtering out only oxygen to the waste loop. You get an easy 1.5 megs, the radiation is negligable, phoron builds up to slowly increase your cooling ability; its generally safe and easy. More power is a mistake; we want the longest duration of the least risk possible. On the cold side, phoron is used. Not only is cold gas unappealing for terrorists, but the high heat capacity makes for a very good coolant. We want phoron to stay cold on the cold loop, but nitrogen's lower specific heat makes it hotter on the hot loop. It also makes it easier to cool the hot loop.

I would also avoid using CO2, because in-character it is a bad idea to put dry ice in a cold loop or carbon fouling in a hot loop. Nitrogen is the preferred coolant gas in industry for a reason.