This is a good and simple design with should suffice for any practical use for fusion, be it deflloring entire station or powering teg. I will also give some advice about handling fusion and what its useful for.
This guide is meant for people with at least basic understanding of atmos system, It cant help much if you don’t know what pipes or tritium is.
This is by no means the most optimal design, be it space wise or heat numbers wise, but it will get you to absurd particle strength easily
Reminder of how fusion works
This is short reminder of what is needed for fusion to happen
You need plasma and CO2, the more (especially plasma) the better. You also need tritium and it will be probably your biggest roadblock. All of that has to be heated to 10000 degrees for fusion to start, once its started it will rapidly consume trit and generate incredible amounts of heat and radiation.
Practical uses are few but it can power teg with waiste gasses if you manage to make piping work (teg is weirdly finicky), use it to heat anything to incredible temperatures (the only way to provide temperature for making hypernoll), and there is nothing as destructive on the station as fusion gasses. They can jump over multiple space tiles to burn you to death, fusion breaks are beautiful sight.
Design itself
I will be using a example screenshots, remember modifications are fine to make, it doesn’t have to be 1 - 1 to work.
Floor
The design is 3 * 5 with the size of the fusion chambers themselves. It contain 2 * 3 fusion chamber and 2 * 3 trit burn chamber. The one tile wide column in middle is not necessary but it looks good.
Reinforced floors are needed to survive the temperatures
Piping
Welcome your worst enemy the piping!
Lets go though it one by one. Trit burn chamber has 2 injectors and 3 scrubbers. More scrubbers = less trit loss. Yellow pipe is for trit burn mix, it can typically be handled by modified atmos pure line (you need atmos level of gasses to do this, you wont get far with canisters). Anywhere between 10% and 3% plasma will work but i would advise more plasma than normal at least at start because we also need heat from the burn for heating fusion to the start point.
Blue line is for moving trit into fusion chamber, if you want you can attach thermomashine to it, it should somewhat help trit production, but it isn’t needed. Scrubbers should be set to scrub trit and only trit, and have extended range active.
One red pipe is for plasma, another for CO2. You can do something interesting with them, but for purposes of basic design its not needed. Volume pump is here to let you easily turn on or off pumping gasses in.
Last one are the black scrubbers and pipes. They are here to filter fusion waiste gasses. Unless you want something specific from fusion chamber you should filter everything but: Plasma, CO2, trit and H2O. Why not H2O? THERE IS WAY TO MUCH OF IT, IT WILL COMPLETLY CLOG YOUR PIPES. Remember to put output for waiste gasses somewhere in space and away from anything important. Use either injectors if you have somewhere powered, or passive vents if you don’t.
Heating pipes and activating trit burn
Now heat piping. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THATS HOLY, MAKE SURE NO HEATING PIPE IS OUTSIDE THE CHANBERS. IT WILL DESTROY ALL YOU LOVE AND CARE ABOUT IF IT IS. The transition between normal pipe and heat one doesn’t exchange heat so don’t wory about it.
Design you see is a bit more artsy (and safe) than just using the 4 ways heating pipes, you can use them if you want.
Unlike all other parts of fusion here we just need to add one canister of plasma into the pipes and we can forget their exist forever more. They will use heat from trit burn to jumpstart fusion.
When fusion starts turn off the valve so it doesn’t drain heat from fusion (its barley noticeable either way). I seen some people replacing valve with heat pump, this works to and will make the fast valve turning unnecessary, but its slightly slower and will necessities fuelling both sides separately. Its up to you.
Last thing here is the igniter signaller assembly. This is easiest way by far to start trit burn. If you forget to add it before pumping in gas not all is lost, add thermomashine to yellow pipe with trit mix, and (with at least T2 parts) start heating. It should cause plasma fire inside the pipe with should ignite trit burn. Just remember to clear the pipe by letting it fully drain and removing thermomashine before you start pumping in normal trit mix again.
Chambers
Here is version with windows. Use either reinforced plasma ones or uranium ones. Not only they have greater resistance to pressure and heat, but they are dammed hard to kill. Anything but intentional sabotage shouldn’t break them.
2 THINGS TO REMEBER AT ALL COST!!
DO NOT MAKE WINDOWS ON INSIDE, THEY WILL BREAK AND FLOOD ATMOS THE MOMENT FUSION STARTS!!
CHECK 3 TIMES IF ALL WINDOWS ARE SCREWED PROPERLY OR YOU WILL GET A VERY UNPLESANT SPILL THE MOMENT YOU PUMP IN GAS!!
Locker barrier
Now time for locker wall. If you perform fusion there will be nuclear particles thrown around. Doesn’t matter your level of rad protection, they will do solid poison damage to you, and they go though windows. The easiest way to stop them are closed lockers (type doesn’t matter but radiation ones are traditional). Remember to wear radiation suit or CE hardsuit, even engieniering hardsuit wont survive radiation levels of proper fusion. If you are a borg you can actually die just to radiation so be carful.
Remember to turn off CO2 and Plasma inputs after adding a lot of it into fusion chamber, if you keep them on trit burn wont be able to heat fusion enough to start. Also remember to turn them back on the moment fusion starts (you will know by flood of messages about particles hitting lockers)
Dealing with radiation
Per someone suggestion i will add quick guide to dealing with radiation, since fusion is the biggest source of it I know off.
First I will repeat what I said earlier in the guide. Nuclear particles bypass all normal radiation protection including the “rad immune” races. Locker barier is necessary to manage them.
Cyborgs are immune to rads up to a point, but after that point they will take a lot of damage.
Anything short of radiation suits or Ce hardsuit will not be enough protection, and even they can be inconsistent. Watch out for toxin damage and react if you start taking it.
Ways of dealing with radiation:
- Sometimes you will have deluxe radiation kits in radiation lockers (it’s 50% chance per roundstart locker). If you see them you are in luck. A ton of toxin and rad healing pills, and the deluxe pill contains mutadone with helps with mutations. If you don’t have that you will have pill bottle witch wont help much but is better than nothing.
- Whiskey helps but only a little and being drunk is a disadvantage. If you are engineer, atmos tech or CE ask bartender for screwdriver instead. It will purge rads much faster.
- If you glow green, you need to shower, it will fix that issue (green circle around you is different thing). Shower also reduces rads you have while you are under it, its slow but better than nothing.
- Ask medbay for radiation meds. Boring but with good chemists effective way. Taking a lot of toxin, brain and mutation healing meds will let you tank though the radiation so that’s a option to.
- A radical option, you can hack a suit storage machine (the one with hardsuits in it) and proceed to decontaminate yourself. It deals lethal amounts of burn damage, you need someone trustworthy to bring you to medbay afterwards, but it will fully remove all radiation from you.
Ending words
I hope this design helps you safely perform your first fusions. Feel free to experiment and try new ones once you gain solid understanding on how fusion works, I seen it performed on 2 tiles and it was glorious. Have fun creating suns in your atmospheric endeavours!