How the supermatter works

[bluezorua]

This is not a guide on how to set up the supermatter, but on how it works

While it may help you learn how to set up the supermatter, this guide is not based around that

Lets start step by step on how the gas loops, starting from the canister till the end of the loop

A photo of the supermatter engine with numbers showing how well go through this

1. How Gas enters the loop

here you see the gasses entering the chamber, the legend is

RED: Canisters
GREEN: Recycled
BLUE: Atmos Piped

• Canister gases come from, well where you expect it, the canisters you wrench in, this is your main way of entering gases to the engine
• Recycled gases are gases that have went trough the filter (8.) and have not been spaced, these are the gases you put into the SM going back for round 2
• Atmos Piped gases are gases that atmos techs have piped directly into the supermatter, these are rarely used unless a setup that constantly removes gas (such as CO2 SM) is used

2. How gas enters the chamber

Gas enters from the right, exits from the left
The top is the bypass, this is only used if gas cannot be shoved into the SM fast enough such as during a plasmafire

3. and 4., scrubbers and vents

When powered the supermatter constantly makes:

• Heat
• Oxygen
• And plasma
  due to this you need to constantly add a gas and remove the gases inside, this is where the previous parts come in and start adding a cooled down gas of your choice, normally N2
  The gasses are then sucked out via the scrubbers

5. The filter

This is a part most new players forget about, this removes a certain gas from the loop and adds it to a wrench in canister, it is almost always useless unless a CO2 setup is done and there it is used to bottle up pluoxium, some people add a layer adapter before and after it so gases can continue flowing freely without needing to remove it

6. Gas to cooling and 7. The cooling loop

its a simple step, you turn on the pump and have space magically cool your gases, this is sometimes turned off if tier 4 coolers are installed for more optimal cooling

8. and 9.Recycling Filter

its quite simple, you simply choose which gases you want to keep on the recycler (normally the gases you wrenched in with the canisters) and they’ll be brought back into the loop, otherwise they’ll be spaced

10. The freezers

similar to the space loop but with electric freezers rather than the coldness of space
!!THESE ARE USELESS FOR NORMAL OPERATION UNLESS THEY ARE UPGRADED TO TIER 4 PARTS DUE TO SPACE BEING COLDER!!
some people use this as to also plug in gases pre-cooled but not that many do it as its normally non-essential

after this it goes all the way back to 1.

I made the end part of this guide in a bit of a rush so I’ll probably polish it later, otherwise if you have any feedback you can yell at me down below

TODO

• Add how the supermatter makes gases
• Add how the supermatter makes radiation
• Add how emitters work
• Add how pressure, heat and charge effects the supermatter

[taste_of_a_liar]

Pretty nice! as someone who has no experience in engineering or how its all done, this actually gave me a better understanding on how certain things work

[williamcll]

one thing you can do is, especially on deltastation set the recycling filter waste to scrubbers, that way you keep the scrubber loop cooled and provide atmos with extra plasma/oxygen for making trit.

[J515]

@bluezorua

how it works

the SM just doesnt work

[J515]

@bluezorua

The top is the bypass, this is only used if gas cannot be shoved into the SM fast enough such as during a plasmafire

Also it’s used for precooling your gas

[J.I.JOE]

Is there a guide that explains what the sm crystal is and why it reacts to gasses and being zapped the way it does?

I get the piping and cooling system but stuff like gas mixtures is still completly foreign to me.

[Ruko]

@J.I.JOE

I get the piping and cooling system but stuff like gas mixtures is still completly foreign to me.

The only gasses with effects worth learning are as follows:

• Pluoxium is a safety gas which can be mixed into an emergency cooling mix for dumping into the SM in the case of a fire. Pluoxium basically forces the SM to chill the fuck out and directly reduces its power output and activity.

• N2 is your safe neutral gas with no notable effect on the SM whatsoever. It is also inert so it will not decay or worsen fires.

• O2 Supposedly increases power output, but its effect is so negligible it’s not worth bothering with, especially considering how much of a risk increased O2 is during a fire if one should occur

• CO2 massively boosts power output, to the point of triggering a meltdown if you’re using it at the same time as emitters. Without emitters CO2 can be safely used in almost any concentration to produce power. CO2 will slowly ‘decay’ into pluoxium when used to power an SM because CO2 + O2 + Radiation = Pluoxium.

• Plasma is a very unsafe gas which causes the SM to rapidly overheat with anything but the most robust of cooling systems, not to mention it plays the other half of fuel to start a fire. Plasma also has a side effect of causing the SM to spit out substantially more gas than usual which could be used to resupply the station with plasma and oxygen in the event the gas miners are destroyed.

• Tritium is similar as plasma, but with the dial turned up to 11. It causes the SM to quickly heat up, enhances its energy output and if ignited will produce obscenely hot and very difficult to contain fires. Tritium does not directly cause the SM to produce extra gas like plasma does.

These are all written from a mixture of memory and experience and I won’t be terribly surprised if someone who code-dives proves some aspect of them are wrong. There are also two more gas effects which aren’t worth knowing about or using at all:

• BZ Causes the SM to shoot nuclear particles. No it does not actually increase power output at all, it just causes the SM to shoot funny insta-death particles and has no other notable effect. Those particles don’t even seem to actually produce power when they hit the collectors strangely enough, probably because they have null radiation values.

• N2O has an oxymoronic effect: It causes the temperature the SM has to reach in order to be damaged to go up, which sounds great on paper. You can run a hot SM without damaging it right? Wrong. N2O also decays at high temperatures instantly ending this effect and flooding the SM with an excess of O2 which fuels whatever fire was already happening to break it down. Shit’s like trying to use dynamite to insulate your house from a fire, and for some reason a lot of folks suggest new engineers use it on the SM like its a safe gas.

[BarteG]

It’s a small thing but the space loop diagram is a little misleading becouse it suggests that the temperature at both ends of it is diffrent. Pipes form pipenets which share all the values describing the gas. If you use pipes instead of pumps (pumps and valves split the pipenets into two) you don’t even need to have the space loop to actually be a loop. That’s why straight piping the cooling loop along with it’s bypass allows it to be not only redundant in the case that someone unwrenches a single space pipe but also lets it cool all the gases in the scrobbers pipe at once

[williamcll]

N2O SM was designed for early engine designs where there were no radiation collectors and instead the N2O is not scrubbed out of the SM but all other gases are now way hotter without burning, which is then used to feed a TEG for roughly 450kW.

That was why early bee 2020 pubbystation setups were so scuffed. All the filters and pumps were designed for N2O TEG but the engine room was built for Plasma TEG.