How long have you been playing ss13?: About 8 months now, 400 hours (total).
Who vouches for your experience (if anyone)?: Admins: @Burza and Sergei Koralev (based on a good note I received), plus a few other players that I can provide if desired (taught them engineering yesterday)
Game Experience (More Detailed): After teaching a bunch of people engineering, I’ve been told a few times that I should sign up for becoming a mentor. I main CE and more recently, have been rolling AI more (yay, low pop sage), and have a lot of experience with engineering.
Hours:
EDIT: My trust level raised. I have edited the post.
I’m writing this targetted at someone who is doing their first CO2 setup. If you are more advanced, you can obviously skip some steps if you know pump values and such, but for someone who is doing it for their first time, sneaking up on it is much better than delamming it.
Prepare for a normal N2 SM through all the normal STRAIGHT PIPING steps ( I can elaborate if you wish), with the following modifications:
Step a’ : Download the Supermatter Monitor on your Tablet, and have that open at all times.
a. At the filter which removes gasses to canisters, place a layer manifold on each side, and add a pipe on layer 1 or 3. To make it look pretty, you can do both, but it is not strictly necessary. Instead of a pipe, you can use 2 digital valves to force all the gases through the filter and allow for the AI to help in a delam by bypassing the filter. Set that filter to filter out pluoxium. Note: If you aren’t using digital valves, some pluox will loop around the coolant loop and be put back into the chamber. The fix for that will be detailed in another step.
b. Optional step: Remove one of the canister connections and add a cooler to cool your collected pluox. Keep a canister or two handy in case of delam. Pluox is good at helping control and cool a delam, as it reduces increases heat resistance of the crystal, decreases rads, and cools.
c. Set your filters to CO2, Pluoxium (to recycle any missed pluox from the first filter), N2, and I like to add N2O, just so I don’t have to worry about losing any N2O if we need to dump some in during a delam (Note, make sure the temperature is fairly low when you dump N2O in, otherwise you can cause the N2O to decompose into 2 N2 and 1 O2, which can be bad if you are already at a high temperature.
d. Keep in the thermocooler cooling loop, but straight pipe it, and keep the coolers turned off. Default T1 coolers do not get colder than space, but they can help remove heat in a delam, and the AI can activate them to help. There are other modifications you can do here, but that is out of scope.
e. Get atmos to plumb CO2 into your engine fuel line.
f. I like to start the engine on N2, so wrench in the N2 canisters and set the air alarm to Internal 0, Siphoning Expanded per usual setup.
g. Activate the emitters and set the SMES, because the crew might be complaining about power by this point if you are doing this for the first time.
h. If you are following SOP (you should be), let the SMES reach full charge.
i. Set the Atmos to Engine pump at a value which is just above the current loop pressure to start (I usually start around 50 kPA above, which usually ends up being around 150.) This can be increased later as you switch over to full CO2 mode.
j. Start bleeding off N2 by switching the N2 filter to Nothing for brief bursts. You will see the N2 concentration decrease and CO2 concentration increase on the monitor. Once the N2 concentration is low enough for you, set the filter back to N2, so you don’t have to worry about it in a delam.
k. As the concentration increases, turn off the emitters. The CO2 will keep the MeV high, without needed the extra excitement from the emitters.
l. You can increase the Atmos to Engine pump when most of the N2 has been bled out. I’ve gotten it up to about 200 kPa(maybe 250 if my memory recalls correctly). This will take some tinkering with.
m. At this point, you should have almost a pure CO2 SM running. As the CO2 builds up, the MeV will slowly rise. You will also be producing pluox, which helps as a moderating gas.
n. Refill/swap your N2 cans, just in case. Turn off the pumps that go into the coolant loop, and wrench in one can of Pluox and one can of N2. Tell the AI to activate the pump on the pluox can and set the Pluox canister filter to Nothing in the case of an delam, along with the other steps.
I prefer digital valves over manual valves in the SM, because the AI can control them so you can get them to help while you handle the steps that requires hands. Even if the AI is malf, turning on and off those valves is not going to do any more harm than what they can do by shutting off air alarms/messing with the output injector (my favorite sabotage because it can be hard to detect).
Make sure you are wearing gloves otherwise you may contaminate the evidence. Grab your forensic scanner, and scan the item. It will give you a readout of potential fibers or fingerprints or DNA. You can then use a medical records console to look up DNA or a security records console to look up fingerprints, or ask the AI and have them do it.
“There’s a recent bug that cropped up in the latest batch of merges”. ( According to the Github issue I read yesterday as I submitted a PR, Ike probably broke it.)
You are out of plasma in your engines. Check to make sure your canisters are actually empty, and if they are, you’ll need to mine some solid plasma and put it into the plasma refinery to get the plasma gas you need to fly the shuttle.
Breakfast/Sweet things: Honey (second place, real maple syrup). Getting high quality honey can add some great flavors. Multifunctional, goes on toast/breads, tea, ice cream, and in dishes you wouldn’t expect.
Dinner: This is a tough call, so many options. We’ve got an awesome burger/wing place near me that has awesome an awesome fry sauce, and a Soy/Garlic/Chile sauce which is to die for. Yes, they put the sauce on the burgers as well, so it is a condiment.
You should keep the n2 in the Co2 setup. That way, if things go wrong, you can filter out the co2 and still have gas in the loop. Also, the ideal Pump pressure for a happy co2 SM seems to be around 1300-1500kpa. This will get you close to max pressure in the SM while allowing for temp fluctuations up to 150 kelvin or so.
The best SM gas is Hyper nob. As it stops other gas reactions, making it almost impossible for a fire to start in the SM. Unless you are a CE that decides to pump a can of fresh hyper-nob into the SM without cooling it below physics-breaking-temperatures first… (1.0 xe15 kelvin is bad mkay)
I mean, you aren’t wrong. You can keep the N2 in the loop and run it, but most people wouldn’t consider that a “pure CO2” SM, as your percentage of N2 is still significant. The N2 does also help with keeping the crystal colder than pure CO2. The reason for my last step M is for a quick SCRAM. You can use the pluox as a first step intervention, trying to increase the heat resistance and decrease the rads. If that fails, space the crystal with an RCD until it gets within reasonable limits, and then have the AI or another engineer dump that last can of N2 into the system as you reconstruct the floor. It’ll be at room temperature instead of chilled, but spacing the crystal should have brought it down in temperature enough to at least give you some breathing room.
Of course the best gas is Hypernob, but that is out of scope for the question. Plus, an engineer who is MHelping on a CO2 setup probably does not have a canister of Hypernob laying around.
The truth to the SM is that there are thousands of different permutations for what you can and should not do, and there is no “right” way to do it (there’s obviously a lot of wrong ways, but no “right” way). It’s all personal preference. I’ve run a strange mixed gas of BZ, Trit, O2, CO2, and N2, mostly because I had small bits and pieces laying around and wanted to mess with gasses, but didn’t have time to get to a dominant mixture of any one before a transfer occurred. I could tell you how to run a perfect SM that outputs 1GW (not actually), but what’s the fun in that? Most of the fun in this game is from experimenting and screwing up on their own. Most players that are going to be MHelping about the SM want to learn how to do something without blowing it up and screwing up the round for someone else, and once they get comfortable with a setup, they will be able to experiment with it by themselves and learn from their mistakes. Why spoil the fun for them?
awesome CE, vouching for him because I was sec assigned to engi once, showed me how SM worked and was genuinely enthusiastic. (have not played any engi roles) He couldn’t show me all of it due to shuttle call, but seemed thrilled to show me more another round, if he was CE again. Also just really nice in IC and OOC. Also pretty good question answers I think.
