alright so y’all know how we have station atmospherics that were built for back when a breach could take almost a full minute to siphon a room? vents and scrubbers are more or less able to handle the new fastmos code as far as clearing out pressure, but one thing that fastmos has done is make it really hard to normalize hot temperatures; a fire that gets out of hand can easily screw an area of the station for the rest of the round.
so.
what are some good ideas for mapping solutions that would make hallways and departments better at returning to normal temperatures after spikes in heat?
that’s less mapping and more coding though. i mean ways within the current atmospherics system that we can finagle an atmos solution.
also i might be wrong on this one but it seems like temp sticks to tiles even if said tile is depressurized, like how a 0kPa supermatter will still have heat if you emergency vent it, and how a 0kPa room will still come back with heat when you repressurize it.
Agree, space heaters are slow as hell compared to how fast the temp can rise now. I had to grow gas frost peppers and throw them around 9x3 part of a hallway to stabilize the temperature because two space heaters couldn’t do it in like 20 minutes.
I miss baystation air alarms that actually had inbuilt thermostats and would try to regulate the correct temp on their own.
Back to map ideas, in addition to proper blockers, what about a layer of heat-exchange piping connected to ‘coolant’ closets around the station? It’d be like how some stations have those green-gray airlock ‘emergency closets’, but they’d also have connectors and nitrogen cans so that people can dump chilled N2 on the fly.
Give every map a roundstart cooler on the scrubbers and distro lines, set to a stable temperature and turned on automatically. This will assist Atmos Techs in stabilizing temperatures by cycling the atmos in a heated area
If the above is done, having fire alarms switch air alarms into draught mode (Siphon + Normal vent) will give a cooling effect for as long as the scrubber line isn’t over-pressurized. (I know this isn’t a mapping change and would also be relatively slow in many cases, but also automatic)
Final, separate idea: Add a new object that acts as a straight-to-space vent (replicates the effect of spacing a tile in the room with an RCD) and have them linked to fire alarms to cycle open for ten seconds. If a player is sucked into one when it opens, space them at high velocity somehow.
distro and scrubbers (especially scrubbers) helps a bit, but it takes a solid 3 total air replacements for me to get a room back to habitable temperature after your average fire, and that’s only down to a somehow livable ~60 degrees Celsius. mainly i was thinking of things that can be done to cool a room without venting it and replacing it, like running cooled air in. not many options w/o a coding change though.
another idea instead of a space venter that might be a bit easier to do coding-wise without adding a new object: fire alarms have a single stored charge of atmos resin, which they will throw out
I just got through typing out how this isn’t possible with our current atmos, but it is, and it can be done relatively easily with mapping changes
Heat transfer pipes
Right now Scrubber and Distro pipes exist in layers 1 and 3. If layer 2 is utilized for heat transfer pipes intermittently, the heat from a fire can be equalized across the station gradually.
Atmos can also be set up to accommodate a station-wide cooling system by having external heat transfer pipes connected to the main network but separated by a valve. Station gets toasty because of a fire? Toggle the valve until things cool off a bit.
Have roundstart coolers hooked up to this system as well to provide a stabilizing force at all times, but know it probably won’t keep up with major fires which will require manually toggling the space cooling.
Needs testing to see if this is feasible or not. There’s a chance this will equalize temperatures too quickly, or that small fires end up roasting the whole station, but on a station wide scale I would think the change will be gradual enough to allow reaction times - especially with fire suit lockers in so many locations
