Supermatter Engine

The supermatter engine, located in the aftmost part of Engineering, is the main source of power for the station; while it is theoretically possible to run the station off of solar power, the setup time is too slow for most normal-sized crews and the station almost inevitably draws its power from the engine.

The supermatter engine is extremely dangerous; when deliberately tampered with or poorly set up, it can easily blow a substantial hole in Engineering and leave the station all but powerless in the aftermath.

Safety First

There are a few important safety principles to remember when working with the engine:

• The supermatter is extremely dangerous. You can pull it, but any other attempt to touch or grab it, or bumping into it, or trying to use an item on it (you get the idea) will result in you turning into a pile of ash.
  • If it is absolutely essential to interact with the supermatter, you might want to ask Medical to make a genetic backup of you beforehand in case something goes wrong.
• The radiation from the supermatter is also dangerous. Inactive core does not irradiate - so it is possible (but not recommended) to work without a suit until you fire the emitter. You should wear a radiation suit, with a hood, at all times when working in the active engine.
  • Suits are available in the engine entrance, and in the Engine Monitoring room.
  • Engineering hardsuits/voidsuits will not protect you from radiation. They provide some protection, enough to keep you out of immediate danger if you need to work with the engine while it is not atmospherically stable, but you shuold always wear a radiation suit if possible.
• The supermatter, even inactive, can also cause eye damage, even with a hood. You should always wear meson goggles when working in the engine room.
  • Meson goggles are available in the same lockers as the radiation suits, though you should probably be wearing your own pair from your locker anyway. They don't need to be turned on to protect your eyes, you just need to be wearing them.
• The laser from the emitter can be deadly. Don't walk in front of the emitter while it is on.

Principles of Operation

If you are new to the engine and the only engineer on shift, skip ahead to "Engine Setup" for a quick guide on how to get the engine running, and come back to this later.

Producing Power

The engine uses a Thermoelectric Generator - TEG for short. Its left side is heated by the supermatter, while the right side is cooled using the radiators. There are two TEGs, each generates a maximum of 500 MW of energy.

In its base state, the supermatter does not produce any heat, but when it is activated by the emitter which is in the engine room for this purpose, the core begins to heat up. For this reason, in order to produce heat and therefore power, the supermatter must be activated using the emitter; this is referred to as "starting" the engine.

Engine Byproducts

Activating the supermatter causes it to produce not only heat and radiation, but also oxygen, and phoron. The gas from the engine is drained using an "Engine Room Vent Pump #1" to the right from the supermatter. It passes through yellow pipes where it enters the TEGs, cools down, and to the blue pipes. Blue pipes have two omni gas filters attached to them. These filters are, by default, set to filter everything but nitrogen out into dark blue pipes, then inject the cooler, cleaned nitrogen back into the core chamber. These filters are turned off at the start and need to be turned on. Oxygen overcharges the supermatter; phoron is not dangerous on its own but is inflammable.

Power Management

Once power is generated by the TEGs, it flows through the yellow power cables which run from the TEGs themselves to the aft side of the engine room. Two SMESs draw power from this direct output circuit; the engine room SMES (visible within the engine room) and the main power grid SMES, which is in the room aft of the engine monitoring room. The engine room SMES powers all of the equipment in the engine room via the Engine Room APC; the main grid SMES provides power to the rest of the station.

The engine room SMES needs around 70-100kW. The main grid SMES output will depend on the station's power draw.

Engine Waste Handling

The Engine Waste Handling room cools and stores the oxygen and phoron byproducts filtered from the engine coolant. The purple pipes at the left are the intercooler loop; they run out into space and the gas within them is cooled by radiating heat out into space. The byproducts never enter the intercooler loop; it must be filled with coolant (usually CO2, but any gas works) to work.

The purple pipes on the right contain the engine waste.

The weird grey things within the hazard-marked area are the heat exchangers; they let the heated gas in the byproduct lines be cooler by the colder gas in the intercooler loop.

Note that if you are filtering out both oxygen and phoron, you will usually need to build a freezer to cool the gasses to the usable level.

Engine Monitoring

The Engine Monitoring room, located immediately fore of the engine itself, contains five computers used to monitor the engine, as well as three buttons to control the functioning of the engine.

From fore to aft, the computers are:

• Engine Cooling Control: Shows the status of the engine, including temperature, pressure, and the levels of the various gases and contaminants.
• Main Power Monitoring: Monitors the combined power output of the main grid SMES and all of the solar panel SMESs, and the power draw on the main grid, as well as the status of all the APCs on the station.
• Engineering Cameras: Provides access to the cameras in the engine room and those of any engineering robots and maintenance drones.
• RCON: Monitors and controls all of the SMES on the station.
• Station Alert Computer: Shows any engineering alerts from anywhere across the station.

The three buttons are:

• Engine Charging Port (top left): Opens and closes the Engine Charging Port shutters.
• Engine Emitter (top right): Toggles the emitter in the engine room on and off.
• Engine Room Blast Doors (bottom): Opens and closes the safety shutters separating Engine Monitoring from the engine room.

Procedures

This section describes all of the basic procedures which can be carried out with the engine room equipment, including several procedures which form part of the setup process, but is not a comprehensive guide to engine setup. For that, see Engine Setup below.

Injecting Coolant

The canister port attached by a pump to the blue coolant line allows the injection of coolant into the engine. To add coolant to the engine:

• There are four red nitrogen cans in the bottom left corner of the engine. Pull two the two input ports at the top right corner.
• Use a wrench on the canisters to attach them to the ports.
• Access the pumps controls by clicking with an empty hand on the pump; click "MAX" to maximise the target pressure and click on the power toggle to turn it on.
• When the coolant canister is empty, wrench it again to disconnect it, and either reuse it as a drain tank or drag it to Atmospherics so that it can be refilled.
• Repeat for the remaining two cans.

Starting the Engine

Do not start the engine unless all other engine setup has been completed.

Starting the engine entails activating the supermatter core using the emitter in the engine room. In can be done from either inside the engine room itself, or inside the Engine Monitoring Room.

• Ensure that all engine setup has been completed.
• Open the Reactor Blast Doors using the appropriate button.
• Activate the emitter.
  • From inside the engine room, click on the emitter itself with an empty hand. From the Engine Monitoring room, press the button.
• Allow the emitter to fire the required number of shots.
  • The emitter fires in bursts of four shots with a longer pause between bursts. You can turn it off at any time, even in the middle of a burst.
  • 8 shots is enough to power the station, 9 - 10 will give you a maxed power generation after some time. 11 is risky and can cause overheating. Do not shoot more or the engine will overheat.
  • If you are "boosting" the engine mid-shift, you should never fire more than one shot at a time, then give it some time to see that temperature is stable.
• Turn the emitter off in the same way you turned it on.
• Close the Reactor Blast Doors.

Removing Engine Coolant

In some situations, such as minor overheating of the engine, you may wish to purge the engine of coolant before injecting more. The engine is specifically designed to allow you to pump coolant into canisters in order to do this.

• Find an empty canister and relabel it as a hazard canister.
  • (To do this, click on the canister with an empty hand to access its control panel, and then click the "Relabel" button. The button will be greyed out unless the canister is completely empty)
• Use a wrench to attach the hazard canister to the Engine Drain port in the fore port (north west) corner of the engine room.
• Turn the engine drain pump on and set the target pressure to maximum.
• Wait for the engine to drain. This can take time, and may require changing a full hazard canister for an empty one, using a to disconnect the one and connect the other.
  • In an emergency, it is seldom necessary to fully drain the engine before injecting new coolant. Alternating between both may be less risky.
• Once the engine has drained, turn off the Engine Drain pump.
• Disconnect the hazard canister containing the drained coolant, and return it to Atmospherics to be emptied.
• It is essential to add new coolant if the old coolant has been drained. Without coolant, the engine will inevitably overheat.

For many crews, it is standard procedure to relabel one of the empty N2 canisters used to fill the engine as a hazard canister and attach it to the Engine Drain port so that a canister is already in place for an emergency.

Venting the Core

When engine overheating is serious enough that there is no time to drain the engine, the coolant inside the engine can instead be vented into space. There is a shutter aft of the core which vents directly into space. There are two buttons which control this shutter. One is located in the bottom-right corner of the engine room, another in the Chief Engineer's Office near the entrance to the Engineering lobby.

Venting the core is as simple as pressing either of the two buttons to open the shutters, and allowing the coolant to vent. This can take a long time - up to a minute or two if the coolant is especially hot or high-pressure - since much of the coolant will be in the pipes rather than in the core when venting starts. Engine pressure can be monitored from the Engine Cooling Control computer in Engine Monitoring.

Once the core has been fully vented, be sure to close the shutter before refilling it with coolant.

Ejecting the Supermatter

If it is utterly impossible to salvage the engine situation, it is possible to eject the supermatter into space, avoiding severe damage to the station.

• Gain access to the Chief Engineer's Office, where the eject button is located.
  • If there is no Chief Engineer on staff, you will need to ask the AI to open the door for you.
  • If there is no AI either, you will need to either hack the airlock or disassemble one of the windows to get in.
• Ensure the the engine vent is open. There is a button to do so on the wall behind the Chief Engineer's desk, and another in the engine.
  • If you accidentally close the shutters instead of opening them by pushing the button when someone in the engine room has already opened them (or someone else does so) the ejection will fail, and will not be repeatable.
• The eject button is located in an alcove behind the Chief Engineer's desk, behind a glass panel. Break the glass using your crowbar, a toolbox, or any other heavy object. Doing so may take several hits.
• Verbally confirm that the engine vent is open with either a crewmember in the Engine Room or the station's AI.
• Press the eject button.

A new supermatter core can be ordered from the Cargo department to replace the ejected one.

Engine Setup

This section details the process of setting up the engine for the first time at the start of the shift.

Many people have developed additions to this procedure which they carry out as standard, but unless you're told otherwise the steps which are listed here are more or less universal.

Coolant Setup

Setting up the engine cooling system is essential to prevent the engine from overheating.

1. There are four nitrogen cans at the corner of the engine room. There are also four phoron cans in the catwalks above the engine room. Take 2 of either.
2. Place the cans directly over the ports and wrench them to the ports.
3. Turn on the pumps leading from the port and max their output.
4. Wait until the cans are fully drained (the pump will show that its power use is 0).
5. Replace the cans with the remaining two.
6. Set the omni-filters at the fore. West should always be output, you can see which other directions are available by looking at the pipes around the filters. One of the two remaining directions needs to be the input, and the other needs to filter the kind of coolant you are using. Once they are set, turn them on.
7. Turn on the high-power pump near the window at the aft port side.

Engine Waste and Intercooler Loop

After that, go to the fore port of the engine room. You may notice an empty yellow canister connected to a port marked with a blue dotted outline. Port to it, there should be another unused port.

1. Connect any type of gas canister to this port.
   1. It can be any type of gas. CO2 is the most used for this purpose. Oxygen is safer, but it works in...strange ways. If you're feeling like taking the risk, you can also use phoron, as it works more efficiently.
2. Make sure the pump next to this port, and the one aft to the yellow canister are turned on and set to max.

Activating the Supermatter

Now that everything is set up, you can start the engine.

1. Click the 'Engine Room Blast Doors' button on the starboard wall of the core to close the shutters between the engine room and Engine Monitoring.
2. Click the 'Engine Charging Port' button next to the blast doors button to open the supermatter charging shielding.
3. Click on the emitter and let it fire eight shots at the supermatter if you used nitrogen coolant. Sixteen shots is advisable if you used phoron coolant. Click on it again to stop it from firing.
4. Close the charging port and open the blast doors again.

Setting Up the SMES

There are SMES units which need to be set up in the Engine Electrical Maintenance room found north of the Engine room and west of the Engine Monitoring Room. There is also the Atmospherics SMES in maintenance just northwest of this room, which must be set up as well.

1. Set up the Engine Electrical Maintenance SMES units to input and output according to your Engine output.
   1. To do this, you need to know your power output, which can be found on the Engine Power Monitoring computer (second computer from the left), or the "Power Monitor" option on an Engineer's PDA, on the "Engine Power Grid" menu. Your output will be shown beside "Total Power". Alternatively, you can use a multitool on a wire in the Engine room and it's reading will be your output.
   2. Electrical Maintenance SMES will take power from the grid before the engine SMES - meaning that if you set input too high, engine will eventually run out of power and cooling will stop working. The engine's output will max out at 1,000,000.
2. Move to the Atmospherics SMES mentioned before, and set it's input and output to about 100,000, setting input to auto and output on.
3. From here, you may go to the different Substations around the station, and set up those smaller sub-grids like the Atmospherics grid (Not required but highly recommended).
4. Alternatively, you could use one of the RCON consoles to modify any of the SMES on station.

Optimization and Maintenance

Supermatter Upkeep

The supermatter stops producing radiation after not having been hit by an emitter blast after awhile. This will slowly have it's power output as a result. Additional charging may be needed if the power being outputted is not enough to charge the APC units across the station.

1. Check the nearby Engine Power Monitoring computer to see the power output as described in the SMES setup process.
2. If the SMES units have a red light on top, they are not charging. If this is so, you must either increase output, or lower it's input settings.
3. Each collector with a full tank produces ~8,300W with each shot of an emitter at their default positions. This means each shot will give you roughly 50,000W of power output. Use this to determine how many shots you need to get the engine to your desired output.
4. Adjust the SMES settings accordingly to the additional power output.

Power Output

Once all APCs around the station have been fully charged, power requirements are reduced. If you wish to reduce potential harm caused by electrical shock, output levels can reduced as well.

1. Check the nearby Main Grid Power Monitoring computer to see the current power load.
2. Adjust the SMES output charge accordingly, with some margin to allow for occasional power spikes as APCs recharge.

Engine Emergencies

If the supermatter gets too hot or too unstable, it will begin to break down. In such situations, the Engine Monitoring Computer will make an announcement over the station intercom to that effect. If you hear this announcement, hotfoot it to the engine room immediately. Unless there are many other engineers on shift to do it, your first priority is to get the engine under control.

The first thing you should do is try to find the problem which caused the engine temperature to spike. Power failures due to not setting the engine SMES output high enough, or not turning its input from "Off" to "Auto", are surprisingly common. Failure to turn on the gas coolers may be another cause. Otherwise, any number of things may be tampered with by a troublemaker to cause things to go awry. Often, simply finding and fixing the problem will cause the engine to stabilise by itself. If, however, the core instability reaches 40%-50% and you have not found the cause, you urgently need to cool the core if only to give yourself time to find the root of the problem.

There are essentially four things you can do to get the engine temperature down to safe levels:

Emergency Coolant Injection is always a stopgap measure, but it can be one that saves your life. Injecting fresh coolant into the engine without getting rid of the current coolant is a quick way to bring the temperature back down while you prepare for a more effective measure. This is especially effective if Atmospherics have cooled some nitrogen especially for use as emergency coolant.

Draining and replacing the coolant is the best way to resolve the situation if you have the time. Following the procedures list above, first drain the coolant currently in the engine, and then - once all of the coolant has been drained - inject fresh coolant. As always, specially-cooled emergency coolant will speed up the stabilisation of the engine.

Venting and replacing the coolant is a faster, though more wasteful, method of accomplishing the same thing. If core instability rises above 60%-70% and you aren't well on your way to draining and replacing the coolant, you should vent and replace it instead. Simply vent the engine core and then, once the vent has been closed, inject fresh coolant.

Ejecting the supermatter is the most drastic method, but can save the station in a pinch. If instability rises above 80%, or if it seems like you cannot stop the meltdown regardless of the exact level of instability, you should eject the core as per Procedures above. If there are enough engineers on staff, at least one should be standing by to eject while the others work on other methods of getting the core under control, just in case it becomes necessary. Template:Gameplay Guides