Guide to Advanced Supermatter Hacking

This page is currently under construction! It is in a state of significant expansion or restructuring, and is not yet ready for use.

This is a guide to creating awful, ridiculous high-power changes to the station reactor configuration. It is not intended to be a guide for new players, but instead a carefully organized record of different realistically achievable engine setups.

If you are a new player looking to learn how to operate the reactor, check out Guide to the Supermatter.

Have a setup of your own you want to add? Make sure to tell Montessquio about it on Discord!

Precautions

• When customizing the reactor room, adding, removing, or

Simple Setups

This section focuses on engine configurations not too far away from what's accessible at round-start, and should all be realistically achievable by an experienced engineer within an hour of starting their shift.

Unless otherwise specified, all of these setups assume you have set up the waste disposal to atmos outlined in Guide to the Supermatter: Engine Waste and Intercooler Loop.

For reference, the reference setup linked above (assuming no SMES bottlenecks) produces 6000kW of power at a baseline Rel. EER of 1400+-100 MeV/cm³.

Renew the TEGs

The default Thermoelectric Generators are old, and don't produce much power compared to new ones you can order through cargo. They can even be replaced while the reactor is running, as long as its done quickly. Just wrench on, wrench off.

When implemented on the reference baseline, just this one act jumps the total power output to a fluctuating 12MW ~ 13MW.

Note that the "Old" TEGs simply have 25% reduced thermal efficiency compared to the new ones. Both have the same maximum power output per unit of 500MW, the Old ones simply need a greater heat differential to get there.

Radiation Collectors

Six radiation collectors can be easily wired three on each side of the reinforced glass that encloses the Supermatter Crystal. They can be wired directly into the same line that takes power from the TEGs, and must be filled with Phoron tanks accessible from the caddy on the bottom right of Engineering Hard Storage.

Each one produces roughly 180kW of power, meaning this group of six will collectively produce just barely 1MW of power when added onto the baseline.

It is also possible to align them behind each other - in this case, they will each linearly produce less energy as they get further from the SM chamber.

More Pressure? More Power

Adding more Phoron to the hot and cold reactor loops won't necessarily increase power output. In fact, it often decreases it since the gas acts more as a coolant. Since the TEGs make power based on heat, it's often important to also re-energize the crystal so the temperature loss from adding cold Phoron doesn't decrease the delta temperature.

You'll generally know if it's safe to add more energy to the crystal if the temperature hovers around 2,000K, or even lower. A Reactor at 1400EER and 2000kPas of pressure can handle the same amount of heat at 2000EER and 5000kPAs of pressure. Higher pressures of coolant means that the reactor can handle more energy at the same temperature, which is good for our collector setup.

By pushing 2MPa of room-temp Phoron from Atmos into the hot loop, it becomes possible to fire a second or even third emitter at the crystal while still maintaining safe temperatures, which boosts the amount of rads it puts out and thereby increasing the effectiveness of the Rad Collectors.

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Solars

If you really need more power, and for some reason you don't have Science or Cargo available, you can always improve the Solar panel array. You'll want an atmos hardsuit, to be immune to any blizzards that might surprise you.

There is a crate of solars in Engineering Hard Storage, as well as two in the solar control room itself on the roof. Each has 20 solar assemblies, but none of them provide the glass you'll need (2 sheets per solar panel), so best to grab three stacks or so from the department before you go. You'll also need a LOT of wire, so come prepared. It's strongly recommended to fill a yellow toolbox with nothing but wire for this task.

Every solar panel generates 1500W at peak, which is then then divided by the relative angle between the way the panels are facing and the sun's angle. However, if you're adding on to the roundstart solar setup (or build your own solar tracker), the panels will track the sun, producing more or less consistent results all day.

Solar Panel Count	Maximum Power (Ideal)	Net Power (24hr Period)
265	397.5kW	TBD
285	427.5kW	TBD
325	487.5kW	TBD

Notably, the weather being Overcast, Light Snow, Regular Snow, even Blizzards have no impact on the solar power output.

Tips and Tricks

Draining the Root SMES

Hook up the shield generator in <<SPOT>> to the left of the root SMES, turn it on. This drains directly from the Root SMES as fast as it can dump power, and is very easy to turn on and off. Using it in this way allows you to minimize power downtime.

Enhance the Root SMES

The Root SMES, found in the room directly to the west of the Engine Control Room, serves power to every other grid on-station. If you drain it, you can upgrade it using the spare coils in Engineering Hard Storage further to the west of the main department area.

For more info, see SMES Manual.

It is recommended to use Superconductive Transmission Coils, since this will be the main bottleneck in getting power to the rest of the place - best to let this one be fast, and all the receivers have high storage, since they only have to receive their small fraction of the total power.

Root SMES Bank

With six total coils, using all Superconductive Coils gives a maximum throughput per SMES of 6 Megawatts. While ordinarily impressive and way overkill for standard setups, the high-power setups you may find here will probably exceed that number handily. Making more than one "Root" SMES, a process called making an SMES Bank, allows you to scale your maximum reactor throughput infinitely, so long as you have space to add more SMESes.

Furthermore, having multiple root SMESes - even just two total with sub-optimal coils installed - means that one can be drained while the other continues to provide power to the station, effectively enabling engineers to work on any SMES in the bank without disabling power to the station entirely.