Guide to Atmospherics

= Welcome to Atmospherics = Welcome to Atmosia, a land of beautiful pipes and gas. Your job is to keep the station breathable and fix any problems that might occur. Simply put, you control the air. Not doing your job quickly and correctly can very easily lead to the death of the crew and the further damage of station property. This guide should help steer you in the right direction and help you learn most of the overall concepts of atmospherics before you jump into a game. At the very least it should be a handy reference guide if you are still not sure on certain areas.

What's in your home?
So, you loaded into Atmosia and all the colorful pipes and consoles look confusing. Have no fear because those colors actually help you work out exactly what each pipe is used for and is consistent in the entire station. So lets take a little deeper look at these pipes.

 Dark blue : You wont have many of these in atmospherics with you, most of them will be found around the station. This is your distribution loop. This takes fresh air to the rest of the station. Easily the most important pipes aboard, if something goes wrong with these you will quickly realize it.

 Cyan : This is your mixed air line. All fresh air that is mixed in atmospherics, ready to go into distribution will first travel through these pipes. This can also be found at the atmospheric substations connected to the pressure tanks.

 Yellow : This is your gas to mixing line. It connects to each of the large pressure tanks outside of the station and feeds gas into the two mixing chambers. The one in the top left is for air, the one in the bottom right is for any mixtures you specifically might want to create.

 Red : This is the waste loop. Any gas that is filtered off station by air alarms and scrubbers, removed with the use of portable air scrubbers or removed during a panic siphon ends up in this loop. If something goes wrong expect this loop to become backed up quickly.

 Green : This is the filtered gas line. When gas is taken into the waste loop it will be directed to the gas filters, these will split the component gasses and send them back to their pressure tanks. This is completely automatic, if not a little slow.

 Purple : This is a very rare one, the only place it exists is above Xenoflora in maintenance. It is a switchable pipe line that either takes gas into Xenoflora or into the waste loop

 Gray : This is the miscellaneous line, anything that either does multiple jobs or is not specifically in any of the other categories will be this color.

So how does gas get into these pipes? Well for most of them, they get their gas from the large pressure chambers in space, just outside of atmospherics. The chambers are split into two batches, the northern ones are your gasses used to mix air. N2, O2, and then finally an air tank on the end. These will mix and go into the cyan pipe line.

The lower batch of pressure chambers are for the more dangerous gasses. CO2, PH, and N2O. These are all gasses that are dangerous to breathe. Make sure they don't go into the distribution line. The final pressure chamber on the bottom is a completely empty one in which you are free to mix any gasses you choose. Just make sure not to put dangerous gasses in it and then send them to distribution.

Gasses you will work with
Oxygen (O2): This is the gas you breathe. Very little else to say honestly, a room will on average be around 21% of this gas. While the code doesn't actually do any kind of high oxygen level poisoning its still recommended to keep the station's air at 21%. High oxygen does increase fire risks though. Should oxygen drop below 16 kPa suffocation damage will begin, eventually killing you.

Nitrogen (N2): This is the other gas that you breathe, its mixed with oxygen to form air. Doesn't really do anything else honestly, just brings up the pressure of rooms. High oxygen atmospheres are at a higher flame risk. Nitrogen is used to make up the last of the pressure needed to make the rooms comfortable.

Carbon Dioxide (CO2): This is what most of the crew will breathe out. It is also a potential waste gas from the supermatter engine, depending on what coolant is used. All station air alarms and scrubbers are set to filter this out by default on the round start so unless someone messes with those settings it will be fine. Too much CO2 in the air will cause you to become short of breath and minor suffocation damage. Very large amounts will knock you out and eventually kill you.

Nitrous oxide (N2O): This is a fairly dangerous gas. Being invisible up until large quantities its actually quite easy to miss it in the atmosphere. In small doses it causes giggling, larger doses will cause you to pass out. It is used in Medbay's anesthetic internals as sedative for patients undergoing surgery. Keep in mind that if you are refilling these internals for medbay, it has to be mixed with oxygen otherwise it will suffocate the patient!

Plasma/Phoron (Ph): This is the most dangerous gas on the station and potentially the most useful too. Its used heavily by toxins to make bombs and can be used as the most efficient cooling gas in the supermatter engine. Even the smallest amounts in the atmosphere will start to kill you. Its also highly flammable, the tiniest spark can set the whole room on fire.