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 a separate mixed gas line. The green line is used where two different gas sources are mixed into a tank. For example, the air tank, has both the Oxygen and Nitrogen tanks flowing into it (using a mixer to go at a rate of about 21% Oxygen and 71% Nitrogen).

 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.

It is important to remember that temperature affects the pressure. If a gas is at a very cold temperature, it will not have as much pressure. Inversely, gas at a very hot temperature will have more pressure. Keep this in mind when playing around with Atmospherics systems.

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!

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.

Tools of the trade
While you will spawn with an almost full toolbelt (as an Atmospheric Technician or Station Engineer) there are four main tools you will use in typical Atmospherics work:

Wrench - The Wrench allows you to connect and disconnect Atmospheric pipes to the ground, but will not work if the pressure in the pipe is at or above a certain level.

Pipe Wrench - The Pipe Wrench, similarly, allows you to connect and disconnect Atmospherics pipes but is not affected by the pressure limit, however, they take much longer to disconnect pipes.

Analyzer - The Analyzer can be used to analyze the air you are in, giving a readout of the pressure and what gases are what percentage of that pressure, or they can give you information on the gases contained in a canister or atmospheric pipe.

Pipe Dispenser - Not to be mistaken with the Disposals Pipe Dispenser (which looks exactly the same), this dispenser produces atmospherics pipes/devices on-demand (such as adapters, pumps or filters) to assist with atmospherics.

Atmospheric utilities
There are several devices/utilities that can be connected to a pipe system and they all have their uses. Devices that don't require power to work correctly will be highlighted like this.

Universal Pipe Adapter - What it says on the tin. This device connects two different pipe types together. For example, if you wanted to connect a scrubbers pipe to a normal pipe. Note that they cannot connect to disposals pipes.

Connector - A Connector (sometimes referred to as a port) allows you to connect gas canisters to pipe systems. Note that if you connect a canister to a pipe system it will automatically transfer the gas to the pipe system.

Unary Vent - Vents connect to the air alarm (if any) in the room they are placed in and are controlled by that air alarm. When turned on, they spread the gas into the air that is transferred to them by pipes.

Scrubber - Scrubbers, similar to vents, connect to the air alarm in the room they are deployed (they will connect to the same alarm as vents). They will begin to filter certain gases out of the air. The gases that are filtered out are determined by the settings in the air alarms, the default setting is to scrub out CO2.

Gas Pump - Gas Pumps use power reach a desired target pressure. The red line on a pump shows you which way the gas will be pumped out.

High Power Gas Pump - The same as the normal gas pump, but uses more power to achieve a higher flow rate.

Pressure Regulator - Sometimes referred to as a 'Passive Gate', these work similar to gas pumps. They help to achieve a desired target pressure for either the input or output. The way it does this is by closing and opening itself as needed. For example, if you had 5,000 kPa inputting into a regulator, and you set this regulator to achieve an output pressure of 250 kPa, it will open temporarily to allow the desired pressure to be achieved. Once done, the regulator will then lock itself to prevent the rest of the input gas from going through until the output pressure is lowered. Note that the pressure regulator does not contribute to the power drawn from an APC, but still requires power to function correctly.

Meter - The meter can be attached to pipes. Once attached, you can examine it to get a basic read out of the pressure in the pipe (given in kPa) and temperature (given in both kelvin and degrees celsius).

Omni Gas Filter - A Gas Filter can have a maximum of 4 ports. One input, one output and two filter outputs. The input is where the filter gets its gas from, the output is where the input gas is transferred to (with the specified gas filtered out) and the filter outputs are where the specified gas is taken to. The ports are specified by interacting with the filter once it is connected, which will open up a menu which allows you to specify which direction is the input output and filter output.

Omni Gas Mixer - These mixers can have a maximum of 4 ports. 3 Input ports and 1 output. The direction of these ports can be configured after the mixer is connected to a pipe system.

Manual T-Valve - A valve with 3 ports, all of which are input/output. T-Valves will always have one port closed and one open. You can identify which port is closed and which is open by a red (closed) or green (open) mark on the valve. When the valve is deployed and connected, you can click on it to turn the valve and swap the open and closed ports around. Note: Manual T-Valves only work on standard pipes and cannot be connected to scrubbers or distribution pipes. Additionally, they have a 'mirrored' variant that can also be found in the dispenser which has the open/close ports on the opposite side of the valve.

Manual Valve - A valve that can either be closed or opened. Like the T-Valve, cannot be connected to scrubbers or distribution pipes.

Addendum: It is worth nothing that there are two types of filter and mixer, which are simply called 'Gas Filter' and 'Gas Mixer'. While these achieve the same outcome as their Omni variants, they are a lot more difficult to use due to their interface and no advantage is offered for using them instead of their Omni counterparts.