# Solaris Station
{%hackmd @ZeWaka/dark-theme %}
hello, im tyrant. I'm proud to present my original station concept: Solaris Station.
Acronym could be like Stellar oscillaton light aided resonance in stars or some nonsense if necessary, but it doesn't need an acronym really. It's solaris.
Alternative names are also under consideration. Aetherion2 (lol), Typhonic, maybe even watchful eye observatory...
## old design
it's a bit more square here, but in reality will end up triangular due to the light refracting around the shield. The old design also involves power generation from cooling the heat shield and not from actually using any sort of photovoltaic principle (which is a bit silly).
## The lore

Typhon's (or Sid's) deadly rays cook anything that stray near it (at least, in low orbit). But fear not! Nanotrasen has provided you with a space station that comes built in with a massive heat shield to prevent untimely charbroiling related workplace injuries. It however does need constant maintainence by a team of engineers to stop it from melting and killing everyone, but hey! You don't get to choose where you work. Comes with all the regular functions of a regular mid-large population map.

## Further details
The primary idea of Solaris is that it is there to take readings and harvest power from typhon. The space around the station is heated by the **high light (and radiation) levels**, leading to unprotected beings taking burn and radiation damage when exposed, and going blind if not wearing sunglasses (or a specifically designed helmet).

The front of the ship features a massive **heat shield** which is maintained by engineering, and coolant needs to be pumped through it to keep it from melting. This ends up powering some auxillary **turbines** to provide some nice background power. The heat shield curves up and out in a sort of cone/funnel shape to protect the station, and there is a gap at the very bottom to allow some light through. The gameplay style of engineers, despite still using turbines, would be very different, as the focus is less on the station getting power and more about ***help if this heat shield melts we all die***.

The main point of the station, from nanotrasen's perspective, is for the PTL beam to send massive quantities of power to various large scale and very secret projects that they're working on, through an interstellar network of focusing prisms and whatnot.
This is achieved through the unique photovoltaic properties of **solid plasma crystals**, which the light is focused on using a **superconducting electromagnetic ring circuit**.
- The solid plasma generates power at an efficiency of a whopping 87% when light above a certain frequency impacts it. But, the plasma crystal only has the photovoltaic properties below a certain temperature, so it needs to be kept cool. Which is a bit of a challenge, especially since it itself generates waste heat while functioning.
- The magnets themselves don't require much power (0 resistance in a circuit means 0 voltage for any fixed current, and therefore 0 power input needed for a static magnetic field), but they *do* need to be cooled by a cold loop of a kind, otherwise they lose their superconducting properties. By adjusting the current of the magnet, more or less light can be deflected onto the photovoltaic. As a side effect, this also changes the amount of cooling that the heat shield needs.
- In short, engineering's main challenge is cooling things, rather than heating them.

The station is intended for medium-high population servers, but could also just as easily be made to target high pop exclusively.

The actual layout of departments is very interchangeable. The heat shield and engineering are the only real fixed parts. They're the core of the station; everything else is built around it.

## Features that will need to be made:
* The whole station to actually be designed at some point along the process. Oof.
* Hot space. You are next to a sun. See [this note](https://hackmd.io/@Tyrant/Solar-radiation-calculations) for further more in depth details.
* Hot space should provide mostly burn damage but also radiation damage (from the south).
* What does hot space do to corpses? If they turn into skeletons, genetics can unskeleton them and then clone. Throwing people into space on this map will be quite the death sentence.
* If skeletons turn to ash afterwards, we’ll probably need full body genetic restructuring or some similar analysis method to isolate who exactly this ash used to be and bring them back. That'd nerfs dragon’s breath somewhat though.
* New miniputts and spaceships that are more radiation proof/ come with shields
* New eva suits and stuff that are radiation and heat proof
* Does this map connect to the debris and mining fields? How are they doing that lore wise?
* If we are especially ambitious we could have the star actually visible at y=1 as a single tile wide layer of instant char broiling via stellar corona. Could make corpse disposal a bit too strong though.
* Heat shield walls and power generation
* The heat shields need to have built in atmos pipes, and bleed heat into the pipes in one direction, with low/no backflow.
* Those pipes then go to the cooling turbines and use the waste heat somewhat usefully as backup power. This could use turbines from the nuclear engine.
* hopefully, code this in a way that doesn't allow you to exploit purging the pressure over and over.
* Everything north of active heat shield walls is cold space. Everything not is hot space and will be boiled. Think of it as a protective cylinder (or really long cone) of nice habitable regular old space.
* Light refracts around objects depending on the sharpness of the edge and the frequency of the light. This would lead to the edges of hotspace curving inwards. One way to possibly have this work is using a concept called the [diffraction shock cone](https://hackmd.io/@Tyrant/Solar-radiation-calculations#the-diffractive-shock-cone), a turbulent area of light with similar properties to hot space to act as a boundary.
* Asteroids could possibly also act as heat shields. New turf: scorched asteroid. Tougher than regular asteroid turf wall.
* Figuring out how that much power can actually get to the PTL without engineering just having to bite the bullet and hotwiring
* Maybe having a direct reinforced cable from engineering to the PTL that bypasses the SMES that feed the rest of the APCs and station. The goal of the station is high power output of course, so high power cabling is important.
* Placement of rooms stuff
* We can’t have every dock just facing north, there’s not enough room. Docking arm sticking out to the north perhaps.
* Cargo also has to ship stuff to the north. We assume everything in the universe is in the opposite direction of the star, since south is literally just the star. More likely is that there's a secondary rerouting ship in higher orbit which resends the stuff.
* Cargo could also possibly steal the transception array from nadir if needed lol.
* With heat proof ships, docks can go on east and west sides, leaving the north free for the arrivals and escape shuttle. For symmetry reasons if nothing else, I'd like both a shuttle for arrivals and escape.
* The research department could possibly have a small research outpost which would need its own heat shield to keep running. If we go for this we’d need some way to cool down that heat shield too. Or we just give research their own TEG or turbine (what could go wrong).
* the research department should probably actually study the star in some way.
* Other stuff that I might not have thought of

## Additional docs
https://hackmd.io/@Tyrant/Solar-radiation-calculations details some work i did on how heat shields would theoretically work and be coded.