The Liquid-Gas Bypass - A pump that swaps elements around corners (2024)

When crud clogs the flow, get a bypass. I present a new percentage-based pump, capable of teleporting both liquids and gasses diagonally.

The Liquid-Gas Bypass

Before jumping in, let's see some uses in picture form (more details later).

The official name is still pending - comment below if you have a nice derpy name that beats "the liquid-gas bypass pump" or just "the bypass" for short.

Short important history (reading this will help you understand what's going on)

When building liquid stacked airlocks, I noticed that if you dig out the side wall from top to bottom, then the lock holds. However, if you dig out from bottom to top, then the liquid on the top often falls to take the place of the dug out tile (see below - green is good, red is bad). @nakomaru's post last week reminded me of this observation, and sparked further study.

• Take Away: Liquids can flow diagonally downwardsthrough walls.

While trying to make an infinite liquid storage facility, I forgot one tile. The liquid forced the trapped gas out of the holding cell, causing the gas to move diagonally upwards. My storage facility was destroyed, but this pump was born.

• Take Away: Gasses can flow diagonally upwards through walls.

I immediatelybuilt the following (left diagram) and let time pass (middle diagram) and watched the water interchange places with each gas as the water found it's way to the bottom (right diagram).

• Take Away: Liquids and gasses literally swap places diagonally under certain conditions.

Time for the gorydetails/mechanics (How does the liquid-gas bypasswork?)

If you need the intro picture again, expand this spoiler.

• First we stack two different liquids on each other (for example, crude oil on the bottom, and water on top).
• Pick a side (either left or right). On that side, make sure there is a solid tile (not airflow or mesh) next to the top liquid, but no tile (or mesh) next to the bottom liquid.
• Make sure there is gas next to the bottom liquid on your chosen side. If there is vacuum, then swapping stops.
• The top liquid and diagonally down gas swap places diagonally. Yes, they literally swap places. Keep feeding in new liquid on top, and the swapping happens repeatedly.
• The swapping occurs with any amount of liquid a valve can produce (minimum 0.1g). If the contents are 10g or above, then the swapped liquid forms a bead and starts falling (obeying the same principles as the bead pump). If the liquid content is less than 10g, then the liquid vanishes (yes, literally vanishes), yet still allows swapping to happen.
• The swapping can occur on either side (symmetry allows for the OCD in all of us - not quite true for the bead pump). If both sides are available for swapping, then the water will swap down to the right. Liquid prefers to go right (not a surprise). For simplicity, I generally box off the side I don't want to use.

  Spoiler

  

  Notice the beads (water blobs) occur every fifth tile. This suggest the beads form during one of the 5 ticks of the game that happen every second. The beads always go right if both sides are available for swapping.

• If you set a valve to 0.1 g, then you can use the bypass without having to clean up any liquid mess. At a rage of 0.1g per second, a single 10kg segment of pipe will let this run for 166.666... cycles. If you know you won't be playing a base to more than 2000 cycles, then leave a 12 segment block of pipes, fill them with liquid, and then delete the liquid feed (no new pump needed). Or set up automation to send a signal to allow a 1 second burst of 10kg of liquid every time the pipe runs dry (every 166 cycles).
• The pump works best in a single gas environment. It does work in a multi gas environment, though if a gas cannot be pushed out of the way by the incoming liquid, then the gas is destroyed (along with the incoming liquid) at the same rate the liquid enters. The pump can, and will,suck an area to vacuum that has more than one type of gas, provided you don't care if some of the gas gets deleted.
• A mechanical door, on the bottom side of the pump, will stop the pump from working (or a shutoff to prevent new liquid from entering).

How can I use this?

1. High pressure gas storage. Putting the valve at 0.1g allows you to ignore cleaning up any liquid waste (convenient). The pump will instantly pull out each 1000g deposit of new gas, so you'll never see a "vent over pressure" error message. This will still work even if at some point the "liquid over vent" exploit is patched out of the game.Here are several examples:
   • Caputure CO2 at the bottom of your base early on without a door pump.
   • Store all your gasses in a compact gas storage facility, without needing the liquid over vent trick.
   • Capture C02 from meteors at alarming rates (thanks @Zarquanfor the idea in the bead pump),
   • Harness all gas from achlorine ornatural gas vent (or any other). Just remember to use naptha and petro if you are going to tame a super hot 500C vent.
   • Capture the entire output of a cool steam vent as 110C steam for later use in a turbine, without it over pressurizing. This requires using several bypasses to keep up the huge volume, but it can easily be done.

   Spoiler

   Here is a compact storage unit. The liquid, if set to under 10g (so at 0.1 g), vanished after making the gas swap. You won't ever see an overpressure warning.

   

   This storage facility uses the 0.1g setting on the liquid valves, so there is no liquid clean up (yes, it wastes water, but at 10kg per 167 cycles, I think it's well worth it). The gas is sorted with a mechanical filter. The hydrosensors turn the gas pumps on/off.A few dupes may have been inadvertently killed while making this.... It was for science!

   

   A single bypass can keep most vents completely underpressure.

   

   A cool steam vent produces so much steam that a single bypass won't be enough (in fact, two may not be enough either if your vent is quite active). So after a two pump example (may not be enough),we use 4 bypasses to easily tame a very active beast. Notice also that one side of the bypass can be completely gas, and it still works perfectly.

   (may not be enough, use the picture below)

   

   Use any form of this pump, up in space, to capture more CO2 from meteors than you could ever use. Here is probably the slowest configuration you could build, and yet it slurps up CO2 extremely fast. Pop some molten slicksters inside, and use petro with a 10g flow to increase the intake with bead power, You could build similar devices lining the walls of every rocket silo, to capture most of whatever gas the rocket emits.

   

2. You can pump an area to vacuum without ever entering it. You could drain slimelung infsted PO2 into an itty bitty room, or contain a sporechid (I gotcha @metallichydra) infection before cracking open the walls. You can choose to keep the gas or destroy it once the room is empty.

   Spoiler

   The PO2 below will eventually be completely sucked up into the tiny chamber. If I don't want the PO2, then I can just corner build when the pump is done.

   

3. You can drain liquid from a region without letting any of the gas inside leave. You will add some extra gas to the region, but you don't have to worry about any gas leaving. This is useful to get polluted waterfrom a slimelung infested cavity without having to worry about the PO2 leaving, or draining ethanol, slat water, etc, without having to deal with the gasses above them.

   Spoiler

   First set everything up, with a liquid reservoir above you. Then let it drain. For this one, the liquid vent is not actually needed, so it could be moved one tile up closer to the actual liquid reservoir you wish to drain. Note: the airflow tile to the right of the ladder forces the beads to pop, dropping in teleportation form to the place prepared ahead of time to receive the liquid. Without the airflow tile, bead mechanics will take over and you may find yourself with liquid come out and spreading more rapidly than you want.

   

4. You can destroy gas and liquid, on purpose, without going to space. I'll leave the details of this one out for now, and let those interested explore and discover.

5. If you are in the habit of creating massive high pressures oxygen chambers, you can use this pump and some automation to service your base with oxygen at appropriate pressures and temperatures, without needing to use a door pump.

6. I'm excited to see someone put together a nice efficient way to suck out gasses from a hydrolyzer without needing to put liquid over it.This will require learning to deal with two gasses (I think you can train the pump with some more shenanigans to work with 2, but not 3, gasses). i'll get around to a post on this if no one beats me to it.There is quite a bit more to explore here.

7. The pump does a decent job of preserving temperature differences between the top side and bottom side. The only connection between the two is the tiny bit of liquid on the bottom tile, so it effectively throttles all temperature transfer. Ethanol might become my new liquid of choice, with its nerfed SHC, to put on the bottom layer. I am playing with this in a steam turbine setup to utilize a tepidizer to get gasses to 125C (using @Blazing Falken's power shutoff pulser NRGFREE-freezer) and then bypass this gas to another chamber where aquatuners bump the temp above 125 to get the turbine going.I figure one tepidizer and one aquatuner can keep over15 turbines running at more than 1/4 power,That'll be another post.

   Spoiler

   Here's the design and post. It can be optimized further.

   

I'm sure you'll all find more cool uses. For now, this seems like a fun mechanic to play with that I haven't yet seen posted on the forums. If someone has video's to a YouTuber or somewhere else, where they've abused this, please share. I'll add them to the top of the list.

What do we call this?
If it's completely new, then we need a fun name. Feel free to add suggestions below. Here are some names (some more stupid than others).

• Diagonal Pump
• Gas teleportation pump
• Flip flop pump
• Gas porter
• Gas porter pump
• gas passing pump (for the teenage boy in some of us)
• diagonal gas pump
• liquid locked gas pump
• liquid-gas swapping gas pump
• lgsgp
• diagonal liquid/gas swapper.
• Diagonal teleportation pump
• Insanely power efficient liquid-gas swapper gaspump.(ipelgsgp)
• The gas bypass pump (bypass pump for short)
• Diagonal gas bypass
• The liquid gas bypass (it moves both liquids and gasses) - rhymes, Maybe "The liquid-gas bypass pump", or just "a bypass pump" or "a bypass" (drop pump all together). Then we can say "just build a bypass to let your gas flow..." or "just build a bypass to drain your PO2 from the swamp biome without ever even opening it up ..."

Of all the ones above, I prefer the liquid-gas bypass, or bypass for short. I'd love to hear others.