Guide to Atmospherics

Welcome to Atmospherics. To those who live and work among this glorious land of pipes, it is known as Atmosia. If you're an Atmospheric Technician, this is where you start your shift, and probably where you'll spend a good deal of time. All the air on the station comes from here, and someone with the proper clearance and know-how can monitor and manipulate the atmosphere of the entire station from this place.

This page will explain the basics of how Atmospherics works, but it won't go into much detail on that subject or explain how to do the rest of an Atmospheric Technician's job. For that, read the Guide to Atmospherics.

Yonder Atmosia

The land of pipes and air, a peaceful place often left to its automatic work. To the untrained eye, it might appear to be entirely impenetrable and useless, just a mess of pipes that should be left alone to do their own work while the Atmospheric Technicians goof off in the break room. But this is far from the truth.

Atmosia contains several notable things that every Atmospheric Technician should know about:

• Monitoring Computers that allow the Atmospheric Technicians to check the atmospheric, fire, and power condition of the entire station
• The Atmospheric Pipe System that takes in waste air from the rest of the station, filters it, and gets it ready to be used again
• The Distribution Computers that allow control of the composition of the atmosphere station-wide
• Reserve air tanks that can be filled in case Atmospherics' reserve tanks are destroyed
• Fire-fighting equipment that enables Atmospheric Technicians to survive easily for extended periods in difficult atmospheres
• Portable air pumps that can be used to repressurize or depressurize areas of the station
• Portable air scrubbers that can be used to clear toxins from the air
• Portable space heaters that can be used to keep an area from freezing
• Pipe dispensers that allow repair of disposal and air distrubition pipes
• Fuel and water tanks for use when fighting fires or other hazards

The Pipes

Atmospherics is pretty simple, but the pipe layout makes it slightly confusing for the untrained eye. It consists of four pipe "loops", which are color-coded for easy checking:

• The dark blue loop is the distribution loop. It sends air to all the vents on the station, and is fed by the cyan and orange loops
• The cyan air mix loop, which contains mixed air to feed into the distribution loop
• The red/green loop, which retrieves (red) and filters (green) waste air from the rest of the station
• The yellow loop, internal to Atmospherics, which is used for custom air mixes

The air breathed by humans on Baystation 12 is made out of oxygen and nitrogen, and is mixed on the south end of Atmosia. The gasses are pumped through the cyan tubes from their respective canisters (N2, O2) and are mixed in the air canister (Air). The breathable gas is then pumped through the cyan loop to the north of Atmosia, where it is then pumped into the blue loop and out to the station.

The filtering loop basically runs the gasses through the filters along the green piping and injects all gas not filtered into the mixing canister.

The "canisters" of the station's Atmospherics network are actually rooms filled with the appropriate gas. The output of these rooms are controlled by their respective Supply Control Computers, a small valve that allows the gas to be injected into the pipes, and a filter pump that moves the gas through the pipes.

To create a custom mix of gas, turn on the output of the supply control computers, open the manual valves, and turn the output of the pump to what you wish it to be. The gas will travel through the orange pipes into the mixing chamber. The air mix is pumped into the mixing chamber via a pump north of the orange loop. The mix obtained can then be pumped into the distribution and filtering loop. Remember to open the hand valve south of dark blue t-shaped valves and turn on the pumps or your custom mix will just be redistributed through the red loop.

Setting Up Atmosia

Properly initialized, Atmosia can keep the station aired-up through nearly any emergency. Improperly initialized, it's a waste of space at best and an outright fire hazard at worst.

Here's how to do it the right way.

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• 1) Go to every green-circled pump and filter. Make sure they're all on and set to max pressure (4500 kPa), so gas will actually be moved.
• 2) Go to every gray-circled valve and click on it with an open hand to turn it on. You can tell if it's on by looking at the small light on its side; if it's green, it's on.
• 3) Go to every computer at the edge of the room and click "Search", so that the computer will actually register that it has gas to inject into the system.
• 4) Go to the temperature regulator and turn it on.
• 5) Go outside, in the direction indicated by the cyan arrow, and use a wrench to connect the three portable air pumps to the gas ports so that they'll fill.

The arrows indicate the direction of flow of various pipe systems. The dark blue arrow indicates the distribution loop carrying gas out to the rest of the station. The red arrow shows the waste intake. The light blue arrow shows both the direction of mixed air flow and points towards the portable air pumps that are outside Atmospherics.

Once that's done, you can go around and configure the various air alarms on the station to filter out toxins, NO2, and CO2. They default to filtering only CO2, but the other two are just as dangerous. You can get the AI to help you with this, though, so it's not that difficult.

Done correctly, Atmosia should be pumping good air just faster than it's lost, and draining bad air away away as fast as the traitors can set it on fire. You can go kick back in the bar like a boss, and wait for the inevitable minor station damage and cries of "Call the shuttle!" on the radio from folks who don't even know it ain't a big deal.

Congratulations. You are now more competent than 90% of all Atmospheric Technicians.

HOW TO BE A TRAITOROUS BASTARD

Or: How to get the AI killed; How to call the shuttle as Atmos Tech.

• 1) Open valves connected to harmful gas you want to add to the station.
• 2) Set pumps to the distribution loop to maximum pressure output (4500kPa)
• 3) Set filters to not filter harmful gasses you want to add to the station
• 4) Open valve from custom mix chamber
• 5) Turn on pump leading to distribution loop
• 6) Wait for vents to slowly kick out your deathgas mix as regular atmos drains out through the inevitable hull breaches. (Alternatively turn off pressure checks on atmos alarms vents)
• 7) If you need to kill someone for your objective, and you want to be more proactive, the Fire Axe mounted in the wall is surprisingly effective. Just don't leave it lying around, because it's the only one in the station.

To hurry this process up, you can set the air vents at local control panels to maximum output pressure. Not doing so gives the AI and atmos techs more time to notice what you've done and shut it off before it takes effect.

A faster process for achieving the same result is to do the following:

• 1) Disconnect, change the direction of, and reconnect the pump that feeds from the air mix to the mix tank in the north-eastern room of atmosia.
• 2) Open the valves for your deathgas mixture of choice.
• 3) Power on and max the pressure on every pump in the mix pipes (yellow pipes) from the storage tanks out to the station output (blue pipes).

This simply means that instead of the air mix being put into the mix tank as it normally does, the air mix (which may or may not contain death gasses) is fed into the station output.

Crafty atmos traitors will want to cut cameras, replace pumps with pipes, and use tricky pipe configurations to avoid the AI interfering or the detective trying to fix it.