Sol 36

17871 Ti

I'm fucked and I'm going to die!

Okay, okay, calm down. Let's go back over what happened.

So, remember when I said that I can't trust Sentinel Corp to get anything right? Well, it turns out that I again failed to give them their due credit for just how much they can fuck up at once. And I ended up nearly suffocating.

Time for a little lesson in carbon scrubbing. It might be a little hard to grasp, but people cannot breathe carbon dioxide. In fact, it's toxic. So everything that involves me being able to breathe has to get rid of it somehow. There are two ways of doing this based on which one it is. To start with, my exosuit has extremely simple carbon filters. They just trap the carbon dioxide and sequester it. At this point with how many oxygen canisters I can get for myself, the limiting factor isn't running out of O2, it's saturating the filters and not being able to remove the carbon dioxide. Every time I come back from a jaunt outside, I have to put the filters through a chemical bath to get them ready for the next time.

The living compartments are more advanced. The air systems in here work with a metal-organic framework that can effectively run forever without some horrible thing going wrong, and those chemically zap the CO2 so that it separates out the carbon atom and puts the breathable oxygen back into the air. On top of this it also monitors the ratios of gases in the atmosphere, making sure that the 3-1 mix of nitrogen and oxygen is kept stable, with a little leeway this way or that to make sure there's not too much oxygen.

Here's the problem: all of this operates on a single loop. That is, the inbuilt systems don't run the carbon scrubber and the oxygen filter on separate loops. It reads the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide as it filters through the air, but the problem is that I've been producing a lot of excess oxygen, and it's allowing a lot more carbon dioxide to remain in the air because there's more oxygen because it's not reading the amounts of each gas, just what ratio they are to each other.

That doesn't sound bad at first, because you think "oh okay, there's more carbon dioxide and more oxygen at the same time, shouldn't that balance out?" As durable as the human body is, it's not invincible. So, our lungs create a gas exchange, which puts carbon dioxide out and takes in oxygen, but carbon dioxide can only go out efficiently if there's less of it in the air. And right now there's been around 3500 ppm of carbon dioxide in the air for the last ten Sols or so, not enough to kill me right away but it means that the carbon dioxide has been slowly and steadily building up in my bloodstream because less of it is getting released into the environment.

I only found this out because I woke up in the middle of the night to my exosuit chirping about CO2 saturation. The thing is, I wasn't wearing my suit at that moment. It had been doing its best to try and filter carbon dioxide out while I wasn't wearing it alongside the normal carbon scrubber, but apparently it hit some kind of threshold and gave up even while the filters I had been using were in the chemical bath. They were only about halfway done, but when I put 2 and 2 together I plugged them in, threw on my exosuit, and ran outside.

Of course, I couldn't just throw my helmet off and take a deep breath. I had to scramble around and find the materials to make a new compartment from scratch, climb into that, and then throw my helmet off. I've been sitting in here ever since. My living compartment has been trying to kill me for days now.

By now my lungs have gotten all the excess carbon dioxide out, so I feel much more clear-headed than I was last night. But that leaves the problem of my main compartment. I did a reading, and it shows that it's still at 3500 ppm of CO2. I can breathe in there, but over long enough periods of time it'll start to kill me again. My problem now is trying to figure out how to deal with the atmosphere problem.

Complicating matters further is that I was operating on a narrow enough energy budget as it is, and when I threw up this compartment it overloaded the power grid. Every one of the main terraforming systems has shut down to prevent putting too much strain on my power grid, but the life support systems are still going. I'm at least not going to suffocate in here for the time being, but if I leave the systems off for long enough then Sentinel will write me off as dead and just abandon me here.

Come to think of it, maybe if they think I'm dead they'll send another Planet Crafter and I'll have some company. Ah, but that might take years. Wishful thinking.

Okay, let me think...I think that the solution is easy enough. Just open both airlock doors at the same time, and the compartments will automatically repressurize with the correct atmospheric mixture. But if I don't change anything, the same problem will just happen again. So I'll need to figure out how to fix that. The easiest solution will probably be to just move the vegetubes out of my main space and into an ancillary unit, probably just this one. So long as the main space that I live in is kept at minimal CO2, any other place I'm in is fine. I could move them to the unit with the heaters, there's still space there, but with so many heaters the interior of those units is approaching 50°C, which isn't good for me or the plants.

So, to keep this unit running I'll need more power. I have more than enough materials to put up more solar panels. In fact, Sentinel recently sent a new blueprint for a much larger and more efficient solar panel design, so with the aluminum I've found I can set one of those up and it'll be more than enough to put me back in a power surplus. So that's step one. Step two is deconstructing my vegetubes and moving them into this ancillary unit, but they and the seeds in them take up more space than I have in my inventory so the whole process is two trips. And once that's done, I'll need to vent out Beta Base entirely and then let it repressurize.

I'm starting to understand why so many Planet Crafters end up dying. Sure, a lot of the time they don't have the right materials, but I've known some planets that were especially resource rich but where the guys ended up dying in the first month.

So...this is a solvable problem. But it shouldn't need to be a problem. This whole mess is entirely because of Sentinel being so shitty with the way they design and program things that doing everything right nearly killed me. Even when I get it right, they're still tilting at me dying whether intentionally or unintentionally. This time it was almost an accident that I survived. Next time I might not be so lucky.

Alright. Let's do this.