Noah Kirchner's Guide to Being Bad (The Basics) at CE But Competent Enough That You Can Set Up the Engine

[NoahKirchner]

I see a lot of engineers drop the ball when they're trying to do the three jobs that Chief Engineers have. Those are A. Set up the supermatter, B. Check disposals, and C. set up atmos. Atmos is complicated and not necessary so won't be covered in a basics guide, and disposals is easy enough, it requires you to pull a lever and press a button. The SM however, is a complicated beast, and the few to master it have extensive knowledge of atmos, power, and the SM itself. I am not one of those people, but I CAN give you the basics on how to not explode the ship.

Setup: Wear a full radiation, turned on meson goggles, and be sure to be careful around all machinery in the engineering room, because messing it up can mean death in a matter of seconds.

Step 1: Power Collection
Whenever you open all of the shutters for the supermatter, you will notice radiation collectors to the North and South of the main chambers, and just outside of the entrance to those chambers are Phoron tanks. The phoron tanks are about half full, and it's your job to fix that. The more Phoron, the more power you can extract from the SM. Take the tanks, and with a phoron tank in your active hand, click on a larger cylindrical phoron canister, found in the Southeast of the engineering room. Once you see a black box appear on the sprite, open up the canister's interface. You want to set the pressure to maximum with the third plus sign on the right of the bar, and then click open on the valve. After you see the tank's pressure fill to about 1000 kpA, you want to turn OFF the valve, and eject the tank. Failure to turn it off before ejection will result in your death. After you've filled up all the tank, click on the radiation collectors with those tanks in your hands, then once again with an empty hand to turn them on. Should you need to eject them in the future, use a crowbar on them.

Step 2: Nitrogen
The Supermatter creates a lot of power, but also in the process creates massive amounts of heat. To solve this problem, and not have the supermatter explode, you need to have a way to cool the chamber. You do this through nitrogen. The three canisters in the Northwest of the engine chamber are where the coolant canisters go, and the ports will spawn with nitrogen canisters already on them, but by the time you get there they'll likely be depleted. What you want to do is wrench off those canisters, and grab two fresh N2 canisters from the Southwest and Southeast of the chamber, and wrench them into their places. After you've put in the two full canisters, do NOT put in any more, or you can clog up the system.

Step 3: The Emitter
The emitter is used to chip off tiny pieces of the SM which creates massive amount of radiation, that radiation is collected by the radiation collectors and turned into power. The Emitter is already set up, so after making sure that you're not in the way of it, and that the shutter leading to the SM is open, exposing the glass, turn it on and shoot it more than 5 times, and less than 12 times. After that, you're done working with the SM itself, turn off the emitter and close all the shutters.

Step 4: Power
The simplest way to deal with the power let out by the emitters is to set all of the SMES's outputs to maximum. This is done by opening up their interface, and clicking "auto" and the maximum amount button (farthest right + sign) until the bars saying input and output are completely full. After that, you're done, check back on the Supermatter's SMES's from time to time to make sure that they're charging still, and that you have a fair amount of power.

Notes, warnings, and extra tips.

If the SM is becoming unstable, and M.O.T.H.E.R is telling you that instability is above 75%, eject the supermatter using the buttons on the walls of engineering.

Do NOT smoke in engineering, you can ignite things and make engineering not a very fun place to be.

The emitter requires AT LEAST 2% power in the SMES next to it to fire, you can charge that SMES with a pacman generator, but it will take a while.

Check on the SM every few minutes, if you notice you're not generating enough power, shoot it a few more times with the emitter.

Don't mess with anything you don't know how to use, or you may very well screw up the SM. This is included but not limited to; pipes, wires, SMES's, freezers, gas pumps, different gasses, hand tools, your own hands, your brain.

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES FOLLOW THE SUPERMATTER GUIDE BOOK IN ENGINEERING, IT WILL KILL YOU, YOUR DOG, YOUR WIFE, AND EVERYONE ELSE ON THE SULACO

If there is a problem with the SM that you don't know how to fix, feel free to ask a mentor through an ahelp if one's online, they can normally assist you if you need more advanced help than this guide can give you.

This concludes this Supermatter guide, I owe almost everything in this guide to Dylanstrategei and some CE's I've had along the way who have helped me out a lot. Feel free to add any suggestions or point out anything I screwed up as a reply so I can fix it for anybody needing to set up an SM for their first time.

[Karmac]

A legit guide? RIP Noah the meme

[NoahKirchner]

A legit guide? RIP Noah the meme

Think I'll get forum banned for making a meme guide?

[Karmac]

Nah mang

[ZDashe]

Good enough for a basic guide.

Just some things I'll clarify or add just for fun info since you'll probably wanna know about it too:
1. Other than SM and disposals (which I think is rather pointless), setting up atmospherics is recommended too.
2. You don't need to turn off the valve on a Canister before ejecting the tank after you pump it up. Pressing eject will eject the phoron tank and turn off the valve automatically. (but nothing wrong with turning it off before ejecting anyway)
3. The N2 tanks wrenched into the cooling system don't actually spawn in empty. It's just that after the round starts, most of it would have already been fed into the system by the time you get there.

If you're curious there's other more advanced guides you can probably find on more tricks and tips, but i'm not gonna share them right here cause it's probably more fun to discover it yourself. =3

Also, for new players, if you don't like to refer to a browser for setting up the SM, there's actually a SM guidebook you can read right on the desk inside the engine room. It teaches you the basics of how to set up the SM as well.

[NoahKirchner]

Good enough for a basic guide.

Just some things I'll clarify or add just for fun info since you'll probably wanna know about it too:
1. Other than SM and disposals (which I think is rather pointless), setting up atmospherics is recommended too.
2. You don't need to turn off the valve on a Canister before ejecting the tank after you pump it up. Pressing eject will eject the phoron tank and turn off the valve automatically. (but nothing wrong with turning it off before ejecting anyway)
3. The N2 tanks wrenched into the cooling system don't actually spawn in empty. It's just that after the round starts, most of it would have already been fed into the system by the time you get there.

If you're curious there's other more advanced guides you can probably find on more tricks and tips, but i'm not gonna share them right here cause it's probably more fun to discover it yourself. =3

Also, for new players, if you don't like to refer to a browser for setting up the SM, there's actually a SM guidebook you can read right on the desk inside the engine room. It teaches you the basics of how to set up the SM as well.

Thanks! I'll add some of that into the guide, cheers!

[Jroinc1]

there's an SM guide in the engineering department, right next to the monitoring computers.

HOLY CHRIST GLAD I CAUGHT THIS.

The guide the book "links" to IS NOT CORRECT AND WILL CAUSE ENGINE DELAMINATION IF FOLLOWED
Namely, it tells you to open a coolant drain valve. This will drain all the coolant in the loop, and cause the SM to overheat and delaminate within a relatively short time.
I followed the book once, caught and fixed it by sheer luck as the SM was taking damage.

So, yeah, one-line it and add a note to NOT follow the book.

[ZDashe]

HOLY CHRIST GLAD I CAUGHT THIS.

The guide the book "links" to IS NOT CORRECT AND WILL CAUSE ENGINE DELAMINATION IF FOLLOWED
Namely, it tells you to open a coolant drain valve. This will drain all the coolant in the loop, and cause the SM to overheat and delaminate within a relatively short time.
I followed the book once, caught and fixed it by sheer luck as the SM was taking damage.

So, yeah, one-line it and add a note to NOT follow the book.

I guess this part in the book is the misleading line, which new players might get confused and end up turning ALL the pumps on, including the Engine Outfilter Pump:

sm-bmp.jpg

Do NOT turn on the outfilter pump, unless you want to vent the coolant out of the loop.

[Jroinc1]

Correct.

[Jay Burns]

I remember our MT/CE rounds, that SM was so fucked at one point.

[Jroinc1]

Hah. Best round as a MT was a pred boarding event, several months ago, with ship-to-ship combat being roleplayed by admins. Auto-breach fixing AINT A THING anymore. They landed a direct hit INSIDE the engine room, breaching to space, and killing the APC. Admins are RP'ing us taking evasive actions, and us losing power and no engi's responding, while I sprint in.

Best part of that round was the MOTHER announcement right after I adminhelp about being there of "CORRECTION: ONE ENGINEER IS RESPONDING."

Next best part? I ask you to imagine this scene.
The CE has caught up with me by this point, we're suited and got a temporary lock rigged up, and move inside.
The SM blast door is OPEN,and the window shattered, so I can actually SEE it's glow, in the otherwise dark room... and spacesuits don't have rad shielding. Used SO much antitox.
We're standing in the middle of a hull breach, you can SEE the stars wheeling beyond, and occasionally see an incoming anti-ship plasma weapon outside, I've got the fire axe and am beating holy hell out of the APC cover with one hand, while holding on to the wall with the other during RP'd heavy maneuvering and variable gravity, standing IN A HULL BREACH fully suited, and the CE's right next to me hanging on for dear life, suited in the breach with the replacement circuits in hand, and a backpack stuffed full of pipes.

We finally get the APC fixed, and get the SM collector doors re-opened. WHY HELLO BURNING HOT PHORON MY OLD FRIEND. A blast slams us into a wall, I get up, drag the CE out, a marine takes him to medical. I head back in. Try to activate the collectors, make a rookie mistake, and don't wear mesons. The collectors are locked, and it won;t let me use my ID to unlock them, and I realize how hurt I am, so I get out of there and hit the eject. Barely get out of engineering before collapsing due to eyes. A marine drags me to medical, after 15+ minutes I get an imidz injection and am BACK UP.

At THIS point, there are breaches in MULTIPLE rooms. The CE's trying to patch a hole in THE CAFETERIA, I head back to engineering, check the SM's gone, grab 2 barrier boxes, and start rigging temp locks, patching a section of briefing that was actually exposed to space with plastic wrap, duct tape and hope.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Comms goes down.
NOPE.gif
Grab the CE, head down, run into a firefight b/t 2-5 CLOAKED, SHOOTING preds, and like half the marine complement of the ship. He gets hit once, I'm fine. So. Tcomms has no power. Swap out the cell, we got 3 minutes. I send him off to grab a pac-man, aand yeah.

"THIS IS ENGINEERING. TO CONSERVE POWER, ALL COMMS OTHER THAN COMMON AND COMMAND ARE HEREBY DISABLED.
Whip out the tools, start taking EERYTHING not needed down to save power. At THIS point, the xenos (yeah. Still xenos.) call the shuttle UP (yeah, it WAS left down). So I don't see the CE again, and 3 min later, the xenos break in and kill me. TO emphasize how screwed we were, we GOT the nuke codes that round. Yeah.
10/10 engi round, would be scotty again.