Toxins Research is one of the most noteworthy laboratories in the Research and Development department, sometimes even more than R&D itself. It is used to create powerful explosives to destroy everything, that is when it isn't being properly used to generate research data. Even if you aren't moved by malicious intent, the power of this laboratory can strip mine the mining asteroid or get rid of a loose Singularity. And if you are a Traitor, may the gods help the station.
Contents 1 Toxins Research: Theory and Autism 1.1 Open Excel and Take Your Meds 1.2 Gas Gas Gas 1.3 Hot Tanks, Cold Tanks, and Maracas 2 Toxins Research: Application and Bwoink 2.1 Making Things Hot and Cold or: Atmos Won't Stop Laughing at Me 2.2 Assembling Your Mistake 2.3 Being Useful 2.4 BWOINK 2.5 Blast Cannons Hell Ya 2.6 DUDEBOMBS and Traitoring 3 Supplementary Video
The goal of toxins research is to understand how plasma and oxygen react together to form explosions, and once you do, how to make those explosions as big and productive as possible. This guide will outline the former and push you in the right direction for the latter, but the whole fun of toxins is figuring out tricks, methods, and ratios for yourself.
Very simply the way this works is you have two tanks, one is very hot and the other is very cold. The hot tank is intended to raise the temperature of the cold tank above 100oC upon the bomb triggering. The cold tank is meant to hold as much gas as possible since you can fit more cold gas in a tank.
Being good at toxins requires a bit of math, nothing too complicated but it's a necessary step. If you don't care about being good and just want to be okay, you can just experiment and hope you stumble on a good mix. Regardless of which category you fall into you'll want to at least understand and be aware of the numbers at play.
The first thing you need to know is that plasma and oxygen react in a 1:2 ratio. That means for every 1mol of plasma you need 2mol of oxygen. More mols means bigger explosion but if you have 20mol plasma and 20mol oxygen, your explosion is only going to be as good as a 10mol plasma explosion because that's the ratio of the reaction. If you don't remember highschool chemistry then the simple version is when you use your atmospheric analyzer on a tank and it says 20mol plasma, you want to make sure there's no more than 40mol oxygen involved as well and vice versa.
The second thing to know is that if the resulting temperature of a bomb after being triggered is not >=100oC it will not explode. This is the primary limiter when making bombs and the whole point of the hot tank. Two factors are involved in the heat change of a tank when mixed: temperature, and heat capacity. Temperature is of course how hot or cold it is, heat capacity is both its ability to store heat, and resist temperature change. This will be discussed more when talking about the differences between plasma and oxygen. In order to calculate the resulting temperature of a bomb and save yourself the shame, embarrassment, and loss of respect effort of accidentally producing a dud we can use a fairly simple equation:
Bomb temperature equation: Tf = (T1 x C1 + T2 x C2) / (C1 + C2)
Tf being the final temperature, T1 and T2 being the temperatures of your first and second tanks, and C1 and C2 being their heat capacities.
Example: 101.15 = (1869 x 796.2 + -151 x 5582.4) / (796.2 + 5582.4)
As you can see I just barely managed to get this above 100 degrees, meaning it exploded. We can also see that because the cold tank is a negative number its heat capacity greatly reduces the resulting temperature, especially considering the final step of division.
Although Toxins comes stocked with most types of gas canisters we're really only interested in plasma and oxygen. You'll want to know how they differ if you hope to help the miners and impress NovusCorp's NT Frontier program.
Oxygen: It has a heat capacity of about 10% that of plasma and you want twice as much of it as you have plasma. Since heat capacity represents a resistance to temperature change this means we will be getting our oxygen as cold as we can to fit as much as possible in a tank. It's very easy to raise oxygen's temperature using hot plasma because of the difference in heat capacity.
Plasma: Plasma, as you've hopefully figured out, has 10 times the heat capacity of oxygen. This makes it responsible for just about every hurdle you'll face on your way to Cuba-impressive bombs. It will likely be the only gas in your hot tank and responsible for the majority of heat capacity in your cold tank. It both facilitates raising the bomb's temperature and is responsible for resisting it. Also you'll at some point accidentally leak a canister of it and die.
When you first start making bombs, especially if you followed the previous guide, you likely see your hot tank as your plasma tank and your cold tank as your oxygen. This works and makes it very easy to produce working bombs, but not big bombs. As your cold tank gets colder your hot tank needs to get hotter. As your hot tank gets hotter it can fit less mols of plasma due to hot gas taking up more space. This means that even if you can get 100mols of oxygen in your frigid super cooled oxygen tank, if you want it to actually explode you're going to manage maybe 1 or 2mols of plasma and so 96mols of oxygen won't even react, causing everyone to laugh at you. Based on personal experimentation this limits bombs like this to a roughly 20mol:40mol reaction, essentially the default boom.
In order to surpass that limit we'll need to mix plasma into our cold tank as well. This makes bomb mixes much more complicated as we can no longer strong-arm our way through potential duds using plasma's big muscly heat capacity. If you want a big dick bomb the large majority of your plasma will come from your cold tank. Being the super smart toxins researcher that you are I'm sure you see the problem. This means that the colder a tank is the more plasma it can fit and thus its resistance to heat change increases dramatically, as each negative degree not only increases the distance to 100oC but also increases heat capacity. Inversely your hot tank will be 100% plasma, but can fit less mols the hotter it gets meaning increasing the temperature also decreases the heat capacity. The result being that each negative degree in your cold tank reduces the final temperature significantly more than each positive degree in your hot tank increases it.
Although there may be a magic number you don't want to pass you still want your hot tank to be as hot as possible but be aware that a 4000oC tank isn't worth twice the temperature change that a 2000oC tank is. Not even close.
Here's where this guide stops being so direct and mostly shoves in the right direction. Partially because being too direct would quickly ruin the fun, but mostly because everyone has their own methods and mine almost certainly aren't the best.
The burn room is probably where you're making plasma really hot. The default setup of the toxins lab heavily implies you should pump gas into this room, burn it, then pump the hot gas out into a tank. Don't do this, it's bad. You'll get a lot of CO2 in your hot mix which is wasting precious tank space and even if you filter that out you're wasting time doing so. On top of that the resulting temperatures you can get from this method are laughable compared to alternatives.
A much better solution is to transfer the heat directly from the burn room into a plasma canister. This still won't get you incredible temperatures but it will certainly get you better than what pumping the gas out would. At this junction you're likely wondering what method of heating could be better. Well experiment with different types of pipes and whatever methods you can think of. Ask an experienced atmostech, etc. The incredible subtlety of this section may be frustrating, but making the hot go from point A to point B is as easy as reading the names of the pipes and making some assumptions.
How do you actually make the burn room hot in the first place though? This is the same principle as bomb making. Gas goes in, reacts, heat comes out. I personally just use a 1:2 plasma:oxygen mix then burn that. Considering what's been discussed already it seems logical but experiment with other mixes or even gasses. Hell toss something that isn't a gas in there and see what happens.
The best way to make gas very, very cold is almost definitely transferring cold directly from space into the tank. This chills it very quickly but may also chill it too much and takes a good chunk of time to setup. Read the guide to cooling plasma for more details on this.
Alternatively you could just use the freezer that comes with every toxins lab. Some already have it setup, some will force you to go through the advanced procedure of attaching a single connector to it. The advantage of the freezer is you can precisely tell it what temperature to reduce the canister to and it's very quick to start up. Unfortunately it also cools extremely slowly. If you use this method it should be the first thing you setup as it will also be the rate limiting step of your whole shift.
So you've got a real hot plasma canister and a real cold canister of your perfect special mix of gasses. Now how do you assemble it for testing? Grab some tanks and get that nasty room temperature gas out of them. Toss them in an air scrubber and scrub them clean. Fill them with your mix, check them with your atmospheric scanner, toss the numbers in your calculator or spreadsheet and if it's above 100 attach them to one of the supplied tank transfer valves. Now attach either a remote signaler or timer to them and take your baby to the bomb test monitoring room.
Note: Make sure you actually understand how timers work or change the default frequency of your signaler prior to attaching/activating it. You really don't want this thing going off early.
Activate the timer, 25-30 seconds should be safe, toss it in the disposals then hit the button to activate the launcher. Watch your baby via the monitoring computers and either wait for the boom or trigger the signaler, remember your PDA has a built in signaler. The nearby bhangmeter can give you readings on the explosion. If you've made multiple bombs do not attach signalers to all of them at once. Think about the results of this action.
Note that the bomb's output might be limited by the bomb cap, introduced after the antics of the legendary bomber “Cuban Pete” to prevent competent Traitors from making insanely powerful bombs to very easily destroy half of the station. If you have made a really big explosive and wonder if you hit the bomb cap, adminhelp it.
Bombs have three primary uses: Being a particularly boring traitor, getting banned, and mining. There are other moments for them to shine but these are the normal round to round uses. Don't do the first two, the third one is pretty good though. 4-5 decent bombs can absolutely destroy the mining asteroid and supply R&D/robotics for the rest of the shift. It isn't recommended to use them for this purpose until you're somewhat familiar with exactly how big your booms will be though. It's easy to accidentally blow up the mining station along with the roid. Make sure your bombs are placed far away from mining or research, this is really the only time you'd ever want to attach signalers to all of them at once.
If you accidentally blow up all the miners while trying to help them, you're likely getting a bwoink. If you make multiple clear warnings and one still gets caught in the blast, well that's Darwin. Do note that bombs have a tendency to send ore flying through space. If you're blowing up the roid it's recommended to focus more on the center of it so the surrounding walls can catch the debris. Do not try to blow up the clown asteroid as everyone will be very mad that what could have been their new Phazon is now spread throughout the cosmos.
If you bomb the main station as a non-antagonist you're going to get bwoinked and almost definitely banned. People don't even like antagonist bombers, let alone non-antagonist ones.
You may encounter a scenario you think completely justifies bombing the station. Maybe the library is very full of xenomorphs. Maybe the 7 AIs are all malfunctioning and also there's 20 wizards in the room too. Maybe the clown called you gay and he's hiding in the theater. Stop and ask yourself if, firstly, the bomb is even necessary? Maybe the whole crew is armed to the teeth and ready to fight the xenomorphs, maybe the Clown is the one who's gay? Secondly ask yourself if your bomb will cause more damage to the station than it prevents? The answer to this one is almost always yes, bombs are hard to predict and even if you put it perfectly in a room no one cares about it's still causing huge damage, breach, depressurization, and probably gibbing someone. If you are completely and totally convinced this is an appropriate time to bomb, still ask an admin because no it probably isn't an appropriate time to bomb. It is almost never an appropriate time to bomb. That AI wizard thing, maybe bomb that though.
Blast Cannons are a fun and much less destructive way to use your bombs. They focus the entire blast into a straight line and if you're decent at bombs it's a very, very long and dangerous line. Consider it a single use bomb gun. Still don't use these on the station but you're much more likely to be able to convince the admins that you totally need to shoot the mime with your blast cannon than you are to convince them you need to bomb him. They can cut a station in half and breach most of the tiles in their path though so again, you'll get bwoinked if you aren't careful. With that said they gib or at least crit just about everything in their path. Much more useful and controlled than regular bombs.
Note: Blast cannons are very delicate. Be careful when trying to place them in lockers or display cases. They have a tendency to misfire. It's recommended to drop them rather than clicking on the closet
After seeing the destruction your bombs caused the miners asteroid you, of course, immediately thought about being a traitor using bombs. Just plant one in medbay, evac, maybe the bridge and bam, best traitor ever right? It might be fun for you the first time but everyone will think you're super boring and be mad their fun round ended instantly without a chance for them to even fight back. Traitors aren't trying to win the round, they're meant to make the round fun. Suddenly exploding isn't fun.
That doesn't mean you can't use bombs as a traitor. Just be more exciting about it. Plant bombs on timers throughout the station and start a bomb hunt while screaming threats and demands over megaphone. Put proximity bombs into lockers mounted on MULEs and make sure everyone knows not to get close to them, send the MULEs for a good long walk through the station and watch the panic. Hide the carded AI in a bag mixed in with a dozen others, all filled with bombs rigged to mouse traps then shout riddles at security as they scramble to figure out which one it's in. Get creative. If you're good at toxins your bombs will end the round. If the round ends without people having fun it's a shit round and your fault. Be fun.