Guide to Fusion Power

Most of the foundation's facilities rely on power, however, they cannot rely on the public grid nor expose their location with such. Here you will learn how to operate a R-UST reactor, the fusion reactor that generates power to the site.

Making Power
To generate power, the R-UST uses high-concentrations of energy to fuse atoms together, which liberates high ammounts of energy. This reaction is hard to maintain due to it's nature but luckily we have just the right tools for the job!

Operating Principles
The R-UST available for usage utilizes an Mk. 8 Tokamak R-UST core to generate the magnetic field, control the reactions and harness power from them. In addition, it requires a Gyrotron, a machine that emits a high-energy(and also dangerous) laser that interacts with the fusion core's field, stabilizing it and assisting to initiate start-up reactions. At last the reactor requires fuel injectors to be placed around it's vacuum chamber which is the only way to feed the reactor with solid fuel.

Before operating it, we must understand some concepts: The magnetic field can start to destabilize when running some fusion reactions, mostly those that release radiation(Radiation itself doesn't increase instability, the reactions do). It's important to note that the magnetic field should not get in contact with any walls or general machinery, allowing the field to touch the containment's wall will quickly destabilize it.
 * Magnetic Field
 * Generated by the fusion core, it's what contains the hot plasma and makes the fusion reaction possible. The field can have it's size and strength altered to allow space for more reactants.  Do not increase the field's radius/size beyond 7 meters.
 * Instability
 * Instability is the measure of how unstable the field is, this should be as low as possible at all times. When instability reaches 100%, the magnetic field will fail, releasing a destructive EMP, radiation and destroying the core's vacuum chamber.
 * Field Strength
 * The field's strength is measured in Teslas, and directly affects the field size. The standard 15mx15m chamber can support a magnetic field of 50.1 tesla, which results in a size of 7 meters.


 * Reactants
 * All elements that can be reacted with the R-UST are refered to as reactants each reactant is capable of performing different reactions, when two reactants react their reaction could produce another reactant as a byproduct along with power. For example the Deuterium + Tritium reaction generates moderate radiation, slightly increases instability, produces helium(helium can later react with another deuterium, providing only extra power with no byproducts) and power.

First and foremost, access the fusion core control console, you should now see the following:

Power Status
 * This tells you the current power output and power draw of the Fusion Core. Power draw is dependent on the field strength, and power output is dependent on the fusion reactions taking place within the core.

Field Strength - This determines the field size of the fusion core; this is important for catching fuel pellets and can be set to 20 or higher for the default R-UST configuration. Field strength must not exceed 50 tesla. If it exceeds 50 tesla then the field size will exceed that of the R-UST chamber, causing a catastrophic rise in instability and near-instantaneous destruction of the R-UST. Increasing the field strength makes the R-UST take more power, but this is negligible compared to the R-UST output when it is operating. Instability - Instability is raised by two things, the fusion reactions taking place and the fusion core field touching machinery or objects. It is controlled by using the Gyrotron to fire a beam of energy into the fusion core field that maintains its containment. If your instability is rising above 1% then you must immediately adjust the Gyrotron settings and/or reduce the amount of reactants being added to the field. Plasma temperature - This determines the reactions that can take place. Initially your fusion core will be at room temperature, and it will take some time to warm up. Once it is above a few thousand kelvin the rest of the reactions will kick in and it will keep itself stable. When turning off the fusion core this value must be below 1000K or it will cause an EMP and destruction of the R-UST containment, likely flooding Deck 2 with extremely hot gas. To cool this down stop adding reactants and turn the gyrotron power up, then wait. Reactants - This is a list of all current reactants in the field. Every tick of the R-UST, it will try and react these reactants together and create some radiation, instability and power based on what reactions are possible. Reactants exceeding 10,000 total reactants will be removed and turned into radiation (this is not something to worry about, just don't try to add more reactants if you are consistently hitting this threshold).