A smal idea for improvement: Nowadays the actual board is usually made of fibreglass (FR-4), crappy ones are made from some sort of phenolic paper (FR2).. So maybe add fibreglass as a requirement.
That makes sense, especially since it would lower the requirement for different metals per circuitry batch. My goal with this mod was to make a recipe that someone in a post-apocalyptic environment could carry out to make a functional printed circuit board, which is why I went with the method I found online (and for that matter why it uses so much copper: you use practically a whole copper sheet, trace the circuit patterns you want, and etch the rest of the sheet!). I'd have to do a bit more research on the particular method used on actual boards to see if the laminating process can be done by hand (maybe using a draw bar?) or if that's something I'd want to roll into a more extensive mod utilizing the Workshop DLC, but regardless of what the research tells me, I really like the idea of using fiberglass in a more material-efficient recipe that reward the player for investing either in themselves or in their settlement's infrastructure.
You can add a recipe to the manufacturing plants. It will be more logical. Of the components in the game, sand and clay are sorely lacking. In the 60s, radio amateurs used mounted mounting, without using a board. In the photo, an electronic clock made by mounted mounting.
Can I suggest esl tagging the esp? I can convert it manually but if might help any others.
Also, another idea is to make antiseptic through purified water, glass, wood (as fuel) and alcohol, or something similar. Or even make bulk amounts using chemist and economics pre-reqs, and maybe a fusion core as the fuel source.
Now that I've looked into .ESL vs. .ESP files, I can see why this advice would make sense. I'll set aside some time to roll out a .ESL version of this mod soon.
Also, with regards to the antiseptic recipe, I think it's a solid idea. I've been working on a few other recipes (e.g., found some interesting ways to turn bone and glass into other, more useful materials), but it wouldn't hurt to shift my focus for a bit as long as I can keep my notes handy. Especially considering that adding a method of distilling alcoholic drinks to make medical-grade ethanol fits right in with the theme.
XD Honestly, I hadn't picked up on that. I'd been considering what sort of mesh I might make for the kit if I got ahold of the right software, but now... now I might just keep it!
Awesome! This will be most helpful! Now my SS can finally put that chemistry degree to use. :)
One question, though: concrete as a component? And you get it back when you scrap? I assume you had your reasons for it, but I can't figure out what they may be. Care to elaborate?
I tried to Google concrete use in circuits and could only find using circuit boards as an aggregate in concrete. Apparently makes decently strong concrete when they are grounded down. Not sure how it would be used to make a circuit board though.
There are some very interesting historical construction materials and techniques using foil, ceramics and bakelite I found though that would likely fit in a retro Fallout world.
Maybe the concrete is used as like a form to "cast" the actual board? Because the FR2 boards that are "fibre reinforced plastic". So maybe the "improvised" procoss of making these is like "put the fibre mesh in a concrete form, then pour molten plastic into that and let it cool down until it is hard"
Seems like a cool mod to solve a non problem though.. I mean if you go out and raid/loot you get junk or actual circuit boards all the time. Give it a A+ for thought out and believable backstory though.
p.s. Making circuit boards irl is really easy. The company I work for needed some large custom circuit boards made and the cost was too high. So we hard glue set a sheet of thin copper flashing to a thin sheet of fiberglass. After vacuum curing, we simply milled everything that wasn't the copper traces away on a milling machine. After the rest of the components were soldered to it, worked perfectly.
Yeah, for big geometries milling can work perfectly. But it is not really easy (of affordable) to mill out sub-mm structures. Etching is the way to go there.
But I don't know how well acid and glue work together ...
But I am not an expert in the manufacturing of boards, I just know work with them ...
Cheap printed circuit boards (getinax) are made of cardboard glue and copper foil (paper + glue + copper). To get a copper pattern on the board, part of the foil is removed with ferric chloride (acid + iron) For the manufacture of radio components, much more different materials are used. According to the level of complexity of the devices, microchips should be used in the game. For the manufacture of microchips, glue (epoxy resin housing), copper terminals, silicon as the main material and acid are used. There is no silicon in the game, but it is acceptable to replace it with concrete in the game (silicon is actually ordinary sand)
I added the concrete as kind of a concession to realism on my part: I needed an abrasive material to remove the thin oxide layer on the copper per Gehlot's method, but FO4 didn't have a really good abrasive to use. Concrete seemed like a good move, but given that you can recover almost the entire mass of the abrasive using the method, it seemed unfair for the player to lose all of it just for one circuit. So I made it both a requirement and a product of the recipe, so you'd need it but not lose it.
Honestly, there's a LOT of tools I would've added to the kit and given the same treatment for added realism, but I'm still figuring out how to mod different items. I think part of the problem is that I wanted to make a kit people could still scrap in build mode or at the workbench, so I created the kit as a miscellaneous item (MISC form, to be specific). Problem is that MISC entries can only have CMPO forms (like copper, oil, silver, basically your very basic materials) as scrapping results; using other items as scrapping results (i.e. telling the game to give you a blowtorch when you scrap a kit) caused my game to CTD every time I opened the category in the chem bench. So I had to compromise on the original vision, but I still think it was a worthwhile trade-off.
15 comments
A smal idea for improvement:
Nowadays the actual board is usually made of fibreglass (FR-4), crappy ones are made from some sort of phenolic paper (FR2)..
So maybe add fibreglass as a requirement.
Just an idea ...
That makes sense, especially since it would lower the requirement for different metals per circuitry batch. My goal with this mod was to make a recipe that someone in a post-apocalyptic environment could carry out to make a functional printed circuit board, which is why I went with the method I found online (and for that matter why it uses so much copper: you use practically a whole copper sheet, trace the circuit patterns you want, and etch the rest of the sheet!). I'd have to do a bit more research on the particular method used on actual boards to see if the laminating process can be done by hand (maybe using a draw bar?) or if that's something I'd want to roll into a more extensive mod utilizing the Workshop DLC, but regardless of what the research tells me, I really like the idea of using fiberglass in a more material-efficient recipe that reward the player for investing either in themselves or in their settlement's infrastructure.
In the 60s, radio amateurs used mounted mounting, without using a board. In the photo, an electronic clock made by mounted mounting.
Also, another idea is to make antiseptic through purified water, glass, wood (as fuel) and alcohol, or something similar. Or even make bulk amounts using chemist and economics pre-reqs, and maybe a fusion core as the fuel source.
Now that I've looked into .ESL vs. .ESP files, I can see why this advice would make sense. I'll set aside some time to roll out a .ESL version of this mod soon.
Also, with regards to the antiseptic recipe, I think it's a solid idea. I've been working on a few other recipes (e.g., found some interesting ways to turn bone and glass into other, more useful materials), but it wouldn't hurt to shift my focus for a bit as long as I can keep my notes handy. Especially considering that adding a method of distilling alcoholic drinks to make medical-grade ethanol fits right in with the theme.
One question, though: concrete as a component? And you get it back when you scrap? I assume you had your reasons for it, but I can't figure out what they may be. Care to elaborate?
There are some very interesting historical construction materials and techniques using foil, ceramics and bakelite I found though that would likely fit in a retro Fallout world.
Because the FR2 boards that are "fibre reinforced plastic".
So maybe the "improvised" procoss of making these is like "put the fibre mesh in a concrete form, then pour molten plastic into that and let it cool down until it is hard"
That is just a guess ....
p.s. Making circuit boards irl is really easy. The company I work for needed some large custom circuit boards made and the cost was too high.
So we hard glue set a sheet of thin copper flashing to a thin sheet of fiberglass. After vacuum curing, we simply milled everything that wasn't the copper traces away on a milling machine. After the rest of the components were soldered to it, worked perfectly.
But it is not really easy (of affordable) to mill out sub-mm structures.
Etching is the way to go there.
But I don't know how well acid and glue work together ...
But I am not an expert in the manufacturing of boards, I just know work with them ...
I added the concrete as kind of a concession to realism on my part: I needed an abrasive material to remove the thin oxide layer on the copper per Gehlot's method, but FO4 didn't have a really good abrasive to use. Concrete seemed like a good move, but given that you can recover almost the entire mass of the abrasive using the method, it seemed unfair for the player to lose all of it just for one circuit. So I made it both a requirement and a product of the recipe, so you'd need it but not lose it.
Honestly, there's a LOT of tools I would've added to the kit and given the same treatment for added realism, but I'm still figuring out how to mod different items. I think part of the problem is that I wanted to make a kit people could still scrap in build mode or at the workbench, so I created the kit as a miscellaneous item (MISC form, to be specific). Problem is that MISC entries can only have CMPO forms (like copper, oil, silver, basically your very basic materials) as scrapping results; using other items as scrapping results (i.e. telling the game to give you a blowtorch when you scrap a kit) caused my game to CTD every time I opened the category in the chem bench. So I had to compromise on the original vision, but I still think it was a worthwhile trade-off.