Reactor + Buildcraft

1st Official Post

    I was just messing around and noticed pipes can attach to a reactor (they will not attach to reactor chamber). What good is this you may ask? Well how about an automated cooling system by injecting Ice automatically in to a slot in the reactor? Which can be even further refined with the RedPower mod ;) . I have tested and it does work. Downside is you will loose the ability to attach 1 reactor chamer, so it will have a maximum of 5. The other downside is having to find ice. That is unless someone manages to get the ice cream mod working in 1.7.3 so you can make ice out of snow, albeit a useless mod otherwise :D (no offense to someone who likes it). This plus creating the recipe in an automatic crafting table and viola ice... Next step is to convince Alblaka to create a refrigeration unit in Industrial Craft 2 to make Ice :thumbup: .


    *Edit - This may also work for injecting buckets of water, I have not tested.

    there already is a way to obtain ice in industrial craft, by compressing snow. I don't think you will be able to convince alblacka to create an ice machine because there are a plethora of other features that are a little more important. but hell there is a freezer in the aether mod.

    Quote from nathan

    there already is a way to obtain ice in industrial craft, by compressing snow. I don't think you will be able to convince alblacka to create an ice machine because there are a plethora of other features that are a little more important. but hell there is a freezer in the aether mod.

    is there a way to obtain snowballs automatically using BC+IC? (terraformers etc.)

    compressing water cell -> snowball.
    compressing snowball -> ice.
    And getting water cell is possible with BC pump and automatic crafting table OR miner and pump from IC2.


    The creation of the ice can be fully automated.

    Did You try to pump water using miner and pumps? It don't working, miner doesn't looking for water, take only that directly below him.

    Miner surronding by a pump cause the miner to mine lava and not water.
    (Because when you mine to find a liquid, it's not to pump water that you can find all over the world)

    Quote from Nargon

    compressing water cell -> snowball.
    compressing snowball -> ice.
    And getting water cell is possible with BC pump and automatic crafting table OR miner and pump from IC2.


    The creation of the ice can be fully automated.


    awesome, didnt know the water cell -> snowball recipe. Sweet.

    thanks for this exceedingly usefull information, I shall now proceed to make a highpowerd would be Mark V and turn it into a mark II ;)

    Quote from FourFire

    thanks for this exceedingly usefull information, I shall now proceed to make a highpowerd would be Mark V and turn it into a mark II ;)

    Please post the results when you have it perfected. I am curious to see some designs.

    when you compress a water cell into a snow ball do you get an empty cell back? If so, how do you do the buildcraft pipes to collect it? I think I have some science to do because I have the same question about the bucket of water and empty cell.


    Edit 1: It ate the cell and gave me a snow ball. Each snow ball = 1/4 tin bar :(

    you just need a winter biome large enough and make a snow farming system akin somehow to auto tree harvesting so as to collect enough snowballs to keep your reactor cool

    Quote from FourFire

    you just need a winter biome large enough and make a snow farming system akin somehow to auto tree harvesting so as to collect enough snowballs to keep your reactor cool

    this is what I was referring to. How could this be done? Do terraformers drop snowballs when removing snow?

    no they directly change the blocks without breaking them but I would presume that a quarry would collect snowballs (untested)
    and all that you would need to do is have a redstone cut off or manual control to turn it off until it snows again

    I built an autostabilizing 300EU/t reactor using buildcraft. It pumps in ice, and catches excess. As long as excess is falling out, it triggers a redstone pipe that unlatches a timed latch that allows the reactor to run. Once the reactor starts melting more ice then I can supply, the redstone pipe stops triggering, which allows the latch to flip, and causes the reactor to shut down. Once it cools, the ice builds back up inside it, and starts falling out, and the whole process starts over again. It looks like, even after it's reduced duty cycle due to cooling, it's still making a cool 90~100EU/t at 3.75 efficiency, and it's completely self stable. All I need to do now is mod in a freezer, so I can make ice using the buildcraft bucket pump addon.


    Reactor I'm using: Ice Reactor

    Overall view
    Redstone pipe with timed RS latch (redpower logic)


    Latch leads to reactor cutoff


    Ice insertion and overflow catching(bunch of obsidian pipes)


    Reactor core with inserted ice (only seems to fill top row). It's just completed a cooling cycle and is about to start up again.


    This is current reading from reactor start to next reactor start. Total power is 90~100 EU/t



    Before anyone asks, yes it is using TMI'd ice and components, but once I mod in an ice maker, I'm going to build a smaller scale one for real. It'll be great for high efficiency usage, not to mention that it's average power output is higher than any MarkI or MarkII that I've seen.

    That is really cool. Too bad there is currently no way to generate Ice without losing tin. The most interesting part to me is that the pipes only fill the top of the reactor...

    Quote from Vendan

    I built an autostabilizing 300EU/t reactor using buildcraft. It pumps in ice, and catches excess. As long as excess is falling out, it triggers a redstone pipe that unlatches a timed latch that allows the reactor to run. Once the reactor starts melting more ice then I can supply, the redstone pipe stops triggering, which allows the latch to flip, and causes the reactor to shut down. Once it cools, the ice builds back up inside it, and starts falling out, and the whole process starts over again. It looks like, even after it's reduced duty cycle due to cooling, it's still making a cool 90~100EU/t at 3.75 efficiency, and it's completely self stable. All I need to do now is mod in a freezer, so I can make ice using the buildcraft bucket pump addon.


    Reactor I'm using: Ice Reactor

    Thanks for posting the design. This freezer mod your talking about would be awesome. How about a slushee/freezer IC² addon machine (uses EU) churning out snowballs that can be used in a compressor to make ice? Automated of course when it has a source of water from a pump by buildcraft or just plain old buckets of water in MC. This also of course would slow down ice production as the compressor is not very fast, but would allow for some pretty complex set up :D.