Hello all I have been doing some testing thus weekend Mods used : IC2, BC and EE with IC addon
Here I think an importaint piece of information would be the average pumping speed (item/sec) of a buildcraft pipe with redstone engine throughout a 10000 second reactor cycle
I honestly forgot about the lapis to ice conversion recipe so what I first tried was cooling with water buckets reactor with a double wooden ended pipe:
My first attempt I soon realised that the plating would conduct and melt , it was intended to give the reactor more health for the first few seconds while the pump system was filling with water buckets
this was the correction of the above reactor but it still was a failure
and that was my last attempt at bucket cooling system it proved nearly impossible to synchronize the heating/cooling cycle so that the reactor side pump did not pull out water buckets and afterwards reactor components I tried to use buckets because even without EE it is quite easy to attain automated waterbucket production.
Now to ice cooled reactors:
Personally I think that the new reactor classifacation for these reactor types should be a -CASUC suffix for "Constantly Applied Single Use Coolants"
I tested the buiuldcraft quarry snowball aquisition ability and they do not dig up snow at all but go directly for the block under it I am going to ask if this can be changed so that we may mine snowballs from winter biomes.
Knowing this I cheated and TMIed myself a full AlchChest of 64 stacks of snowballs which I hooked up to to an automated row of eight Compressors powered by an array of 32 solar panels. I tested and found that a compressor will do one compression operation in just over 10 seconds meaning that 8 would produce on rough average just under 8 ice every 10 seconds
My first ice cooled test reactor with an efficiency of ~2.7 I soon saw that the two DCs with 3 cores would overheat before the cycle finished.
My adaption of the above design it has an efficiency of 2.666 and as long as enough ice is constantly added it could run its full cycle with no problems.
after many failures I got sick of rebuilding my reactor containment chamber and since you can currently attain bedrock semilegity i decided on a design and
it is bedrock reinforced with EE Darkmatter blocks (which turn into lava at 85% heat ლ(ಠ益ಠლ) )
and the Reinforced stone part includes door access and the top part is a double five source blocks heated by glowstone blocks the flowing water blocks means that even if a waterblock evaporates it will immediately be replaced and lava will be turned into obsidian.
Thus after wresting with compressor automation mechanics I gave up temporarily and Mcedited in 16 doublechests full of ice all connected to the input pipe in individual pairs to be activated seperately.
Then with this setup but lacking a reliable overflow system I put this reactor (attached) on with 12 of the doublechest pumping simultaneously.
I left it running all night and in the morning i found it blown up, calculating from the produced power It must have run 57% of its full cycle having run out of ice blocks
some maths later I found that it would run fine with an ice flow of ~2.1 pieces per second now that I realized/remembered about lapis > ice I will be doing some stuff.
@ Below : yes you can get snowballs from shoveling but simply put: can you be bothered to constantly shovel snow balls and manually feed them into compressors the entire time your reactor is running? we are talking about Automated CASUC systems here.
