[GregTech-5][1.7.10-FORGE-1355+][Unofficial but approved Port][Stable] Even GT5 Experimental is slowly getting stable.

I’ve converted my steam power production to use 3 large turbines running Ultimet rotors for some 1,500 EU/tick (the displayed output keeps fluctuating between 1200 and 1800, presumably because the EV dynamos don’t emit a packet until they hit 2,048 EU).

Setting up the first turbine and figuring out how I’d re-configure power distribution took considerable time, but building turbines 2 and 3 went pretty quickly. Compared to most multiblocks, the large turbines are somewhat simple, with only 5 special blocks (controller, maintenance, dynamo, input and output hatches).

It helped considerably that I only had to build one set of redstone logic for control, and turn them all on or off together. The logic is as I laid out earlier - one set of comparators and a RS latch to check available energy storage, and one for available steam. The turbines turn on if the battery is nearly empty and there’s steam available, and turn off if the battery is full or steam runs out.

Running out of steam should never happen, but there could be some reason why the boilers shut down.

In practice both the turbines and the boilers run fairly steadily since the output energy buffer and steam buffer are large. If the turbines are running continuously due to load, the boilers run 13 minutes on / 2.4 minutes off since they produce 20% more steam than the turbines consume.

Peak demand so far has been about 2,400 EU/tick, but I expect that will go up dramatically once I build some actual EV machinery. So far my only actual EV consumer is my disassembler. I know the Tungstate electrolysis requires 2k EU/tick, and all of the Resin Board electronics also require circuit assemblers demanding 2k EU/tick each.

That's a nice efficiency scheme but it doesn't have much about safety. The one very crucial thing is d.water amount in boiler input because if there are any loss in steam condencation process or pipe system (or some glitch happens) d.water will deplete before steam and so it will all be fiery and messy at one point. Thats also true about LHE.

Also how do you bring exact amount of steam to turbine if your production is more? Do you use fluid regulator or manage it by pipe material/size? Or does steam tank acts in way of actual buffer by itself?

In case of tungsten extraction it's more about hydrogen, be sure to have it much (I use methane+water reaction, but it's now costly on CH4)

The turbines don’t explode, as far as I know, so they don’t need redstone logic for safety.

The boilers have had automatic logic to shut down if they get below 80% water since I built them. I think I said that earlier.

There’s a MV distillery in the loop that adds distilled water if the distilled water buffer gets below a certain amount. Right now it’s set to 50%, which means a reserve of 64,000 L of water. Even though it’s supposed to be a closed loop, I added that in case there are losses in practice or I screw up somehow. Worst case is that the boilers shut down, rather than explode.

Pipes are completely unreliable as a method of fluid regulation. Each steam turbine has a fluid regulator on the input hatch.

I have a large hydrogen reserve tank. So far, hydrogen production from ore processing has far outstripped demand, so I have logic to burn off excess hydrogen in a MV gas turbine.

I’m not sure, as yet, what I’ll do if I need additional hydrogen production beyond electrolysis of things like bauxite. I’ve got a water electrolysis setup, but it’s really too slow to do much good. I put it together early on because I thought it would help with oxygen, but it didn’t, really. For a while I was doing a lot of cobblestone -> sand -> glass -> silicon dioxide -> silicon + oxygen, but not so much recently because I’m using aluminum a lot more often than steel.

The steam turbines were mostly about reducing my water consumption and getting some practical experience with large turbines, which I’d never done before. That it boosted my steam power production by 500 EU/tick was a nice bonus, but I’m aware that I’ll shortly be venturing into territory where 500 EU/tick is a trivial amount of energy.

The efficiency of the steam turbines hardly seems worth it at this stage, given that they’re 4x3x3 structures that only produce as much power as a single-block HV turbine. They should be a lot more attractive when they can produce 900+ EU/tick with better rotors.

I’m pretty fuzzy about the transition from this stuff to plasma turbines fed by fusion reactors. I know those produce an absurd amount of energy (27,000 EU/tick or more), but I don’t know that there’s a lot in between.

For the water production: I remember someone doing a setup with a snowman creating infinite snow. Then ME Annihilation Plane creates snowballs from that snow which can be turned into water in the fluid extractor.

The snowman thing is too far afield for me. If I’m going to do something that wonky, I’d just as soon use a block that creates infinite water. Both feel equally unrealistic / cheaty.

When I set up a drill over a magnesium site, I enabled an option in Agricraft which allows the water tanks to fill if there’s a water source block above them. Because the magnesium site happened to be under the ocean, and it felt reasonable that tapping the bottom of the ocean should yield infinite water.

I do have a desert bauxite site I want to drill. Not so much for aluminum, which I have far too much of right now, as for the rutile dust, since I’m running short on titanium. I just need to decide whether I’m happier shipping drilling fluid in, setting up a cactus farm to extract water, or maybe collecting water in a nearby plains biome and piping it in.

If its about realism, I think you actually can enable vanilla water respawn mechanics but restrict yourself to only use water from big natural reservoirs. Machine hull + drain cover + pump (may be multiple) will resolve water problem without breaking IRL logic. (I mean, its impossible to deplete an ocean, isn't it?)

I’ve left the vanilla water respawn mechanics alone, I’m just playing with some self-imposed rules. Mostly that I can’t draw huge amounts of water out of a puddle or a magic block, which is how most mods do water sources.

This means, again according to my personal rules, I can only collect rainwater or tap a truly large water source like the ocean. It didn’t occur to me to use a drain cover in my under-ocean tap. I’m sure that would have worked, though I’m fine with the wooden Agricraft tanks acting as collectors. They’re open on top and look like they should be able to collect water from the bottom of the ocean.

Unfortunately, the Gregtech 5U pump will empty out the ocean if used there, and gets a trivial amount of water for doing it. I have one, but it’s only for collecting lava. Which I rationalize as a more limited resource. Particularly since lava can be centrifuged for resources, including tungstate.

Very, very small amounts of tungstate. I drained one local lava deposit and got about 4 tungstate dust out of the whole thing, which isn’t enough to electrolyze. I have toyed with the idea of emptying large portions of the Nether lava lakes for this, but I haven’t given up on finding a vein near me. I’ve only prospected about 30 3x3 chunks.

I was incorrect, I meant pump cover on same machine hull connecting to pipe system, so you can pipe water wherever you want. Drain will not empty an ocean because it only takes 1 block of water in front of it periodically. It said that you can even attach it to GT pipe, although I've never tested it this way.

IMO lava centrifuging is inefficient, just postprocess to logically get rid of cooled down in LHE lava. Outcome is so miserable that it just not worth energy and time spent.

Don't give up, It took me 100 or so 3x3s to find almost all minerals that spawns in overworld (exept iridium/osmium, haven't found it till now), so good luck to you.

Iridium and osmium don’t spawn as ore veins. Yes, Gregtech has entries for ore blocks for both of them, and NEI shows ore processing for them, but they don’t spawn unless you add an entry to the config. It appears that platinum sludge is intended to be the only way to obtain them from ore.

In practice, treasure chests in villages, temples, abandoned mine shafts, and the like are a far more plentiful source of iridium.

I should check how much I’ve got of each. I know I’ve only got about 20 platinum, all obtained from processing chalcopyrite for sludge.

EDIT: I looked at the vein table again, and while there’s no entry from osmium, iridium does generate as a rare block in a platinum vein. Which is a very rare vein, about 0.25% of 3x3s should have it.

There's quite easy way to get platinum: centrifuge redstone for mercury (or electrolyze cinnabar) then use it on crushed nickel ore in chemical bath. It's only about time since redstone centrifuging is long process, and with ore drilling rig you got that in thousands (also you gain ruby dust for chrome and pyrite for iron).

Iridium spawns in end in small ores, but it's not in great demand through game. Osmium is rather valuable (currently get it through ic2 crops but its very slow process, on par with sludge centrifuging and uum replication I guess. There another quite easy way by using fusion reactor but you need that at first).

I don’t use a lot of nickel, so I’m not really on top of what it produces when washed with mercury. I do have nickel deposits, but I haven’t really mined them beyond getting some cobalt early on.

I do, of course, have a mercury bath setup. In fact, just recently I set up a separate centrifuge for bulk-centrifuging redstone, and a big tank to hold the mecury. Prior to this I only had a very small (48 bucket) tank for mercury, but I was very short of chrome, and I had large reserves (2000+) of redstone, so I wanted the redstone -> ruby dust -> chrome process, but I didn’t want to just throw away the extra mercury.

Near as I can tell, mercury has little value beyond ore washing. You can “burn” it for power in one-shot batteries, but that seems like a waste. It’s also a fuel for Magic power converters, again a bit of a waste. The extra copper, gold, and silver you get from mercury washing seems a lot more valuable.

Up until recently, the only use I had for platinum was carbon fiber. Which it produces at very low cost (1 platinum = about 70 carbon fiber). When I looked into wireless redstone transmission to control the turbines, I discovered that those covers require EV emitters / receivers, which in turn require platinum rods. You can run through a lot of platinum in a hurry in you go into wireless redstone logic in a big way.

I ended up going wired for the turbines, which you can do now that multi-block casings transmit redstone signals. Still, I’ve got the wireless stuff in mind. Wireless redstone is potentially very convenient, and I tested that it works in / out of Compact Machines. I could, for example, broadcast the state of the steam buffer wirelessly, and every control circuit that cares about that could listen to that signal.

I also see that platinum is the only -1 EU/meter cable for 8kV. Clearly it’s way too rare and expensive for that. Unfortunately there’s no cheap alternative like aluminum. I guess that most people use tungsten steel cable, which is -2 EU/meter, but much easier to obtain once you’ve got a tungsten deposit.

I checked platinum sources, and sure enough, washing crushed nickel ore with mercury is the only meaningful source of platinum as a by product, and far more productive than platinum sludge. I had around 1500 crushed nickel in storage from ore rigs, so I dumped a bunch of it into my ore processing system to get some more platinum.

I’ve got 11 Osmium and 31 Iridium at this point. 20 of the iridium is loot from treasure chests.

I’m setting up the ore rig for bauxite. Man, compared to just going out and mining, the prep time is huge. Much of the day, really.

Part of the issue was this was my first surface mine, the previous three were all underground. Of course that meant I had to build a shelter from the rain, and I ended up building a substantial little castle rather than just leave a big ugly stone cube on the site. It’s still rectangular in shape, but it has proper walls with anti-spider defenses and a few decorative touches like crenellations. Kind of silly for something that’s essentially throw away, something I’ll abandon once the site is exhausted.

The actual surface site turned out to be in the plains, not the nearby desert as I thought, so I threw in a wooden water collector tank and a minimum-size (3x3x4) Railcraft tank to store water. My plan is to have lubricant and drilling fluid cars in the train, and send the train back early if drilling fluid runs out locally. Which should only happen if there’s not enough water on site.

Even though it’s substantial work, it feels like the time investment is worth it, since drilling one site is like mining 3 sites by hand, and I don’t have to hand-carry anything back and forth or go through the tedium of branch mining.

I also think the process of setting up drills will go faster as I get more practiced. Throwing up the drill itself goes very quickly. It’s setting up the support stuff that still takes a little time, like the on-site drilling fluid production and the redstone control logic.

Plus there’s laying down track, though each new segment of track I lay is something I’ll probably be able to use to reach later sites.

I made an IV disassembler.... and it's really useless. To disassemble a LV machine it needs more than 400secs, so there isn't any reason to waste millions of EU to save a bit of copper and iron. The only thing you could use it for then is to disassemble electric tools, but considering how much tungsten it took to build, an EV one or even lower would still be better, since you could disassemble more tools than you'd ever use before the loss of materials would exceed the cost of the machine.

I tend to look at EU as being free. Mainly because I emphasize renewable fuel sources (i.e. trees converted to charcoal) or largely hands off (i.e. my oil rig). The cost for setting up the power infrastructure is significant, and a project that never really ends, but once it’s in place I don’t hesitate to use it.

90% of the reason to have any kind of dissambler is the electric tools. They’re very expensive compared to simple pickaxes if you can’t recycle them when they’re near breaking. They’re quite reasonable if you can salvage 90% of the parts.

Even with electric tools, most of them don’t get really heavy use. It’s the drills that get significant wear, not chainsaws, screwdrivers, or wrenches. Even if you’re using ore rigs for your ore mining (as I am), there’s usually significant wear digging tunnels.

I don’t see myself making an IV disassembler for the extra savings, even though I regularly use a MV drill, which means some loss of titanium every time I rebuild it. I’m glad I have the EV disassembler, though.

If past experience is any guide, eventually you get to a point where things that used to look prohibitively expensive are now cheap enough to do anyway. I don’t care about the steel cost of anything since I have so much iron and I can make more steel very rapidly. Stainless steel doesn’t look so bad since I have hundreds of manganese, though I’ll probably have to drill a redstone deposit for more chrome soon. Titanium will be plentiful as soon as I finish drilling my current bauxite deposit.

Tungsten is, of course, completely prohibitive for me since I haven’t found any at all. I imagine, though, that it starts to feel cheap and plentiful if you’ve gone to the End, killed the dragon, and flown around setting up ore drills there. I gather that tungstate is common there, though I’ve never been there.

I don't know if the end is actually the best place to get tungsten.

I've quickly flown around the main island without digging shafts or anything (I was looking for naquadah but it turns out the pack I'm playing only has it enabled in GC asteroids) and I didn't see any; mostly tin, olivine and lapis if I remember correctly. Of course it might be just bad luck.

The vein ore generation can really screw you over, and digging countless shafts just to find an ore isn't really the most fun thing you can do.

By the time you’re flying around the End, making a seismic prospector and producing explosives to run it should be easy. Data sticks are the main barrier to using it, but you should be able to make those by the time you care about tungsten.

So, no actual shafts, just dropping the prospector and activating it repeatedly.

Tungsten generates between levels 20 and 50, so I’m not sure how visible it would be from the surface. Yeah, I know the geography of the End is a little weird, so those levels may be more visible than I think.

Of course, if the pack you’re playing with has altered the ore generation, there’s no way to say for certain whether it’s left tungstate generation in the End alone.

It appears that a Large Boiler -> Large Steam Turbine setup is not actually a closed system. After every turbine run, there’s less water in the distilled holding tank than when it started. Even taking into account water that’s currently steam in the steam tank, since most of the time, the turbines shut off while the boilers are running, and then the boilers continue until the steam tank is 90% full.

I think it’s a startup cost. That is, I think that the large boilers don’t work quite right, while they’re heating up they consume water at their full rate even though they’re not making steam yet. At some point I need to do some experiments in Creative to verify where the water is going.

It’s also possible it’s a steam turbine problem, that they aren’t returning 100% of the water while they’re spinning up, but the boilers look more likely.

I believe that once both are running, all water consumed by the boilers is returned by the turbines. It’s difficult to say because I’m usually not stressing the system. If I’m just processing ore, system demand’s about 200-300 EU/tick, far less than the 1550 EU/tick the turbines produce, so the turbines run about 12 minutes, fill up the battery, and shut off.

That’s just one on/off cycle for the boilers. The turbines start up, empty the steam tank, and the boilers kick in. By the time the steam tank is almost full, the battery is full again and the turbines are off.

It appears there’s about 40,000 L less distilled water in the reserve tank after a cycle. It’s noticeable, but only about 10% of the water I’d use if I generated that much EU with HV turbines and no water recycling.

I can live with it, but it does mean that the distillery attached to the system keeping a minimum amount of water in the tank runs on a regular basis.

So far in my LHE/Turbines setup i haven't noticed any loss of water, and they've been turned off as well so even in startup they didn't lose any.

It might be the boiler's fault, unless there's some loss of steam somewhere, or the turbines are running over the optimal flow and are voiding it (I don't know for sure if they void the water as well or output it normally)

There’s no loss of steam, and I have fluid regulators on the turbines setting the steam flow to exactly the optimal flow rate.

However, there’s no way to avoid excess steam in the input hatch before a turbine starts running. A turbine rated for 18,000 L/sec, 900 L/tick of steam with an input hatch holding 16,000 L of steam will have an oversupply until consumes all the extra steam. After that it’s limited by the flow into the hatch. So for about 2 seconds it will eat 1,350 L/tick of steam for no extra energy output.

However, even if the turbines voided the extra steam rather than converted it to water, that’s only about 100 L of water loss on startup before the fluid regulator limits the steam input. I’m seeing far, far more loss than that.

Boilers, oddly, run on a per-second cycle, rather than per-tick. A Titanium boiler will run for 1 second generating no steam, and then abruptly create 32,000 L of steam in any output hatches. This is fairly easy to observe if you view the contents of the output hatch, or if there are multiple hatches, the last output hatch.

I have memory of a problem like this. Experiment with larger input hatches.