Setting up a Steam Chain

  • I returned to Minecraft and IC2 recently, and I'm working with all 10.2 mods on a dedicated Survival server. My IC2 build is 2-2.6 190-ex110.


    Let me start by saying I love this new chain, it's really fun. I really appreciate the complexity of it, and that you can create a closed system that involves so many different things.


    Having said that, the whole steam thing in IC2 is new to me, and I have some questions. It could be that I don't fully understand the mechanics, or that the development of these new machines is still a WIP. Here is what I what I tried doing:


    I had lava in a railcraft tank. Using EnderIO conduits, I piped the lava into an IC2 Liquid Heat Exchanger. I piped the Pahoehoe Lava from the Liquid Heat Exchanger into a tank for later disposal. I used Heat Conductors in the Liquid Heat Exchanger (more on this later). For the most part this all seemed to work.


    I used a Steam Boiler adjacent to the Liquid Heat Exchanger. I piped steam from the boiler to a tank. Distilled water was piped into the Boiler from another tank (filled from the turbine and condenser). I set the bars to 0 (more on this later) and the output to 1 mb/t (more on this later). This machine kind of works, but not as I expected.


    Steam from the tank was piped into a Steam Turbine (machine) with a Steam Turbine (part) in it. Distilled Water was piped from this machine to a tank. The Steam Turbine functioned, but would constantly explode. The amount of kinetic energy produced would fluctuate, and I couldn't find a way to control how much steam I was pushing into the machine (more on this later).


    A Condenser was adjacent to the Steam Turbine. It would collect Steam and then convert it to Distilled Water, which was piped into a tank. The heat vents seemed to do the opposite of what I expected them to do, adding them made the machine much less efficient; it held more steam longer and produced far less Distilled Water. I thought the idea was to manage the steam by converting it to Distilled Water as fast as possible, because when the steam in the machine is full it no longer prevents explosions? In any configuration, the Steam Turbine would continue to explode constantly.


    A Kinetic Generator was adjacent to the Steam Turbine as well. The generator would create around 40 eu, but this did fluctuate.


    Okay so hear are some of my questions:


    1. Are these machines working as intended?
    2. The rate at which lava is consumed in the Liquid Heat Exchanger seems very high. So high, that it might be impractical? If the only time heat is created is when lava is converted to pahoehoe, you can really consume a lot of lava very fast. What do you do with that much Pahoehoe when so much is created so quickly? Is this working correctly?
    3. The Heat Conductors confuse me. I understand that you create more heat by adding in the Heat Conductor, but what exactly is the math here? One seemed to do nothing, but multiples of two did something. Any more than two didn't seem to give any benefit, as you can increase the temperature on the Steam Boiler regardless of how you have the Liquid Heat Exchanger setup.
    4. I don't really understand how the Steam Boiler controls work. How do you make more regular steam? Increasing the water or the bars of pressure didn't seem to increase steam output.
    5. Does super heated steam work? I tried creating it with 221 bars of pressure, but the Steam Turbines seemed to work exactly the same, and I couldn't chain two of them together.
    6. The Steam Turbine constantly explodes regardless if it's alone, with a Condenser, or with another Steam Turbine. How do you prevent this?
    7. The Condenser doesn't seem to relieve pressure of the Steam Turbine. How do you do this?
    8. What effect do the Heat Vents have? It seems to be working in reverse where adding them makes the machine work slower and less efficiently?
    9. I used Copper Insulated cables from the Kinetic Generator, and they melted. The reported voltage was well under 128 EU/t, so that wasn't what I expected. Am I missing something here?
    10. Given the complexity of the whole system and all of the machines and parts involved, I expected a lot more EU to be produced in the end. You can setup a single Wind Turbine in about 5 minutes with only basic materials, and make more power! Is this still being balanced?


    Clearly I need some help here. If anyone can give me some assistance it would be appreciated. I really like the whole idea!


    It's great to still see IC2 alive, and some of the old timers like Choco are still moving it forward. You're doing god's work son. :P

    • Official Post

    It's great to still see IC2 alive, and some of the old timers like Choco are still moving it forward. You're doing god's work son. :P

    Nice for you to turn up to see my 6000th post ;)

    1. Are these machines working as intended?

    It sounds like they're working as intended, or at the very least the sort of way you'd expect. They've always been slightly unreliable, but always reliable enough to be used.

    2. The rate at which lava is consumed in the Liquid Heat Exchanger seems very high. So high, that it might be impractical? If the only time heat is created is when lava is converted to pahoehoe, you can really consume a lot of lava very fast. What do you do with that much Pahoehoe when so much is created so quickly? Is this working correctly?

    Lava was nerfed very quickly to avoid the nether being a near unlimited source of cheap heat. As a result lava is consumed in huge amounts and you end up with just as much pahoehoe lava as you had normal lava. It can be cooled into basalt, which is a nice building material, but there's no machine for it so it just has to be emptied out and left to cool in world. It'll instantly cool touching water though, so could be worse.

    3. The Heat Conductors confuse me. I understand that you create more heat by adding in the Heat Conductor, but what exactly is the math here? One seemed to do nothing, but multiples of two did something. Any more than two didn't seem to give any benefit, as you can increase the temperature on the Steam Boiler regardless of how you have the Liquid Heat Exchanger setup.

    They're just a way of changing how much heat a heat generator can output, it's not really steam setup specific, especially as normally you'll just want to transfer as much heat as you can generate.

    4. I don't really understand how the Steam Boiler controls work. How do you make more regular steam? Increasing the water or the bars of pressure didn't seem to increase steam output.

    You increase the amount of water input and it'll produce more steam, but you need more heat too. Pressure increases the amount of heat needed to heat the water without actually increasing the amount output, until you get to the magical boundary at 220 bars when it will suddenly turn into super-heated steam. I don't think Thunderdark had finished what he had planned at all, as pressure is essentially useless. If you're making super-heated steam (which you should want), set it to 221 bars otherwise leave it at 0. Theoretically it can allow finer balancing of heat output from something like a fluid reactor to use everything available, but because of float rounding with weird numbers, most pressures need non-whole numbers of heat.

    5. Does super heated steam work? I tried creating it with 221 bars of pressure, but the Steam Turbines seemed to work exactly the same, and I couldn't chain two of them together.

    You need double the heat per mb of water input for super-heated steam. So 200 Hu would normally allow 2mb/t of water to be 200mb/t of steam, but it could only allow 1mb/t of water to produce 100mb/t of super-heated steam.

    6. The Steam Turbine constantly explodes regardless if it's alone, with a Condenser, or with another Steam Turbine. How do you prevent this?

    You have have a condenser directly adjacent to it for normal steam, and either a condenser or another steam turbine for super-heated steam. This is one of the weirdnesses of the system that the code auto-ejects between them and will fire steam explosions if it can't eject everything it has. A condenser touching a turbine with normal steam in will get 90% of the steam, the remaining 10% condenses in the turbine itself and fills the tank with distilled water. You'll want to keep it pumped out otherwise the efficiency of the turbine drops. A super-heated steam turbine will eject all 100% of it's steam into the touching turbine, so there's no danger of distilled water building up there. You can have more than one touching, but it doesn't balance between them, instead ejecting as much as possible to each one in turn in order of down, up, north, south, east, west.

    7. The Condenser doesn't seem to relieve pressure of the Steam Turbine. How do you do this?

    Condensers only need to touch turbines with normal steam in (as mentioned above).

    8. What effect do the Heat Vents have? It seems to be working in reverse where adding them makes the machine work slower and less efficiently?

    They speed up the rate at which the condenser can turn steam into distilled water. You won't really need this unless you've got a lot of steam output or are directly outputting into a condenser (which you'd do if you wanted lots of distilled water quickly).

    9. I used Copper Insulated cables from the Kinetic Generator, and they melted. The reported voltage was well under 128 EU/t, so that wasn't what I expected. Am I missing something here?

    The kinetic generator outputs in tier 3 packets no matter the output it's generating. It's a reminents of 1.7.10 where there wasn't explosions or cable melting to avoid bottle-necking if it outputted more than 128EU/t (which it could do from windmills and turbines with lots of steam in). It probably needs to scale tier dynamically.

    10. Given the complexity of the whole system and all of the machines and parts involved, I expected a lot more EU to be produced in the end. You can setup a single Wind Turbine in about 5 minutes with only basic materials, and make more power! Is this still being balanced?

    I think it's just part of being unfinished, the wind turbines are very powerful (probably too powerful), and steam struggles to compete because it's so expensive, especially iron wise. The numbers still need tweaking, but at some point the whole steam boiler needs overhauling and mechanics changing. It would've been nice to at least know what Thunderdark was aiming for, right now it's a guessing game from what features were added. On the plus side, you can turn IC2 steam into Railcraft type steam for 1 HU per 10mb now, so it is still having related things added.

    145 Mods isn't too many. 9 types of copper and 8 types of tin aren't too many. 3 types of coffee though?

    I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realise that what you read was not what I meant.


    ---- Minecraft Crash Report ----
    // I just don't know what went wrong :(


    I see this too much.

  • Thanks for the replies, it's appreciated.


    The only thing left unresolved, is the issue with the Steam Turbine constantly exploding. I understood what you said, but it's not actually working the way you describe. Pushing only 1 mb/t of Steam into the Steam Turbine, which has a Condenser next to it, still explodes constantly.


    Maybe this is a bug?


    On a side note, I really like the Railcraft boiler setup. Unfortunately, in the 1.10.2 version of Railcraft it's bare bones. No boilers. Not much of anything really.

    • Official Post

    The only thing left unresolved, is the issue with the Steam Turbine constantly exploding. I understood what you said, but it's not actually working the way you describe. Pushing only 1 mb/t of Steam into the Steam Turbine, which has a Condenser next to it, still explodes constantly.


    Maybe this is a bug?

    1 mb/t of steam is very little (do you mean 1mb/t of water's worth of steam?). Either way, it should still work. Has the condenser filled up with distilled water? It's water tank is quite small relatively.

    On a side note, I really like the Railcraft boiler setup. Unfortunately, in the 1.10.2 version of Railcraft it's bare bones. No boilers. Not much of anything really.

    Yeah, the port is taking a long time. The dev version has more ported, but I don't think it's got boilers either yet. It's getting there though, plenty of people working on it.

    145 Mods isn't too many. 9 types of copper and 8 types of tin aren't too many. 3 types of coffee though?

    I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realise that what you read was not what I meant.


    ---- Minecraft Crash Report ----
    // I just don't know what went wrong :(


    I see this too much.

  • Quoted from "mustangdood"




    The only thing left unresolved, is the issue with the Steam Turbine constantly exploding. I understood what you said, but it's not actually working the way you describe. Pushing only 1 mb/t of Steam into the Steam Turbine, which has a Condenser next to it, still explodes constantly.

    Maybe this is a bug?
    1 mb/t of steam is very little (do you mean 1mb/t of water's worth of steam?). Either way, it should still work. Has the condenser filled up with distilled water? It's water tank is quite small relatively.

    Yeah sorry, 1 mb/t of water. The condenser fills with steam, and the steam is quickly converted to distilled water. The tank storing the distilled water has plenty of room. If you watch the condenser, it easily keeps up with the steam coming in; neither the internal steam or water tank is ever full.


    If you place a 2nd condenser next to the turbine, no steam will be used. I assume that means that all of the available steam can be handled by a single condenser.


    Basically, the setup is producing the least amount of steam from the least amount of heat. The condenser is easily keeping up, but the turbine is still constantly exploding.

    • Official Post

    Hmmm, strange. Is the steam boiler touching the turbine or are you using some kind of fluid pipe?

    145 Mods isn't too many. 9 types of copper and 8 types of tin aren't too many. 3 types of coffee though?

    I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realise that what you read was not what I meant.


    ---- Minecraft Crash Report ----
    // I just don't know what went wrong :(


    I see this too much.