The Perfect Minimal Reactor?

    The Design


    The Goal: make a Mark I-O, 2.33 eff, negative heat reactor using only 2 chambers.

    Click here to read why

    It's fairly easy to make a heat neutral 2.33 reactor with 2 chambers, and simply adding a third chamber is a dull way to create negative heat gain, which is nice for having a self-correcting reactor instead of one that just stores heat. So it's a good challenge to make a negative heat, 2-chamber, 2.33 efficiency design. No one-use coolants or redstone timing either; that's cheating. ;)

    Also--and I'm probably dead wrong, so please correct me if so--the highest efficiency you can get with a Mark I is 2.33. I'm sure it's the highest you can get at 2 chambers, but my meager math tells me it's the highest for any number of chambers too (maybe a 6 chamber, 2.5 ... maybe not).

    My math says that you need 19 cooling cells to make a heat neutral design: 2.33 eff = 48 heat; water cooling + two chambers = 29 external cooling; 48-29 = 19 cooling cells required. That leaves only 8 spaces for other components: 30 total - 3 uranium - 19 cooling = 8 extra spaces.

    After fussing around with using the extra space for a 20th cooling cell (-1 heat/tick) and placing 7 HDs, there was just no possible way to do it. The best I could do was heat neutral with one unreachable space. Finally, I settled on a reactor plating for the tiny heat loss and ended up with the design above.


    The Problem: Alblaka says that the reactor plating has -0.1 heat/tick, but also that it transfers heat immediately to adjacent components. The order that happens in is critical. If it dissipates the heat before transferring, then the design has a very small negative heat gain. If it transfers before dissipating, it's back to a heat neutral design. The javascript simulator seems to go with the latter. I guess I should just build the thing and test it.

    Oh, and the simulator puts more heat on the right side components, even though it's a symmetric design. Maybe there's some nuance I'm missing?


    Ideas and corrections are welcome.

    Very nice, very compact and it produces enough energy and lasts forever! although about the heating, maybe it follows some wierd pattern like the North-west thing for rails and redstone.

    Wow... never really thought of using a bit of plating in place of where an HD would have normally gone. But that does improve the resource drain just a tad over the other design people like circulating!

    That's just the design I use, not counting that clever plate :D

    But you know, It's not horrible to have a few heating points since you really can't run it all the time unless you constantly babysits it :thumbup:

    Quote from dezuman

    But you know, It's not horrible to have a few heating points since you really can't run it all the time unless you constantly babysits it :thumbup:

    I know, needs more automation :(

    I figure you could include a feeder system a la Kaso's glorious Nuclear Power Station. Except, instead of ice cubes, you'd feed in uranium cells. A few buildcraft pipes are no problem, and with EE (I know it's a little cheaty, but whatever) you can generate uranium and empty cells from matter generators pretty quickly. That just leaves periodically taking out any depleted cells. Maybe a quick addon to buildcraft to selectively remove them ... :P Maybe a custom uranium cell that always vanishes after use, heh.

    By the way: http://test.vendaria.net/index.php?reac…CCHCCHCCCHCCCHC. You beat me to it dammit. I thought maybe I could get a heat neutral 2.5 reactor with that same setup, but I guess that's pretty optimal. Kudos!

    Quote from Somerled

    I figure you could include a feeder system a la Kaso's glorious Nuclear Power Station. Except, instead of ice cubes, you'd feed in uranium cells. A few buildcraft pipes are no problem, and with EE (I know it's a little cheaty, but whatever) you can generate uranium and empty cells from matter generators pretty quickly. That just leaves periodically taking out any depleted cells. Maybe a quick addon to buildcraft to selectively remove them ... :P

    First off, kudos to you for taking an extremely good design and making it better. Second, I'd already planned to do what this above quote details (But I wasn't sure how much energy it takes to create matter). Third, there's an add-on for buildcraft that can deal with the nearly-depleted uranium cells, Buildcraft Additional Pipes .

    [I believe SpaceToad intends to add that functionality of the advanced wooded pipe to buildcraft... when he gets around to it.]

    That BC addon is BOSS. I could simplify so much with just one of those pipes.

    The matter generators in Equivalent Exchange can easily be set up to be self-sustaining ... mostly. No energy requirements. You need RedPower for the engines and the EE addon for IC2 items.