(Redpower2) Redstone Gated breeder

Design goals:

Heat using uranium.
Short heating time.
Minimal cooling component* (Mostly for short heating time)

Traditional breeders use a vast array of cooling components; each of which must be brought up to your desired breeding temperature. This is why the reactor planner says you need a gazillion buckets of lava to heat the bloody things. They are also extremely slow to heat up, or use multiple uranium cells. That's why I've been experimenting with this design:

http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=1m10101001501521s1r11r19

As you can see, it produces an excess heat of 20 per active reactor tick. Cooling is supposed to be 34 per inactive tick (less 4 for the isotope cells). This naturally leads to a 3:2 ratio. It runs at 60% of traditional breeder speed, but higher efficiency of fuel and less babysitting (when stable).

The IHDs are required for a single-run startup timer (if the water in is piston-blocked off; which is a must for speed), the excess IHDs only moderately increase the cost of producing the reactor but make that process far safer. The current startup time would thus be desired-temp * 7 / 37 (*for fully cold components; 6 heat sinks inside and the reactor vessel).

I'm not sure if it's boiling water around the reactor, or if it's the fault of redpower2 timing, but using 2 timers and an RS latch to switch between the two I have not yet achieved the predicted perfect ratio.

An alternative approach which might also work is building a reactor with zero external cooling and CASUC/CARUC style bucket cooling, I might try that next if unable to nail this down.

http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=1010101001201521s1r01r19 << Note the lack of any water blocks around the reactor (unlike the other recent thread about a CASUC breeder I looked at after coming up with this design from just the 'casuc breeder' title.) Mine also only enriches 16 per instead of 20, but won't swing so violently through the hurts-player 70-85% thermal region.

Over an ideal cycle my design's internal components (10) will help the reactor vessel by containing 75 of 200 heat for each tick... However that's a really crazy network to conceptualize given the multiple sub-components interactions. I'll have to write out a proper simulation of it later tonight.

I'm likely abandoning the idea I was working with here in favor of the more resource and more promising to stabilize effort here: http://forum.industrial-craft.…page=Thread&threadID=2760

The issues I suspect I was running in to may have been:
* synchronizing the redstone pulses to the reactor (doubt it),
* evaporating water (seems plausible),
* or accurately forming a redstone clock of exactly 3 seconds to 2 seconds high/low (or inverse) using an RS latch and two timers (might be the case, but I tried a large number of off by a few mS adjustments).

I was initially planning a master clock for 4 reactors, so toggling the clock there was not a design consideration. Each reactor has (was planned, only one was built) individual controls for all the options (force reaction every tick, water on/off, warmup clock, and master off+cool).

I honestly don't see how a toggle latch would have any fewer issues than the RS latch. I'm leaning towards every so-often the reactor evaporating the block coming down from the source block and causing a void to flush across it just long enough for at least one cooling to be absent. The redpower2 waveform issue (is it off by one/two on length, delay/sync etc) I could probably spend a whole evening wiring up a crap-load of latches delays and redpower2 light blocks to capture a snapshot of; but I don't really want to expend that level of effort when there's a more promising design that has better specs anyway.

It also has two major advantages I've learned since last build.
#1 redpower2 logic can live on walls.
#2 I seriously just cannot rely on exterior water-cooling (except maybe as an emergency shutdown thing) if I want any modicum of reliability. I haven't seen it happen but that makes the most sense.

If your pulse ratio is 1:whatever you might be safe, but then again you're also counting on that /exact/ quantity of cooling each and every tick. In my case it was 3 ticks on and 2 off so it would show aberrations sooner.