It seems that higher voltage cables have higher current loss. I don't understand why, as in real life it is the opposite. Can somebody tell me the logic?
Current loss?
-
No, there is no logic. There is balance however.
Low voltage wires can travel further without loss, while high voltage wires can't. The reasoning is, that when sending HV in huge packets of 512eu or 2148eu, that loss is only being applied once every packet, rather than continuously as with the LV.
A (not so) mathy example:
Lets say we want to move some eu along 20 blocks of wire.
Say we are using gold wire and a MFE. We will lose 8 eu per packet of 128 sent. Not bad.
Now what if we are using a HV transformer and some HV cable. We will lose 16eu every packet of 2048 sent.But now we must remember, that for the gold wire to send the same power as the HV wire, it has to send it 16 times! So thats actually 128eu lost per packet of 2048 sent.
16eu loss with SHV sounds a lot better than 128eu loss with gold, eh? It's a lot faster too, so if you need power speedily, you can see why this is useful.
Or you could use some glass fiber, and only lose 1eu per 512, so 4 per 2048, but thats just me.
-
Or you could use some glass fiber, and only lose 1eu per 512, so 4 per 2048, but thats just me.Isn't it supposed to be 1 every 20 block with glass fibre?
either way I use it basically to the exclusion of anything else once I get established and have enough diamond.
The one exception being solar panels. tin cable works better there. -
Isn't it supposed to be 1 every 20 block with glass fibre?
either way I use it basically to the exclusion of anything else once I get established and have enough diamond.
The one exception being solar panels. tin cable works better there.Yes, It looks like the examples failed to take into account differing cable lengths, although It is difficult to tell. In any case, he was saying 1 eu per 512 eus, hence 4 eu per 2048, rather tha 512 or 2048 distance, which would be far higher.
-
In "real life", the current loss is applied as a percentage, not "by packet" as in the game. You'll notice, if you're sending the proper size packets through a line, that the percnetage of EU lost is lower on the high voltage lines for cables of the same length.
This is why I stepped the output from my wind farm up to EV before running a line down to my house. I lose a mere 48 EU out of 2048 for the 60-block trip, where I would lose 24 out of every 128 EU packet with gold cable (meaning I'd have only 1664 EU out of every 2048 sent). That means my triple-insulated HV cable is 20% more efficient than gold for transmitting the desired volume of current over the needed length.
Yes, I'm aware that glass fiber would lose only 3 EU out of every 2048, but honestly, why waste 15 diamonds to make a line that long when iron suits the particular task?
-
In "real life", the current loss is applied as a percentage, not "by packet" as in the game. You'll notice, if you're sending the proper size packets through a line, that the percnetage of EU lost is lower on the high voltage lines for cables of the same length.
This is why I stepped the output from my wind farm up to EV before running a line down to my house. I lose a mere 48 EU out of 2048 for the 60-block trip, where I would lose 24 out of every 128 EU packet with gold cable (meaning I'd have only 1664 EU out of every 2048 sent). That means my triple-insulated HV cable is 20% more efficient than gold for transmitting the desired volume of current over the needed length.
Yes, I'm aware that glass fiber would lose only 3 EU out of every 2048, but honestly, why waste 15 diamonds to make a line that long when iron suits the particular task?
this is also why i prefer tin and copper, i dont need to step it, sure i cant store as much in one spot but no need to mess with trasformers.
-
Glassfiber can only hold 512 eu packets max but even then its 4 times better than insulated hv cables. I dont use hv cables anymore its all glassfiber since i got several stacks of diamonds.
-
this is also why i prefer tin and copper, i dont need to step it, sure i cant store as much in one spot but no need to mess with trasformers.
Try running a copper wire from level 124 down to sea level and tell me if you still prefer it. You'd be losing over 35% of the power being produced - so on a 16-mill wind farm, the output of fully FIVE of them would be lost to signal degradation.Simply put, copper wire just can't do this job.
-
Tin does 39 without loss. Glass fiber does 39 without loss (Yes the wiki is outdated, test it your self). There are a few other things you should experiment with or read my other posts griping about how 'that doesn't work at all like in real life'.
-
So HV cables DO have a practical use.... -
GlassFiber is really the mother of all cables in this game, when you produce enough Energy to have several mass fabricators working then diamonds should not really be a problem anymore. Until then HV cables are good for your needs of moving energy around over large distances.
-
When you account for packet size, gold has 1/2 the distance loss of copper, and Iron has 1/4 the distance loss of gold (only 1/2 if HV transformers are unavailable).Here's the math:
Let's say that you need 2048 EU's sent over a 20 block length: You could send
-64 packets of 32 EU using copper cable (1 EU lost over 5 blocks),
-16 packets of 128 EU using gold cable (1 EU lost over 2.5 blocks),
-4 packets of 512 EU using ref. Iron cable (1 EU lost over 1.25 blocks), or
-1 packet of 2048 using ref. Iron cable (see above).The copper cable will lose (20/5)=4 EU per packet -- 4 EU times 64 packets equals 256 energy lost, over 10% of the total.
The gold cable will lose (20/2.5)=8 EU per packet -- 8 EU times 16 packets equals only 128 energy lost, half that of copper.
The Iron cable will lose (20/1.25)=16 EU per packet -- but because only 4 packets are sent at high voltage, only 64 EUs are lost.
Spend the diamonds to get HV transformers, and only 1 packet has to be sent, meaning that only 16 EUs are lost.Of course, you could skip all this and lose no energy by using glass fiber cables, but that comes with a high cost in diamonds -- you'd need 8 diamonds to cover 24 blocks, much less than the 2 you'd need for a pair of HV transformers.
-
Display More
When you account for packet size, gold has 1/2 the distance loss of copper, and Iron has 1/4 the distance loss of gold (only 1/2 if HV transformers are unavailable).Here's the math:
Let's say that you need 2048 EU's sent over a 20 block length: You could send
-64 packets of 32 EU using copper cable (1 EU lost over 5 blocks),
-16 packets of 128 EU using gold cable (1 EU lost over 2.5 blocks),
-4 packets of 512 EU using ref. Iron cable (1 EU lost over 1.25 blocks), or
-1 packet of 2048 using ref. Iron cable (see above).The copper cable will lose (20/5)=4 EU per packet -- 4 EU times 64 packets equals 256 energy lost, over 10% of the total.
The gold cable will lose (20/2.5)=8 EU per packet -- 8 EU times 16 packets equals only 128 energy lost, half that of copper.
The Iron cable will lose (20/1.25)=16 EU per packet -- but because only 4 packets are sent at high voltage, only 64 EUs are lost.
Spend the diamonds to get HV transformers, and only 1 packet has to be sent, meaning that only 16 EUs are lost.Of course, you could skip all this and lose no energy by using glass fiber cables, but that comes with a high cost in diamonds -- you'd need 8 diamonds to cover 24 blocks, much less than the 2 you'd need for a pair of HV transformers.
That's a much better example than the Wiki had (last time I looked anyway, havent checked lately). Looking at the Wiki when I was starting out I thought just what the OP thought and what is the point of high voltage transmission in IC2 then. Once you get past that though and see how it works (or get better examples) it is quite the opposite.
It is easy to look at the EU lost per tile and no further and I think that is what some people do. If you look at it as a percentage of power lost instead it is a no-brainer.
-
I look at it this way. There are two ‘modes’ you can use these cables in. Short-run lossless setups and longer distance transmission.
In short setups where you want no loss, you never use longer than 4 copper, 2 gold, 1 HV. Tin can go up to 39 lengths without loss but only takes power from wind/water/solar gens since they fizzle if you put more than 5 eu/packet through them. Glass Fiber is the holy grail and can take 512 up to (was it 39 as well? Last time I checked in single player it was). But it’s mad expensive.
But if you cant do what you need to do within those confines, you’re going to have to use a system with loss. How much loss? It depends on the length and your resources. However, due to my crappy calculations done on a napkin, when comparing all wire/voltage sets, (not including glass fiber) the higher voltage the better.
Sure, the loss per cable goes up with higher voltage cables. But that loss is PER PULSE. And the higher the voltage, the larger the pulse is. The size of the pulses increase FAR more than the loss per cable length for the higher end cables. So if you’re going to have any real length to your transmission, you’d want to splurge and use an EV setup.
Glass is the great exception to everything because it combines the loss of tin cables with the packet size of HV. The only down side is that its total throughput is lower than that of EV, so I wouldn’t use it for main trunk-lines in 1k+ power systems.
