Watermills and Luminators?

    Since generators are out and it's down to windmills, water-mills, and solar panels for providing luminators power via tin I wanted to investigate how difficult each would be. Solar's I already know -quite- well.


    Water mills... I'm not sure if I'm doing right.


    I built a 9x9 pen out of glass, 8 water around the top, mill in the middle; one tin wire, one batbox, one copper wire, one luminator. Yet the water-mill; despite being surrounded by 25 blocks of water, only seems to produce around 0.2 eU/t of power.


    Even when it had a full charge while building; the thing only seemed to catch zombies on fire /in the same square/ as the light?


    Are these even effective?

    I gave up on water-mills; if they output 1eU/t sporadically it might work out; though trying out wind-mills isn't fairing much better. At least they're powerful enough to send bursts directly down tin... however all of the variance and craziness of windmills returns as well. There's also something like stuttering when I'm near them, I'm not sure why as sound should be disabled and was supposedly fixed; possibly my character counts as an obstruction and it re-calculates the volume each movement?


    I guess this leaves the only viable luminator powering solutions as RP2 bucket-pump to watermill in alternate mode, and solar panels...


    Edit: This also doesn't count the fact that the AoE for the Luminators catching mobs on fire is //right// in the same cube.

    Water mills produce 1 EU packets (Not 1 EU/t, that is the average over a bunch of ticks... Currently 0.25 max)
    If you have a 0.2 EU/t output that means the water mill is sending a 1 EU packet every 5 ticks, a total of 4 packets per second.


    Using a bat box as storage (which you should with water mills) means your bat box will emit two packets to the luminator every second. The luminator should blink on and off, though i haven't tested it.
    The best way to provide power to a luminator is to have an throughput of 2 EU/t or more, thus, using water mills, you need a tower of 10 water mills to make enough power to keep a luminator at it's minimal amount of light constantly.


    Er, how exactly are generators out? It was my understanding that the fuel usage and output rate had doubled. Making them faster. Also fuel is actually worth amking now.

    For the purposes we are discussing here (dedicated luminator power), they are impractical. Now generators produce too much EU/t to be carried over tin - and any other cable has much more loss.
    It seems from what I've read here, that this is the main concern.

    Ahh nice typo there... it was a 3x3 pen.


    Anyway, yeah; watermills as is are impractical. Windmills are unreliable (maybe fixed with rev b?). Solar was broken, and wouldn't work in a cave anyway.


    There are a few ideas I got from mode B of watermills; but they require features from the next version of redpower2; and trying to use them resulted in my server crashing every time I tried it fully automated.