Mass fabricator Questions

  • Does anyone know what happens when it's full of matter and fully charged?
    Does it's speed increase with EU?
    If so, what's the max speed?
    Is it better to hook it up to MSFU's or directly to the power source?

  • Does anyone know what happens when it's full of matter and fully charged?
    Does it's speed increase with EU?
    If so, what's the max speed?
    Is it better to hook it up to MSFU's or directly to the power source?

    It runs.
    Yes.
    The Mass Fab will run as fast as you can pump juice into it. I believe it can take up to 512 on each face so it goes as fast as 3000 EU/t makes it go. Having scrap makes it go even faster.
    Depends on your power grid but a MSFU is a safe bet.

  • It runs.
    Yes.
    The Mass Fab will run as fast as you can pump juice into it. I believe it can take up to 512 on each face so it goes as fast as 3000 EU/t makes it go. Having scrap makes it go even faster.
    Depends on your power grid but a MSFU is a safe bet.


    Yes and no both on the EU thing. It can accept 512 EU/t packets but it can accept any number (in theory) of 512 packets over a glass fibre cable.
    In a test world when I was messing around with solar panel I had 512 panel feeding a MFSU feeding a mass fab. Over the exact same cable I added a second MFSU fed by a few fusion reactors.

  • Well, there is no obvious limit to how fast the mass fab can operate. (Besides the obvious CPU and engine limits)


    I shall experiment with them later on (after i have designed the ultimate nuclear reactor) but my initial theory is:


    • You can have six 512 EU packets coming into the mass fab per tick. (512 EU/t per side, a total of 3,072 EU/t)
    • The more packets you send, the faster it will go.
    • Obviously, scrap makes it go even faster (6 times faster)
    • It is probably beneficial to feed the mass fab with an automated scrap factory using Redpower 2 tubes or Buildcraft pipes considering the rate this machine operates at.
    • If you use pipes/tubes (RP2 or BC) and you want full automation you need to drop 2 sides in favor of pipes/tubes which would give you 2,048 EU/t.
    • With a fully automates setup (assuming you can produce the scrap you need) the theoretical production rate is one matter every ~4 seconds. (I think the diamond recipe is gone now, but if it isn't that's one diamond every 36.6 seconds)


    Have fun!


    EDIT:


    There is a small problem though... This assumes packets are sent EVERY tick. By default, MFSU's and such produce one EU packet every other tick. You will have to figure out a way to make them send alternating packets. (With the added risk of big holes in your base and the loss of the mass fab and cabling)
    The wiki page hints that a mass fab that receives overvoltage will explode with the power of a nuke... That is quite a big hole! So for your own sake, should you attempt the ultimate mass fab, shield it with at least 5 layers of reinforced stone. (Test with a nuke somewhere off site to be sure your 5 layers is enough shielding)

  • ok there is no max on how many 512 eu packets can be sent to the mass fab. currently i have in my test world 4 nuclear reactors putting out 3400 eu/t total(pre 1337 patch) into a mass fab on one side... so the mass fab can take as much power as u can put into it AS LONG ITS ONLY High voltage, and what i mean by that is u can have 20 nuclear reactors(600+eu/t each) each reactor connected to a high voltage transformer and each output of each transformer connected to a single glass fiber cable and connect it to the mass fab... now for the boring part math..... 20*600=roughly 12k eu/t(way too much just to connect to mass fab w/o high voltage transformers) so in the end no matter how much power your sending to the mass fab as long its in 512 packets then your fine... if u want pictures of proof of concept then just let me know ill put some up

  • I've just tested the speed with TMI-d stuff, one mass fab constantly scrap fed with buildcraft pipes.
    The power supply was 8,16,24 MFSU, 25UU production timed with stopwatch.
    v1.337b


    My measures:
    4096EU 61sec
    8192EU 37sec
    12288EU 33sec

  • Hm... not exactly linear.


    I suspect what's happening is that you only get about 5000 "units" of acceleration from one piece of scrap, and the MF can only use one piece of scrap per tick. That would mean that at around 5kEU/t, only part of your input energy gets the benefit of scrap. I bet if you did the same test with 256, 512, 1024, and 2048, it would be a linear progression through 4096, after which you get what you see here.


    So that would put a soft limit of 5kEU/t on the mass fab before you start really wasting power.

  • ooo, interesting. It could be reaching the limits of it's coding or something with that.


    to be totally practical if you go above 512EU/t you will have trouble supplying the mass fab. with enough scrap continually.


    I tmied a bunch of stuff, ran something like 30-40 MFSUs in parallel (for easy power generation used advanced solar panels 8) ) and had a readable input of over 16000EU/t, and there was no way you could keep scrap supplied with that. I never measured how long it would take to make it.


    looks like you could supply it with scrap, it would need a huge scrap processing facility 8) . although if you had 25+ MFSUs you are way past wealthy in MC.

    Hell, prove me wrong, Happy to be so 99% of the time, then I can learn stuff :)

  • I did my extensive test again, this time with more variables, and with/without scraps.
    The results:


    Time for creating 5 UU-matter without scrap:
    512 EU 490 sec
    1024 EU 245 sec
    2048 EU 122 sec
    4096 EU 61 sec
    8192 EU 30 sec
    16384 EU 15 sec


    Time for creating 25 UU-matter with scrap, and scrap count:


    512 EU 405 sec 840 scraps
    1024 EU 202 sec 841 scraps
    2048 EU 100 sec 845 scraps
    4096 EU 61 sec 810 scraps
    8192 EU 37 sec 760 scraps
    16384 EU 30 sec 612 scraps



    So as you can see, without scraps it's linear, but with scraps, something happens around 3k EU.
    (in the test the scrap flow was constant, even with 16kEU the scraps never went below 30-40 in the massfab gui)


    Oh, and found out some interesting thing while testing, the glass fibre cable maxed out at 12800 EU, so in the 16k test i used 2 sides of the massfab for power. Maybe it's a well known fact, I didn't know that. ( and maybe it's a bug??)



    Okay, that's it, I'm go to bed now. It's 2AM here :)

  • maxed out? interesting, my testing was with glass fibre and i got 16k EU/t. perhaps it has changed as my tests were before 1.337 came out.

    Hell, prove me wrong, Happy to be so 99% of the time, then I can learn stuff :)

  • Probably what happens is that on one tick, you get 5000 (or so?) EU worth of acceleration from scrap. If it gets 3kEU, 3k of that is used up, and there's only 2k left on the next tick, so 1k of the 3kEU/t doesn't benefit from scrap on that tick. The more energy you give it at once, the worse this gets.


    If you have enough scrap to keep up with that kind of energy input, it looks like it's better to add more MFs than to shove more than 2kEU/t at one...

  • On the note of explosions, I did manage to blow up mine in single player. Accidentally connected it to EV during the night, and when I slept to bring day back around, I got a rude awakening. Blew the entire second story off my house, along with chunks of my solar array at least 30 blocks up. Luckily I'd shielded my workshop on a whim with ONE layer of reinforced block. The blast took out everything in line of sight except the stuff shielded by those blocks. It didn't even take out one of the blocks, even at 2 blocks away from them. My reactor and nuke tests weren't nearly as forgiving. I'd say 1 block surrounding is enough. Though this was single player... I've heard that nukes behave... unpredictably in SMP.

  • It runs.
    Yes.
    The Mass Fab will run as fast as you can pump juice into it. I believe it can take up to 512 on each face so it goes as fast as 3000 EU/t makes it go. Having scrap makes it go even faster.
    Depends on your power grid but a MSFU is a safe bet.


    You could hook up multiple power sources to the wire running to the mass fab, like having 120 solar on a single tin wire.

    • Official Post

    i have 1600 wind mills connected to a massfab on a single face getting 2000-6000 EU/t [1600 wind mills/50 wind towers/ 32 wind mill each tower/ Reverted MV transformer each tower/ Using EU-spliiter cable to carry HV from transformers to massfabricator.] {Eu-splitter cable carry up to EV and has EU loss due distance equal to tin cables.}
    i placed a stack of scrap when massfab was running at 6000EU/t, it vanished in seconds