A 32 EU packet isn't going to make the trip from the build limit to sea level on anything BUT glass fiber. You really want to step it up.
I agree that glass fiber is kind of prohibitively expensive to use with a wind farm - 16 diamonds for wind power seems like an absurd expense. Might as well just build the transformers instead, or use a different form of energy.
FnordMan's suggestion is the optimal one - and it's the way I've got mine wired as well.
Hmm. Making solars detect desert and water detect ocean is very doable. Just detect if it's in the corresponding biome.
A 32 EU packet isn't going to make the trip from the build limit to sea level on anything BUT glass fiber. You really want to step it up.
I agree that glass fiber is kind of prohibitively expensive to use with a wind farm - 16 diamonds for wind power seems like an absurd expense. Might as well just build the transformers instead, or use a different form of energy.
FnordMan's suggestion is the optimal one - and it's the way I've got mine wired as well.
Actualy iam pretty sure they would go from 128 to 0 with 80% loss on low voltage using cobber cables. Funny thing is through even then in this extreme situation windgens make 0.4 eu/tick average which is almost equaly to solars. If you count in the cost of solars then windgens are always better.
In normal situations distance will be far less through and using higher voltage will boost your eu output alot with only small costs.
FIrst off, Solar power is not a starting power supply, no matter what the creator or other users say.
Fossil Fuel Generator > Geo Thermal > Wind > Solar > Nuclear.
Generally i follow that guideline when transversing the tiers of power. First, burn Charcoal, create a harvesting forest (usually 15 blocks high underground) so the trees are easy to access. Second, once you get access to a shit-ton of lava, invest inan MSFU or MFE and get about 20 buckets of lava per trip. This is easily the most convenient method of power generation in quantity early on. Lastly, choose between Solar, and Wind.
Solar 1 EU /T means you got lots of investment in batbox's and MFE to mitigate loss; however, once setup are very viable.
Wind as you mentioned, very expensive due to distances, but they run almost constantly which solar do not unless you have a bed everywhere you plan to go.
Once you have a few diamonds, store some spare energy from various resources and choose your nuclear solution of choice, personally i grab a bunch of glass cables and do a 5 layer dome level 6 or bedrock, but thats just me, then run it all up glass fiber with an MFSU. Not the best method, but mititates damage if i forget to check the generator or miss something.
Hope that helped. Key here is once you get enough power, grab a miner and a pump. Miners do wonders to speed the tech-tree.
Solar's are (were) actually my preferred (late Tier I) Tier II power supply, at least for base operations. A constant /predictable/ trickle is just what you want when you have an induction furnace or two locked on (now I'll probably have to go overkill (safety margin) windfarming to obtain that). It's also generally enough to keep a small bank of machines going once you build a small flower. Suddenly you no longer need to worry about running your base of operations, and instead get to spend time worrying about powering and upgrading your miner configuration.
QuoteSee? All these power systems can be made very useful under the right circumstances. No one power need become obsolete with a few changes. Buffing other power types will not make solar pointless, nor will re-working solar make other types pointless. All types of power systems should be very viable in the right circumstances. No single power source should ever be the right choice in all situations.
Which is very true, even in real life. The problem I find that people are running into is the fact that they want ONE power source to run ALL of their machines/utilities. That honestly does not work in life, or in Minecraft. The BEST approach is to explore ALL your options, and use the ones that grant the best, most effective benefit...
Take, for example, my Bio-Plant (pics soon hopefully). The initial energy investment is 32 solars imputing into a Batbox. The Batbox is used to feed power into two Electric Gasificators, 1 Adv. Compressor, 1 Adv. Extractor, and two Canning machines. The Gasificators generate both charcoal and Wood Gas Cells. Charcoal is fed into a Generator setup, which partly feeds into both a series of MFE's and partly back into the original Batbox. Afterwhich, the Wood gas is extracted and canned into Fuel, which is later burned. Optionally, I also added Xie's hybrid Wheat into the mix, where I get over 3 stacks of wheat from half a stack of hybrid seeds. The wheat is also processed into Bio Fuel as well, and fed into the MFE's for the plant.
There is quite a fair deal of work that goes into energy production. Despite what some may think, throwing up a bunch of 'free' energy systems and letting them run off your setup forever is NOT a practical solution. However, it is a great investment to apply in, and if all you need is a small amount of startup energy, they can be worth the investment later on (when you have larger, more sophisticated, setups of energy generation)...
It even gets better. Not only are solars really expensive to make, but now when you dismantle them with a wrench, you get a chance to get a generator instead. This is just grand... I know this happened in old-school IC, but I know for a fact this did not happen in IC2 version 1.15. I really should just go back to that version although this is upgraded for 1.0 support Ill be screwed since I want to go to 1.0.
Seriously why did anything think it was a good idea to have what is now a very expensive machine get destroyed when using the special tool designed specifically to dismantle these machines. I was using the power wrench and out of 24 panels it turned two of them into basic generators. Maybe Ill just forgo this nerf by using an inventory editor to just make me a few 100 solars. I really hate to do stuff like this, but this is just too much on top of everything else.
That happens to any advanced machine you dismantle. You are not supposed to move machines after they are set up and if you have to do so then you run the risk of breaking something while dismantling them. The same way you run a risk of breaking something while taking an engine out of your 15 year old rusty car.
However, there is an addon in the addons section that gives you 100% wrench rate. Use that if breaking machines is such a big deal.
That happens to any advanced machine you dismantle. You are not supposed to move machines after they are set up and if you have to do so then you run the risk of breaking something while dismantling them. The same way you run a risk of breaking something while taking an engine out of your 15 year old rusty car.
However, there is an addon in the addons section that gives you 100% wrench rate. Use that if breaking machines is such a big deal.
It /is/ actually a big deal for a nice high-tech wrench to have such a high error rate. At the /very/ most it should be 1 out of 100 chance of failure; probably more like 1 in 1000. The basic stupid wrench? Yeah, steve can have an error rate this high while doing it by hand.
Yeah, like i said. There is an addon available if you don't like it.
As for the electric wrench vs normal wrench. It would make more sense to have the electric too have a higher failure rate than the manual tool. Have you ever used a power tool before? They have a higher failure rate IRL too...
And i don't have a problem with this at all. You need to carefully plan the placement of your machines and if you do it wrong then obviously you run the risk of breaking things. The miner is excluded from this breakage chance. It is supposed to be moved.
MFSU's on the other hand are not supposed to be moved... What if everybody took their factories with them wherever they went?
"Oh, i don't need to plan ahead or anything. I just plop down my MFSU, my MV+LV transformers and macerate, burn and build on the spot as i go!"
Not very "industrial"... is it?
Now you know about the FEATURE, use the addon or learn to plan ahead so you don't need to pull down your machines and generators needlessly.
To drop in an old cliché. If you hate so many things about the game, why the hell are you playing it? I still don't get this sense of entitlement that everyone has towards developers. The dev team don't get paid for this, hell, we don't even get thanks half the time. The work you recieve and play is given freely, yet you seem to pick holes in every little thing that YOU don't like. Well mate, it's really not about what YOU like as an individual, it's about what most people like. Really, it's about what the dev team want to do with the game and no one else has a say. At the beginning of the thread, it seemed there was an element of sense in what you were arguing, but it seems that you are just playing devils advocate and are entirely committed to 'winning' this argument and get some sort of concession. You may be in the right to complain to professional development companies with a payroll and lots of devs, but this a 7 man team ffs. The team do this for the thanks they get and their love of the game and the people that play it, but frankly, sometimes the lack of gratitude just isn't worth the damn effort.
And for the record, your entire problem could be solved by writing your own addon rather than complaining about the changes that have been made. That's what the other members of the forum have done for things such as the wrench rate. You've got the power to do something about it, stop bitching and get on with it.
Soz, been following this thread for a few days and I can't be arsed anymore.
A mining operation with a fully upgraded miner and pump generally runs between 0.5 and 1.5 MeU; depending on the density of ores/valuable stones (the higher number is the upper-average of what I got after telling the miner about RedPower2 block IDs).
As a miner consumes around 28eU/t (let's call it 24 though, as the pump is much less when it's needed)... Solar is probably now more like 0.4% effective given the weather stuff, maybe less. Each miner would need a batbox and around 60 solar panels. Tin is good for up to 39, but you've got to dangle a batbox off of it at some point to buffer storms/the night. Each mining operation you'd also need to move 15 of your solar panels. (This is presuming you make a running bus-bar of tin and have 5 panels above each potential 9x9 grid; there are probably more optimal movement patterns, I'm sure you can think of a few).
Wind is tricky, it scans a /huge/ area and subtracts any non-0 block from effective world-height then multiplies by an RNG result to produce a number. The average of 2-3 eU/t might be enough for your early miner and possibly a small array for a workshop. However the serious business would now solidly be something nuke; likely a timer gated reactor. It's a little expensive to build, but I do have an entirely air-cooled reactor planned for later use with redpower2 frames. The far more efficient (resource and uranium use) base reactor would also work well; except it requires 24 blocks of water around it. Both require a fairly large set of standard redstone stuff (8 clock + 5 clock, toggle-FF, data-FF, a handful of logic gates), or a few redpower2 components (16s clock + 1s pulse expander (RS latch and a 1 second clock)).
Ok, some miners are immune. You still failed to answer the question I asked about how you are supposed to power them. Miners do not run themselves. With respect to this non-nonsensical machine breaking thing, how are you supposed to power miners given that they are meant to be mobile? How much EU is consumed during a complete mining operation? I know its well over 100,000, probably over a 1,000,000.
Don't know about you but I generally used EV lines from a central power area. Used to use a generator + a bat-box but you can't do that anymore in IC2.
Even then I don't use miners that often once I get a quarry up and running, not worth the hassle of repositioning it once in a while.
If you find a miner so much of a hassle than look around in the forums ya twit. There's *two* variants on an advanced miner in different addons that'll use a lapotron crystal as a power source. The one in Rocket Science and the one in AdvGenerators. Don't just shoot your mouth of going "WAH! WAH!" EVERYTING SUCKS!" without looking around or I dunno, expending a bit of effort instead of mouthing off like a spoiled brat.
TheSilverHammer
<rant snipped>
And for the record, your entire problem could be solved by writing your own addon rather than complaining about the changes that have been made. That's what the other members of the forum have done for things such as the wrench rate. You've got the power to do something about it, stop bitching and get on with it.
Soz, been following this thread for a few days and I can't be arsed anymore.
Hear hear! I for one appreciate the hard work of the team, even if I don't hear your particular work that often. Nothing personal, I just don't like extraneous noises, it's why I don't like using RP2 timers, the constant tick tick noise drives me batty.
It's not just the miner that is excluded from breaking. HV/MV/LV Transformers are also exempt from breaking, so are cables! (most effectively broken with a chainsaw)
Have you ever seen a battery powered mining operation in real life? They need to generate their power on the spot or receive it from afar. They can take a full year to reach the resources we reach in 2-4 Minecraft days.
Moving a real life mining operation ALWAYS leaves some stuff behind (breaks the package, having to resupply to set up elsewhere) so if IC2 would be really picky about it, you wouldn't be able to move a miner without resupplying it with new materials. Say mining pipes, drill bits etc etc...
Either way, the first time i used a mining drill i set up a MV feed using gold cable. I then set up an LV transformer, a chest and the miner. Waited for it to finish and let it pull it's pipes back up. wrenched the miner and the transformer and moved it along the gold cable another 9 blocks and set it all up again. Since wrenching a miner and a LV transformer NEVER fails your problems are solved without an addon.
If you are going to come talking about "oh but i want to use my lapo crystal to have a mobile mining operation that i can take wherever i'd like and i don't want to use cables" then obviously you don't want to play IC2 the way it's intended... You might as well TMI everything you want and be done with it because at this stage... You will never be happy until everything is as easy as clicking a single diamond icon in a GUI to get 64 diamonds.
EDIT:
At first i didn't want to waste my time but... Here goes:
Set up three basic generators, two bat boxes (they never break from wrenching either) , a LV transformer with redstone current and a long gold cable. Move your miner in one direction as far out as you'd want to go. Then on the return trip just make a bend each time and go back towards your generators. REPEAT as long as you'd like. Then, go in another direction around your generators. REPEAT for all 4 directions.
If you have 2 bat boxes, fill your three generators with 3 charcoal each time the second bat box goes below 4,000 EU stored. If you think that's too much maintenance then place ~16 bat boxes (You still can wrench them to your hearts content) and fill your generators to the brink with charcoal.
Even better yet, use 2 geothermal generators (they are not very expensive after all, but they do have a chance of breaking when you wrench them) and fill them with lava cells. They will then allow you to mine at least 88 minutes NON STOP. And no energy is wasted generating any surplus so you can skip the whole bat box thing if you'd like.
No matter what you do, when you have mined an area around those generators in all directions (say you mine 9 times in each direction in a square, you mined a surface area of 2,916 blocks. A total of 186,624 blocks searched if at sea level)
You are going to find enough resources to build yourself 20 or more extra miners after that... As well as have a bunch of diamonds in your hands.
I didn't say everything sucked. In fact my complaint was only about the solars. That is just one thing. Overall this is a great mod.
And you *totally* ignore basically all of the post and focus in on one little thing. Go away, troll
And you *totally* ignore basically all of the post and focus in on one little thing. Go away, troll
Yep and you ignored the topic name 
Its pretty bad that even when you use copper cables to go from the top of the world to the bottom windgens still make more eu/tick than solars make. Should be enough proof that solars are underpowered.
