[IC2 Exp][1.7.10] Advanced Solar Panels v3.5.1 + Quantum Generator + Solar helmets !

As far as I know, there's not a single generator in the base IC2 mod that requires raw UU-M or something that can only be made from it. I submit that there is an obvious reason for that.

If the recipe was cheap, then that'd be stupid and unbalanced.

The way it is now is balanced. Okay, so it takes time to get your money's worth, but remember after that you aren't using Uranium or other such materials in another generator/reactor anymore. I'ts free energy!

10 of these Hybrids and you got yourself 500 EU/t. If the recipe was cheap, then that'd be way too much energy.

To mod creator: Good job. I might use this later, as I don't plan to install more mods.

Quote from TehSomeLuigi

If the recipe was cheap, then that'd be stupid and unbalanced.
If the recipe was cheap, then that'd be way too much energy.

And when the recipe is too expensive, that's also stupid and unbalanced.
The problem is, it's not enough energy for the energy you put into making it. Increasing the output isn't the answer - a sensible recipe is.

And it's not FREE energy - it's energy that costs energy to make and takes far too long to simply repay the cost of creation, let alone break even.

Quote from SeNtiMeL

In real life solar panels is too expensive in comparison with the usual generators.

In real life, solar panels don't cost more than nuclear reactors - nor do they require the output of one to create.
And in Real Life, people don't design devices that cost more to make than they return. In Real Life, they perform a cost-benefit analysis before the design is implemented.

Quote

Unless any other generator produce 10 eu and 50 eu without fuel use ???

There's a reason that they don't do that either. Why not just make it require Red Matter while you're at it?

Well, isn't there two side to the story here.

On one end you get 10 EU/t during day and 1 EU/t during night time per advanced solar panel. That is 5.5 EU/t on average 24/7.
To meet that you would have to build 11 solar panels, but obviously that is cheaper than building the advanced one. But also laggier when several people build them on a single server.

I kinda have to agree with them having a large price tag... They do provide free endless maintenance free energy. But as they are now, why would anyone in their right mind make one unless they already have enough EU's to power our sun?
If i had to choose between regular solar panels and these advanced ones i would go with the regular ones because they are cheaper, so much cheaper that i couldn't care less about any lag.

Agreed. I'm finee with the recipe being expensive, but the expense should be comparable to the results - and not require an investment so great that the return is far-off.
Also, when you design a solar panel that outputs 50 EU by day and 10 at night, you should automatically forfeit the right to make ANY comparisons to "real life".

Quote from HeadHunter67

Agreed. I'm finee with the recipe being expensive, but the expense should be comparable to the results - and not require an investment so great that the return is far-off.
Also, when you design a solar panel that outputs 50 EU by day and 10 at night, you should automatically forfeit the right to make ANY comparisons to "real life".

Well, that depends on what the real life equivalent of 50 EU is considered to be... Just for fun then:

50+10EU/2=30 EU is:

30 Solar panels or
~10 wind gens (average) or
~? water gens (i have no idea!) or
3 Coal based generators or
1.5 geothermal generators or
~0.020833 Nuclear reactors at max (2,400 EU) or
~0.4166 Stable (non volatile) reactors doing 120 EU/t (my design)

Comparing that to the real world assuming each generator is:

IC2 / IRL
Solar panel (1 EU/t) - Solar Panel (200W)
Wind generator (~3 EU/t avg) - 1m diameter Wind turbine (~1 KW)
Generator (10 EU/t) - Steam electric generator (~10 KW)
Geothermal (20 EU/t) - Geothermal power plant... (This is a weird one, there is no 1x1x1 meter geothermal plants...)
Reactor (10 to 2,400 EU/t) - Nuclear Reactor (0.02 KW to 1,500 MW) EDIT: Oh, a 3x3x3 meter reactor, i don't have any exact figures but 800 KW is a decent guesstimate.

Well, as you can see there is not much to go on to relate to the real world. Scale and energy output is very random across the board.
How would we go at fixing this? Re assign all generator outputs to match their real world counterparts? Not only would that mean a single solar panel would at most power a small vacuum cleaner but a nuclear reactor of the size 3x3x3 meters would still only produce a very tiny amount of power compared to the real life applications we have (induction furnaces, rotary rock pulverizing machines and machines capable of producing high enough pressure to compress coal into diamonds.

No, I simply made that point to illustrate how "real life" can't possibly be used to justify this insanity. But at any rate, imagine how much energy is output by that hypothetical 800 KW reactor over the aforementioned 11 hours (Well, you needn't imagine, it's 8800 KWH). That's enough electricity to power an average household for a year. "Let's invest our entire annual allocation of energy into one generator - which, in and of itself, will be insufficient to power everything in the workshop on its own". It's insanity to even look on this as an "investment".

But it doesn't really matter, there'll always be someone who doesn't bother examining the math and thinks this is a fairly priced recipe. In fact, there's one born every minute.

Quote from HeadHunter67

No, I simply made that point to illustrate how "real life" can't possibly be used to justify this insanity. But at any rate, imagine how much energy is output by that hypothetical 800 KW reactor over the aforementioned 11 hours (Well, you needn't imagine, it's 8800 KWH). That's enough electricity to power an average household for a year. "Let's invest our entire annual allocation of energy into one generator - which, in and of itself, will be insufficient to power everything in the workshop on its own". It's insanity to even look on this as an "investment".

But it doesn't really matter, there'll always be someone who doesn't bother examining the math and thinks this is a fairly priced recipe. In fact, there's one born every minute.

Yeah, the post was just meant as a fun train of thought. But there are industries that require large amounts of energy to operate. An average forge uses 400 KV power lines. They use induction furnaces to smelt metals. So my comparison to the induction furnace (which smelts 128 m³ in a minute) is that of a 400 KV forge

EDIT: 400 KV @ 10 amps is 4,000,000 watts (Or 4 MW)

Wow! That's a lot of power - though I can imagine they wouldn't use generators that took 44 MWH of energy to create, right?

If anything, it's too cheap for multiplayer servers, and too expensive for single player maps.

Why? 11 hours is nothing. The other 900+ hours it runs, you'll be gaining a TON of EUs, for free.

However, without a chunk loading block, on single player it's painful.

...And when might this be ready for 1.42? I'd love to cut down on Solar Panel spam on my server. >.>

These panels are far too expensive.

Quote from HeadHunter67

OK. let me break it down further for you then:

Taking 200 minutes to pay for itself (recouping just the direct energy cost to make) means that until it's run for 400 minutes, you'd still have been better off using the power that went into creating it for something else. That's nearly 7 hours to "break even" - and while it may run all the time on a server, then you have to factor in the night cycles. So in that case, the number is actually 11 hours. Yes, you read it right - until it's been running 11 hours, the energy you put into making the Hybrid Solar Panel would have been better spent directly on whatever you're going to use the "future" power gains for.

Maybe for some people, that's a good investment - then again, some people think the same thing about scratch-off lottery tickets. I'm not sure when solar panels became an "endgame" source of power, but this thing is going to be used instead of nuclear reactors - and that's why I think it's not properly balanced.

Yet another nuclear lover. Nuker's are something that only after doing a few hours of research you want to use for any decent power generation. And the only half-decent ones are still the CACSUC reactors, which take a few hours to get working properly and explode every 30 seconds. People will always use solars and/or watermills to produce power. Even in endgame, they'll just make more of them.

On the recipe, something similar was said about the original one in where the recipe required iridium, this produces a tier 2 amount of energy, yet requires a tier 3 machine to create. It's kinda unbalanced.

In response to you saying that it has to run 11 hours, what if you're like me, and you have a chunkloader in your house, and that funnels straight into a mass fab? Then, you get more than what you put in after under a day.

Quote from HeadHunter67

Wow! That's a lot of power - though I can imagine they wouldn't use generators that took 44 MWH of energy to create, right?

Actually, yes they would. Every transformation that happens in real life costs more energy than the end transformation can produce in a single day. For instance, making a diesel generator costs a lot of energy (not just in electric but joules as well) but over a perioud of hours that generators is capable of turning fossil fuels into energy that by far exceeds the energy spent in creating it.
Which leads me to the next thing. Fossil fuels take several hundred thousand years to become what they are. It's a slow process that stores potential future energy for us to use. (and deplete)
When we make a tree farm to burn in burner generators we pretty much convert solar power into burning power through the process of Photosynthesis (which takes CO² and turns it into C and O². The C part is stored in the tree and the O² part is released, allowing us to breathe.
This too is a slow process but it does give us a source of Coal (albeit, contaminated with other plant material and humidity that needs to be "enriched" for us to get the most out of it) for burning.

The energy spent in making the fuel for any generator (That includes solar power) is by far much greater than the energy we get through the generator itself. (Over a period of time, until they start paying off for themselves)
Solar panels does not convert 100% of the sun light into energy. If they did we wouldn't need fossil fuels anymore. And to make such a solar panel we would probably have to use VERY expensive/rare materials which would pile on the costs (in energy consumed) to make them.

So in short, they should be expensive. But since MC is a game it doesn't help to make them so expensive that people would decide to use something completely else because they see no gain in spending that much resources making a single one when they can simply go down under ground and stab a few rocks with a pickaxe and carry several metric tons of ore back to the surface in their pockets.

Quote from Cadde

The energy spent in making the fuel for any generator (That includes solar power) is by far much greater than the energy we get through the generator itself. (Over a period of time, until they start paying off for themselves)
Solar panels does not convert 100% of the sun light into energy. If they did we wouldn't need fossil fuels anymore. And to make such a solar panel we would probably have to use VERY expensive/rare materials which would pile on the costs (in energy consumed) to make them.

Last I heard the payoff period for solar panels on a house was several years, depending on where you are (how much sun you get) and how expensive power is where you are.
as to efficiency? wikipedia says the best commercial ones are 21% (take that with a couple grains of salt) but i'm sure that's the expensive cost prohibitive stuff.

Quote from Shalashalska

Yet another nuclear lover.

If that's all you got out of everything I wrote, I don't need to bother with the rest of your post.
I brought up nuclear power because that's the only way you're going to get the 12 million EU to make one of these in any reasonable amount of time.
I'm not a "nuclear lover", what I love is balance and reason - and a sensible cost-to-benefit ratio. I don't see any of that in this machine.

Hah, this thread isfull of several kinds of crazy. where to begin?

Let's start with the design. Expensive, hell yes. But that's not exactly an issue in a mod where you can make just about anything for free (apart from the initial expenses of making the mass fab, cabling and solar/wind/water gens), given enough power and a mass fab. If you could make something like this from 2 sticks, some dirt and a cobble block, people would be screaming about how OP it was. At least with this, you have to work at it to get something worthwhile.

Before HeadHunter starts rambling on about EUs and breaking even again, I'm going to say right now that it doesn't matter. IC is all about the machines, be they realistic, futuristic, or just plain loopy. You don't have to use a mod if you think it's not feasable. If you're anything like me, you end up with loads of spare UUM, several MFSUs loaded with spare juice, and loads of BC mining rigs providing massive amounts of raw materials. 'Expensive' is relative, to me, the time spent making stuff is more valuable than the resources required.

Besides, it's a game! Have fun, damnit!