A breeder that never cools down, is it possible?

  • Basically, if a :Uranium Cell: has any components next to it that can take heat, the :Uranium Cell: will dump all of its heat into those components and dump none of its heat into the hull. Meanwhile, the only components that interact will hull heat are :Intergrated Heat Dispenser: . Thus, the components in this reactor do not interact at all with the hull heat. They don't draw heat away from the hull, and they don't dump heat into the hull. They just store the heat in their internal heat storage. Thus the hull (pre-heated to 9000 heat, of course) stays at the same heat at all times.


    The reason this is difficult to understand is because most reactors use large numbers of :Intergrated Heat Dispenser: as a way of coupling the hull heat to the heat of every component in the core. The concept that components might not share their heat with the hull is an uncommon one, despite the fact that most components operate in this way.

    Actually there is another component that reacts directly with the hull. Each Depleted cell is giving off 1 heat every second, which goes straight to the hull. To compensate this, some external cooling needs to be provided (-1 for each cell being charged).

  • I have been tinkering with this idea.


    I think it does deserve it's own breeder classification. I propose the term "Hull Constant". You have to think about it differently, the point of the design is to keep hull heat constant (high) for the purpose of breeding. It is never fully cooled, the hull is supposed to keep its heat even outside operation.


    There are 3 ways to achieve this.


    True Hull constant
    Both Isotopes and external cooling must affect hull heat only, so it's natural to balance them. Uranium heat goes to components. No dispensers are used (they suck heat out of the hull). There is no mark 1, as there is no way to distribute heat enough. Mark II has a cooldown period, but as this is a "Hull Constant" design, the hull doesn't cool down, just the components. The cooldown period is defined by how long it takes the hottest cooling cell to cool off. Here are some designs:


    Mark II: All of these mark IIs have cooldown of 51 min 43s and are mark II - 3 In practice they are identical. Mark 2s all have constant 2 eff. If you are willing to swap in 3 extra cooling cells/ uranium (stored unlinked in the reactor to cool) they can be run like mark 1s


    raGan's design (slight tweak to external cooling) http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=1010121101501521s1r11r10


    Slightly cheaper: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=1010141001501521s1r11r10 This is near perfect for 4 buckets of lava @8k hull heat constant. 8050 is radiation threshold It has the same cooldown as the above reactor.


    Scaled up: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=1010101301501521s1r11r10 11200 is radiation threshold, so 5 buckets of lava sets hull to 10k permanently.


    Mark IVs Couple options here. Standard on / off cycles are fine, but there are so many empty slots, if you slot unlinked coolant cells and swap the cold with the hot, you can get much greater runtime. If there are more unused cells than excess heat, then you can have constant uptime.


    3 eff : 10 eu/t
    http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/reactorplanner.html?518fwjxc6iqi1ejgdqq=10101011114110101001010</a>
    83m 20s Up. 166m 39s off, alternatively enough cells to maintain runtime through swapping.


    3 eff : 20 eu/t http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…i=10101013114010101001010


    Scaled up. Same up down times, but not enough free space for coolant swapping, so some downtime or spare parts needed.


    3 eff : http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…i=10101013114010101001010
    55m 32s up, same down, enough space for swap cooling constant uptime.


    Mark IV -s 10 eu/t
    4 eff. http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…e=10101213114010101001010


    I like to call this one crazy ivan's Hot potato. If your bored and you want to breed uranium, you can make a game of whack a mole, trying to keep the heat even in all the extra cells. 4 is the best eff a true heat constant breeder can achieve, as there needs to be one cooling component next to the Uranium. 36 cooling cells are needed. Swapping is near impossible without empty space, 3 spaces and 3 extra cells make it sustainable. Safe uptime of only 18m 30s.


    Operational hull constant


    These still don't use heat dispensers, so hull heat is decoupled from component heat. External cooling is still designed to be equal to hull heating, but with this subclass, uranium is allowed to interact with hull. The result is while operating, the hull remains a constant temperature regardless of what the components are doing. The down side is that when not operation, the hull heat generated changes. With some fancy piston work, you could change the external cooling to match, added to your redstone off switch, but most people will instead allow the hull to cool after the fuel expires. What distinguishes this from your standard breeder is the heat up phase. From cold, you feed lava buckets directly into the HULL, then pop the uranium in, and its up and running with hot hull the whole operational time. With heat dispensers, lava heat gets sucked into components, that doesn't happen with these. Sadly, with external cooling maxing out at 33 and no dispensers to link in more cooling cells, it's hard to get efficiency and uptime. I think the basic no component perfect breeders don't need this classification because there are no components to decouple from the hull.


    Here is an example:
    Mark II hybrid 2 eff energy + 2 eff breeding (1cell) 40 eu/t output http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…i=10101010114010101001010
    mark IV 3 eff http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…m=1k101010114010101001010 swapping extends runtime, but not indefinetly


    Manual hull temperature maintenance


    The third way to maintain hull temp is should not really be new at all, but I don't see it talked about a lot. Standard breeders can maintain hull temps even with heat dispensers with manual reconfiguration of the reactor. Time goes into making the breeder hot. 9k heat for each cooling cell and heat dispenser must be generated then take time to distribute through the system. We are talking heat totals of > 400k, with cooling happening during distribution, which is why a full 6 chamber reactor takes > 250 buckets of lava and more than 30 minutes. Instead of heating up the parts each time, you can store the hot parts to prevent them from cooling. The cooling cells are critical, they will cool themselves down at the very least if heat is not being generated and fed to them. From there, if you want to keep the hull hot, reconfigure external cooling to match isotope heat generation either by adding isotopes or changing cooling blocks to heating blocks. If you want to use the hull for a cold non breeder start, pull and store your hot dispensers for breeding use later, and socket in all the cold cooling parts for your generating run, maybe throwing some SUC in along the way, and the parts will be cold probably by the time you finish. With hot parts stored, and a cold hull, with any perfect breeder config, all you need is 5 buckets of lava instantly and your heat phase is over.

    Thanks for Giving drill access to miners!

  • I've read your post and all i see is that "HC" breeders are messing with planner a lot. I noticed little mistake with this one's external cooling balance:

    Quote

    3 eff : 10 eu/t http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…q=10101211114010101001010
    83m 20s Up. 166m 39s off, alternatively enough cells to maintain runtime through swapping.

    It should be without 2 fires: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…q=10101011114110101001010
    Nice job.

  • Nice catch, corrected.


    While the benefits of HC designs are nice, I doubt the idea will be that popular. What you get is very easy warm ups, permanant warm ups, hotter hull temps than possible with heat dispensers. The cost however, is the cap on efficiency. A lot of people won't build more than a mark II, and 2 eff on a breeder is downright poor. With babysitting, a mark IV caps at 4 eff, which seems to get around 4 uranium to 1 consumed. The whole point of breeders is to provide fuel, and with returns of ~8 to 1 with babysitting on current standard breeders, the cost compared to the benefits probably outweighs it.


    Still, It is fun to tinker with. I encourage everyone to play a game I like to call "Crazy Ivan". It's like hot potato with cooling cells. There is little danger of meltdown, as the armor plating needs to melt before any heat goes to hull. The idea of the game is to pull the cooling cells before they melt and replace them with fresh ones. You store the hot cooling cells elsewhere in the reactor, so they can cool themselves. Technically, you are manually doing the job of dispensing the heat among the different cells by swapping them. Alternatively, you can use this method to safely heat up the cooling cells for a more standard perfect breeder design. I made a design that pops a cooling cell every 30 seconds http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…w=101c1010114010101001010 but haven't tried it for 2 reasons. 1) it scares me. 2) When you are swapping the cooling cell out, the plating eats the heat because there is no alternative heating cell. Thats not sustainable, plating doesn't cool fast enough. It is also not sustainble in that there isn't enough free space for cells to cool completely. A more sustainable design is http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…g=10101011114110101001010 . Still not enough cooling space, but the plating doesn't heat because you can pop the fresh dispenser in the diagonnaly symmetrical slot before removing the hot one. I think I am going to use this design next as a coolant heater to while transitioning to a standard 5eff perfect breeder.

    Thanks for Giving drill access to miners!