How can you measure the temperature of a reactor without any other mods besides IC2?

    Hey all,


    I'm working on my first breeder in IC2 and I am having a hard time understanding how to heat up a reactor to a specific heat level.


    First, I came up with this design because I was lazy and didn't want to manually dump 200 lava buckets into the reactor. That design breeds 4 total isotope cells after running it for 2 full uranium cycles (with cooldown in between). I figured this was the best way out if you wanted a reactor that required zero excess work besides inputting the materials.


    Now, I am playing with the idea of heating up a reactor with X amount of Uranium cells and pulling them out and replacing them with my zero heat sum reactor set up. The only problem I am having is that I do not know when the reactor hits a set temperature (9000 for example). I do not have any other mods installed besides IC2. How can you ever know what heat percentage of total hull value or specific temperature is inside of the reactor?


    Any help would be appreciated.


    Edited for clarity.

    You can either look at the cooling components, try to detect when wooden blocks start burning or detect when you start getting hurt. I usually heat my 6-chamber casuc breeder up until it starts hurting me, as it's then at about 11k heat.
    Another thing besides that would be to use the reactor planner to count the time until the reactor reaches 9k heat. For your design it would be about 9923 seconds - you can count it by adding up the heat that your cooling components(16 components, 10k each=160k) can take before melting to your reactors maximium tempature(2 chambers increase the melting tempature to 12k heat) which adds up to 172000 heat. Then you need to calculate how much is the wanted tempature from your reactors maximium tempature without components. 9000/12000=3/4. Three quarters of 172k makes it about 129000 heat. That divided by the excess heat - which is 13 in your design - makes it the 9923 seconds.
    Remember, if you replace the heating setup with cooling components that aren't at the same max heat % as the reactor, they will cool the reactor down. You should use the same IHD's and coolant cells or it gets really complicated.
    Edit: this would propably work out quite well. Encase it in solid blocks, run it for a cycle(it will heat up to about 9,8k heat) dig the stone out and then add 22 water blocks around it and it will become a neutral breeder. You wouldn't even have to change the component setup.

    Check out this awesome mod !

    Edited 2 times, last by jppk1 ().

    Thanks. I think I will wait until the reactor starts hurting me as well.


    Do you normally wait several hours for your system to heat up? I don't think I have the patience to set a timer for an hour or two and then have the nerves to run back before my world is blown to bits.

    Edited the previous post, changing the setup at 9k heat wouldn't exactly work if you use non-heated up components at the breeding setup they would cool the reactor down. The setup I posted is propably one of the easiest and cheapest ways to make a 1 uranium/4 depleted cell breeder.
    Edit: read this, it helps out a lot if you're new to breeders. You can even make a heating configuration for the breeder I posted by using the method I mentioned in the earlier post.

    Ahh thanks so much! I was combing through these forums the last few days looking for a good breeder tutorial and I couldn't find anything. I can't believe there was one here all along. I'm gonna check this out. Thanks again!

    If you have ADD or ADHD or just don't wanna bother waiting. Don't breed.

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    That's a rather cool idea, but a lone tree is suspicious, better plant some more. So really... forget about solar-flowers, solar-trees are the next generation :P