How to design a lousy reactor

  • There are lots of ways of designing a bad reactor, and I can't cover them all here, but there are some mistakes being made over and over again....


    1. Don't just make some reactor, and say -"Here, look how good this reactor is." What did you design it to be good at? Are you aiming for the all-time power record for a Vanilla IC2 reactor? Or are you doing this for a CASUC? Perhaps instead you prefer reactors that don't work at efficiency 1, and are tolerably efficient in their use of Uranium. Perhaps it's a breeder?


    To make a lousy reactor post, make sure you don't decide what it ought to be good at, or if you do, don't tell us in the title.


    2. Make sure you include lots and lots and lots of heat dispersers in your reactor. Why will this make your reactor worse?
    a) Heat dispersers are really, really expensive to make. So unlike cooling cells, which are really cheap. So adding lots makes the reactor cost so much more!
    b) Heat dispersers just move heat around, and allow you to keep hot cells cool, and cooler cells hot. But they don't actually cool down the whole assembly. So adding more means you have less space for cooling cells, which means your reactor runs hotter, for less time, at higher expense. It's a lose - lose scenario !


    Conclusion. To make your reactor worse, take out cooling cells and add more heat dispersers!


    3. Use Reactor plating. It's expensive, it hardly has any cooling effect, and it acts on other components in ways that are hard to understand. So obviously it would be good to put more of this into the reactor, especially if it means you can put less of those cheap, effective cooling cells in.


    4. Reactor chambers are free ! Did you know this? Everyone used to think that reactor chambers were expensive, crafted only with great amounts of copper, iron, redstone and tin. But nobody making a bad reactor should worry about this - you should make a six chamber reactor for everything as they are just more HAYO. The fact that small reactors get the same amount of free cooling from water blocks as big ones is irrelevant, and you shouldn't consider either that, or the extra expense of all those chambers as being important in any way !


    5. Scatter Uranium all over the reactor. Make pretty patterns with it. Be creative ! Sensible rectangular shapes are so square and boring. Who cares if they're more efficient? Forget those boring rectangles, and you too can have an inefficient reactor with a cool design motif written in Uranium!


    If you put all this into practice, you too can design a 6 chamber reactor with efficiency 1, giving 100 Eu per turn and needing 90 minutes to cool down after each run, and costing enough to build three regular reactors......

  • you forgot step 6.


    6. Mention how long it took you to design it with the reactor planner. Your a genius nuclear scientist! Your so smart you can make a design worthy of the best reactor list in only 30 seconds flat. In fact they when hear how fast you "whipped this up" they will be so impressed with your genius design they will scrap the rest of the list and tell every one to use your reactor design instead. Never mind that the other designs probably took hours trail and error testing, or math they probably didn't have the planner tool. So be confident cause there is no way Rick will yell at you like he did to the last 500 entries cause unlike them your a genius!

    true balance is impossible in video games the best one can hope for is to make it really hard to guess which of 2 choices are better.
    and remember kids "NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF JOKES!"

    Edited once, last by passinglurker ().

  • To be slightly more helpful, there are some heuristics you can use to help you build a good reactor.


    1. Never split your Uranium into several areas. If you find you want to, you'll discover it's cheaper to build small reactors for each of the areas rather than one big one to contain them all.


    2. Minimise the heat dispersers! Well I think I've gone on long enough about those, but you should aim to have something to heat/cool on each side of a heat disperser, and to avoid cases where one cooling cell is next to several dispersers. Form little crosses of cooling cells around a heat disperser (well, you always have to settle for 2 or 3 cells in most cases, but try...)


    3. Breeders are a little different as typically you don't try to directly cool the Uranium - instead the whole reactor is set up to cool the reactor chamber. You want to maximise breeding efficiency by surrounding 1 or 2 U with isotope cells. The rest is usually cooling, but usually with either perfect balance or some other temperature objective in mind.


    4. Juggle juggle juggle stuff around looking for any small advantage, until you're happy. At this point you probably still don't have an optimum reactor, but the result shouldn't be embarrassingly bad any more.

  • It's awful DragonHerald. Its only redeeming feature is that your initials are nice and readable. :D

    Why thank you. It only took me 5 seconds to think of!

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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

  • What, you thought while building it? Now you need only to claim that its the best Setup of all time and all the other ones are shit.

    But of course it is the best setup of all time. Using all the best most exspensivist parts ever and it has my initials on it. Like a bawss.

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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