Decentralized Distribution of Steam (DDoS)

I hope no-one considers this a necrobump, but given how little activity this forum gets I don't think anyone will mind. I've been trying to get a CRCS system going with AE now that I have access to fuzzy buses. However, i'm not sure how to use them. I've tried them on different settings and with cooling cells with varying amounts of damage - every time it gets pulled out of the reactor. Unfortunately I can't just use precision buses because they look at the exact amount of heat stored, rather than the percentage heat as I originally thought. This means I have to use fuzzy buses. Could someone please explain how to use them in a CRCS setup?

As a sidenote, plutonium is amazing for CRCS now. It produces 10 eu/t base and has the same efficiency scaling as uranium. However, it now only has a base heat of 8 rather than 10, meaning its stats are exactly double those of uranium. This basically means that as far as CRCS is concerned, there's no reason not to use plutonium (though of course you have to get enough of it together in the first place).

Quote from Shakie666

I hope no-one considers this a necrobump, but given how little activity this forum gets I don't think anyone will mind. I've been trying to get a CRCS system going with AE now that I have access to fuzzy buses. However, i'm not sure how to use them. I've tried them on different settings and with cooling cells with varying amounts of damage - every time it gets pulled out of the reactor. Unfortunately I can't just use precision buses because they look at the exact amount of heat stored, rather than the percentage heat as I originally thought. This means I have to use fuzzy buses. Could someone please explain how to use them in a CRCS setup?

As a sidenote, plutonium is amazing for CRCS now. It produces 10 eu/t base and has the same efficiency scaling as uranium. However, it now only has a base heat of 8 rather than 10, meaning its stats are exactly double those of uranium. This basically means that as far as CRCS is concerned, there's no reason not to use plutonium (though of course you have to get enough of it together in the first place).

For configuring a Fuzzy Import Bus to pull coolant cells:
1. Grab a coolant cell that's almost dead. If there's more than one red pixel showing on the damage bar, it is less likely to work.
2. Drop said coolant cell and a Near-Depleted Uranium cell into import bus interface.
3. Set the button on the top right of the bus GUI to the 25% damage mode.
4. Connect import bus to existing AE network.
5. Drop a new (or otherwise completely cooled) coolant cell into reactor. If it gets pulled out, inject more heat into the hot cell and goto step 1.

As a side note, I find Factorization Routers useful for inserting coolant cells and uranium/plutonium cells into banks of reactors. And Buildcraft is really handy for preventing explosions- instead of placing a lever on your production reactors, place a Cobblestone Structure Pipe with a red pipe wire and an iron AND gate. Set the gate to "Inventory Full" >> "Redstone Signal" and "Red Pipe Signal" >> "Redstone Signal". Use another gate to turn on the red pipe signal, keeping in mind that placing it adjacent to a gate that emits redstone may cause problems.

Also, another side note, I *think* I've come up with some improved cooling tower designs. I'm not certain if these actually work, though.

1. 1 chamber, cools 2 cells at 120 heat per cell per second, 240 heat per second total.

2. 5 chambers, cools 4 cells at 124 heat per cell per second, 496 heat per second total. Basically the 1-chamber design stuffed twice into the same reactor- slightly cheaper than 1-chamber coolers, and a little faster as well.

3. 6 chambers, cools 4 cells at 144 heat per second per cell, 576 heat per second total. If I'm correct, this hits the theoretical maximum rate for pulling heat from coolant cells using component heat exchangers. This again consists of two copies of the 1-chamber cooler stuffed into the same reactor, but with a few extra components in the middle to dissipate that last little bit of heat. I'm not sure how it compares to the five-chamber cooler in cost-efficiency terms, though.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

Yea, Fuzzy Import Buses are great with Applied Energistics v 12. You can tell it 25% or less, and it'll automatically pull them out when they hit at or below 25% damage. Then you just have a surplus of full cells which automatically go in that tick, because you have a fuzzy export bus trying desperately to insert completely full cells into the reactor.

Basically, this runs a CRCS system in a Mk. I configuration, as long as coolant cells hold out. You have export buses which pull cells less than 50% into the cooling towers, and import buses trying to pull completely full ones out. You've also got a 1k storage cell in a disk drive (no, you can't use an ME chest for this trick, it needs to be a disk drive) which stores the cells not currently in anything as a space buffer.

Everything is fully automated as long as your numbers on your micro-cycle vs cooling-cycle are correct.

Even better, you can use the same export bus to pull out the depleted cells and input full nuclear material to recycle instantly.

I will have to look into those cooling towers, something seems a bit off, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I'll do some testing and get back to you with my results. That single-chamber reactor is particularly interesting to me. It's small enough that you can *REALLY* miniaturize your decentralized cooling system. It's also got a 500 second coolant-cycle time. This... bears looking into.

If this works, I've got one of these reactors with 16 of your one-chamber cooling towers surrounding it in a 9 x 9 x 2. This is a stackable CRCS system producing 1600 EU/segment. In fact, if I cut the initial reactor in half, I could do so in a significantly smaller space, but only 800 per reactor. THEN go Tower of Power, so I've got FOUR of them around a single cable (although I'd have to invest in HV Transformers since they produce more than 512/t) for a total of 3200/segment.

Holy crap... what have I done?

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First off, you don't need a fuzzy bus if you only want import or export completely cooled cells (or completely emptied condensators)- precise busses work just as well for that purpose, and don't contain diamonds. Save your advanced processors for importing hot cells.

Second, the thing that you feel is a bit off in my cooling tower design might be the lack of a component vent adjacent to the coolant cells. This is a feature I noticed in the other cooling tower designs that I removed so that there was more room for component exchangers to pull more heat out of the coolant cell.

Third, I should probably explain how I got to the design I did. I replaced the coolant cells with heating cells, and adjusted the design until I maximized the number of heating cells in each stack without having anything build up heat and melt. Knowing that each heating cell in the stack inserts one heat into all of the adjacent components per second, a stack of 30 cells would insert 30 heat into each of the four component exchangers each second, thus the 120 heat per cell per second I spoke of earlier.

I then copied the same design twice into a larger reactor, and found it worked with a few more heating cells in each stack.

Edit: Testing indicates that this cooler design is really (!) slow when it comes to that last 30 heat or so. Thus, it is probably certainly a good idea to use a Fuzzy Bus to pull cells when they're 75% cool- so forget my comments about saving diamonds.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

No, look a few posts up and you will see that I've got a 4 cell 5 chamber design which holds 4 cells that cools about 148 per tic tht uses them. In fact, it's really the only way to achieve more than about 16 cooling per tic. No, I was more concerned with how many OC vents are 'shared' by multiple exchangers.

I was referring to the designs with one component vent and three component exchangers (probably the very design you've cited)- the exchangers transport most of the heat to the OC vents, and the component vent finishes off the last little bit of heat. Not so in my design, hence the problems.
Regardless of how many exchangers are adjacent to most of the OC vents, the design seems to work. In fact, this very feature may help cool one cell even faster when the other cell isn't there or is at a lower temperature...

[testing]This seems to be the case. The tower seems to be able to transfer heat between the top and bottom halves faster than it can pull heat from either cell.[/testing]

It was also just about the only thing that I could do when trying to stuff as much cooling power as possible into a 2-chamber reactor. I figured that the more exchangers I put around each vent, the more heat could be transferred to each vent, so it would dissipate heat faster. It was my intuition speaking to me- and apparently it was right, for reversing the top half of the design does indeed reduce the cooling speed of the tower. I suspect that having component vents adjacent to each other is a significant efficiency hit, as they can't dissipate heat from each other.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

You can use 99%, which is around 600 heat and still bypass that problem.

Did you test that?
Turns out that the 99% thing is a bit of a misnomer (as I had suspected)- it behaves the same way as Redpower Filters, and only pays attention to whether the damage bar exists or not. If programmed with a fully-cooled cell and set to 99%, a Fuzzy Import Bus on my cooling tower will never do anything.

If you have GT installed, keep in mind that the vacuum freezer can cool collant cells for a small eu investment.

And so would ruin the point of your Reactor, aka generating energy. I'm pretty sure the Vacuum freezer would consume more energy than it would allo to generate.

Quote from MatLaPatate

And so would ruin the point of your Reactor, aka generating energy. I'm pretty sure the Vacuum freezer would consume more energy than it would allo to generate.

Well if your DDoS reactor can make more then 128 eu/t and makes less then 360,000 heat in 1500 seconds you will have a bit of an energy income (Example using NaK, because it is the most efficient coolant) but obviously cooling towers are the way to go.