Alternate sources of Eu from other mods

after a few days of trying...i am unable to create a perpetual boiler->turbine->whatever setup. have not tried a steam engine/transformer. i did, however, find that iron tanks can store steam, which would be a great method of storing power outside of the boiler, as long as you can cope with the loss from using pipes.

Quote from inucune

after a few days of trying...i am unable to create a perpetual boiler->turbine->whatever setup. have not tried a steam engine/transformer.

Did you use coke ovens to convert coal to coke? And, were you using max size boiler at top temperature?

Quote from inucune

after a few days of trying...i am unable to create a perpetual boiler->turbine->whatever setup. have not tried a steam engine/transformer. i did, however, find that iron tanks can store steam, which would be a great method of storing power outside of the boiler, as long as you can cope with the loss from using pipes.

to really make a boiler work you need some kind of automatic farm (be it tree for charcoal or a peat bog from forestry) and some kind of automatic feeding system.

Logistics or redpower works for this but redpower isn't around for anything past 1.2.5 yet and logistics is only up to 1.3.2 at the moment.

also note that while iron tanks can store steam you won't be able to get it out fast enough to do anything meaningful with it.

Quote from inwerno

I've just done some math on RC's steam boiler and came out with some pretty interesting numbers...

RC's wiki gave me the formulas I used, haven't tested this yet:

Assuming a maximum efficiency boiler (36 m³ LP) you get 3.96 fuel usage/tick at maximum heat.
These are heat units, right? So charcoal (1600 heat) will last 404 ticks, producing 360 steam per tick (according to the RC wiki).
5 steam equate 1MJ or 2.5 EU via Transformer.

So the boiler will deliver 180 EU/Tick, and about 72700 EU per charcoal. One stack of charcoal should generate about 4.6 million EU.

Using coal coke, which has a heat value of 6400 now, quadruples the result. One coal coke = 290k EU, one stack = 18.6 million EU. Instead of compressing 64 coal into one diamond, you could generate UU even without scrap, craft two diamonds from UU and still have some energy left

And that's using steam engines and transformers, the Turbine has even better efficiency than these. The investments in this infrastructure will surely be massive, but it seems to be highly efficient.
Anyone wants to do some testing?

Bonus: a power plant built this way should look wicked

Display More

Well, it does look wicked, but the math somehow doesn't really work for me, but its still a very nice way to produce power. My setup is a max sized high pressure boiler, good for twice the steam that of the low pressure boiler in your example. Still, it doesn't produce 360 EU/Tick, but 290 EU/Tick. I tried many other setups with steam going through 18 different golden waterproof pipes, just a few and also hooking the engines up to golden conductive pipes, but all of those ways didn't even come close to the 360 EU/Tick (more like 160 at best). Anyway, the coal coke lasts 150 seconds or 3000 ticks, so 870000 EU, which is a lot more then the EU's you need to produce the coal from UU and if you feel fancy scrap can boost this to an even higher level, but I really don't think this is OP. The massive amount of resources you need to build the 4 water tanks, the 4 coke overs, the 18 (23 in my setup) industrial steam engines (about 285 iron?), the 18 (23 again for my test setup) transformer (Those really are expensive with 6 iron, iron gear, generator and circuit. Total about 19 iron times 23 = 437?), boiler (Only 81 iron? Didn't expect the boiler to be light on the iron compared to the engines and the transformers.) and the buildcraft/logistics pipes system (also some gold and diamonds involved with that). So basically, you convert massive amounts of iron and other resources (including time, but that is what it is all about when ) to make a huge and epic machine which doesn't make a lot of sense (really just because of the UU coal recipe) and also isn't really overpowered as can build nuclear reactors with a breeder to feed them for about the some resources (I think, but not totally positive) which probably gives more EU per invested resource. It wouldn't be as epic as this and it wouldn't a steady amount of creosote oil. And you can easily upgrade the production of coal (by changing the gate settings a bit) and coal coke (and therefore creosote oil production) by just adding coke ovens. I really enjoyed spending some time building something with railcraft. If I ever need some creosote oil production, I will probably build something like this.

Edit: And why not, a tank to store the creosote oil.

so with the latest update you can burn creosote in the boilers. creosote+coal coke will be my next attempt. however, the turbine has been nerfed to 50eu/t (or 50 UE). i think this is where transformers will come in handy.

my idea with the tanks was this: the turbine spins down when it is not outputting power, so it would build up steam in the tank. tanks also store the steam indefinitely, whereas the boiler bleeds off steam when it cools. i understand you can't get more that ~18% output speed using an iron tank, due to WPW pipes only pulling so much.

however, you can get a pretty steady output from the other steam engines(18 MJ is where i am sitting atm) when supplied from an iron tank. the purpose of the tank is efficient storage, which the boiler is not designed to do.

Well, currently you can't burn creosote oil in a biogas engine, so transformers are not so viable. On the other hand the best fuel for turbine/engines is currently fuel (shocking). It really doesn't calculate well with transformers mods (e.g. all mods with 5/2 MJ -> EU conversion), one bucket of fuel with this conversion factor equals 1.5 MEU. Covert is balancing his mod around solar panels/forestry, not transformer mod.

Balancing energy with something like UU is really hard, specially with many different mods. There should never be the case, that mining, even using miners or (frame) quaries, would become obsolete. Huge part of MC is using natural resources and exploring to get more. With mods there is additional challenge with transporting the items and properly using them. UU is not OP per se, but when you start using huge renewable energy production systems, what's the point of the game?

Point of the game is different for different people. For me, right now it is making broken contraptions that produce obscene amount of UU:)

And, I think coal price should be just replaced with 3 uu = 10 coal.

for many of us, it's a competition to create the smallest (or in my case, most complex) machine with the best outcome. i don't know why everyone cries foul for perpetual machines, since such devices would be the pinnacle of science. it's a challenge, and one with a reward when completed. i understand they cause some issues on servers, but if anyone can build them, then perhaps a little espionage is in order.

test the limits of what you can do! if not, go back to banging sticks with rocks rocks with sticks in vanilla. (that's a joke, btw)

Only problem with perpetual motion is that it is not "realistic". Green gens make energy essentially from nothing, but we are given a "realistic" justification that they get it from wind, sun, etc.

And, crafting coal from uu-matter is not pinnacle of science or effectiveness. It is much simpler thing than, say, Frame vehicles, 1.2.5 CASUC Breeder, Fillerforest, or even any sufficiently complex logistic network. And much less effective than windmill spam.

Try feeding the boiler with scaffolds instead of coke coal, peat, or coal.

Sawmill with hoppers on top to store oak wood. The Sawmill can be powered by a hobbyist's steam engine off of the boiler's steam.
Two autocrafting tables to turn oak planks into sticks, and oak planks and sticks into scaffolds.
Then add logistics crafting pipes, and a supplier pipe to the boiler set to keep at least 32 scaffolds in the boiler.

So then you just need a tree farm to supply wood. Once the boiler reaches max temp, it's very efficient.

Interesting how relatively harmless mod bonuses grow out of control when stacked. Forestry makes growing trees easier, Thermal Expansion gives 50% bonus to plank production, IC's make 2.5 more burnable stuff out of planks, and Railcraft boiler multiply energy output from one burnable item by I don't even know how much.

Hey SSD, very nice setup. Sorry for not replying earlier... I've got absoultely no idea why your machine doesn't put out the calculated energy, though. I did a test setup with a LP boiler running charcoal, and got out 180 Eu/tick, as advertised. But if you just wanted to build something like this for power production, you could simplify (and save resources) greatly:

use just one transformer, pipe the BC power in using gold pipes,

use a BC pump instead of the water tanks, run this one by supplying it some power via power pipe from the steam engines.

Just built one of these in creative. Giving about 360 Eu atm, refilling itself with coal from UUM, now I've got to wail till the boilers are hot, meh. Took me about 50 minutes Will post screenshots later

The scaffold idea is of course very good, but you would need some kind of automatic wood farm for that to work best. If you've got forestry, for example, you can burn peat...

Well, I think overpoweredness-discussions are pretty much moot. If you've got the resources to build even a small reactor you've got more power then you'll ever need (at least in my case). In my current survival map I went as usual generator -> wind + geothermal -> nuclear (go hybrids!) ... and since then I added steam and now I'm building biomass (just installed forestry) but everything after nuclear is just for the fun of it, I've had more than enough power (and UUM) since I went nuclear. But I take my time for building nice houses around my machines, so my massfab has a lot of time... So, I guess OP-ness only matters if it's easier to build then a small reactor. And all the steel for the steam-variant here takes time because of the blast furnace. So, screw the math, this seems balanced

EDIT: The setup i was speaking of seems to work really well, but without scrap it's not generating a huge energy surplus, but it's running infinitely, just as SSDs, generating creosote in the meantime. A tad more effective, using 2 LP boilers and just one generator... but I'm getting very very bored now waiting for the damn thing to heat, so I won't post screenshots. I highly doubt anyone would be interested, anyway. Using forestry and wood or peat to burn is much more effective, so it's just a proof of concept.

Peat burning is incredibly OP early game in forestry/buildcraft.

The initial investment is very low(30 copper or something in all, and some of this is for the machines required to make the engines), and requires no hard to find materials. one farm can supply 20 eu/t using the 2MJ to 5EU conversion ratio while only taking in a tiny amount of tin and some dirt and sand. It's not spacially economic compared to geo or nuclear, but it requires much less of an investment and can be automated easily.

I was playing with this recently and have achieved a scaffold-burning max-size high-pressure Railcraft boiler getting its wood from a single Forestry tree farm (it even makes some profit in logs once the boiler is up to full heat). The boiler could run four turbines, and the tree farm, and make a few extra MJ on the side. While the cost of a whole bunch of steel every four days isn't completely ignorable, it's also well within capacity for late-game automated resource collection.

As a note, I'm doing this in Railcraft 6.5, and the turbines (and probably boiler, as well) have been rebalanced in 6.7. However, I do suspect the greatest cost in setting all that up is getting the turbine casings and rotors in the first place. It's not really something that can be set up in early game, but should be okay by the time you start thinking about making UU.

I haven't much (read:any) experience with mass geothermals. How long can 1000 eu/t geothermal factory work, before it sucks all lava around?

Quote from baturinsky

I haven't much (read:any) experience with mass geothermals. How long can 1000 eu/t geothermal factory work, before it sucks all lava around?

Not long at all.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

[...]Some four hundred plus STEEL (not Iron) to generate 100 Eu/tic is pathetic. By way of contrast, Geothermals produce 20 Eu/tic at only 10 refined iron. Some eight TIMES as efficient on iron, much less the blast furnace conversion into steel. Plus, yanno, NOT eating up 33 steel over time, which will need to be replaced.

We have differing opinions on this, and I think I know why: as far as I'm concerned, one-time costs don't exist, except as an initial hurdle. They do not factor into a long-term efficiency calculation because, given enough time, they tend to zero out. So comparing the one-time cost of 12 turbine casings to the one-time cost of five geothermal generators is a no-op for me: they're both zero.

As for running costs, I'm matching these to the contents of my storage, and I can tell you I have tons more iron ready to be turned into steel than I do lava ready to turn into EUs. As the boiler is effectively free (it makes its own fuel, given the occasional infusion of some humus for the tree farm), steel vs. lava is all that counts.

Now, if I had a stick up my ass about efficiency, I'd probably use that tree farm to make scaffolds to burn in regular generators -- their operating cost would thus drop to "just some humus every once in a while", which is extremely low. But I don't honestly care that much, and playing with steam is fun.

On that same note, I could probably go nuclear (I don't recall if I have two or three complete stacks of uranium), which would have even lower running costs, but honestly I got over my fear of using one piece of coal to smelt fewer than eight items a long time ago, and that's about the level of anal-retentiveness that would be necessary for me to forget the steam turbine altogether.