[Official] New Reactors design thread.

Here - I managed zero excess heat: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…n622314zzk5hnt83hkiyn2hhc

How? I'm not even sure myself, but for some strange reason putting a heat capacity plate in the remaining empty slot minimally improved overall heat distribution, and with some component reshuffling I ended up getting 635 out of 640 cooling utilized. Even the exact type of plate seems to matter (it doesn't work with a normal plate, and only half as well with a containment plate). I have no idea what's going on.

Unfortunately that doesn't keep that one vent at the bottom from melting after four minutes, and every attempt I make to move heat away from it ends up reducing cooling by a way too large amount.

I also had slightly different heat distribution results when I moved the location of the fuel cells to a different corner, but I didn't manage to make anything intrinsically better out of it.

Here's another attempt: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…o2ghiitkuc1ejsdmqhx1g9b0g

I tried thinking outside the box, and siphon off the small amounts of excess heat into a coolant cell, hoping to at least trick my way to a mostly complete cycle. Didn't work quite as well as I thought, sadly, if for an unexpected reason.

The coolant cell does work, and the reactor does run for an impressive 229 minutes before the hull reaches critical levels - that's 27.5% of the cycle. Another simple component change (replacing the top right component heat exchanger with an advanced one) could extend this time by a lot again, but alas, it is not to be: shortly after minute 245, nearly every component in the reactor suffers catastrophic failure by melting in rapid succession.

Without the coolant cell, I managed to do this: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…n622314zzk5hnt83hkiyn2hhc

With hull-limited 79.5 minutes runtime followed by 4 minutes of cooldown, this thing could run auto-controlled by temperature monitoring for an effective 464 EU/t with a fairly good efficiency. This is probably better than some of the heat-stable designs in your page 2 post, if you're willing to "dance with the devil", so to speak.

Nuts, forgot to press copy URL

Let me try and fix it.

This time you goofed up on your second link But hopefully you still have it pulled up, not like me who drove 30 kilometers in between making the post and having to fix it.

Unfortunately I can't quite reproduce what I had, but I found something very similar . 81.5 minutes runtime, followed by 4 minutes 10 seconds cooldown. Slightly less than a tenth of a cycle each run period.

Also, I think the effective EU/t measurement in the calculator isn't reliable. This posts 452.9 EU/t, while an intermediary stage I had posted 460 despite having only 55 minutes runtime followed by the same 4 minutes, 10 seconds cooldown. Another indicator is that if you play with the elapsed time slider, effective EU/t and other readings jump all over the place without reason.

Finally, If I do the math by hand, and compare actual runtime to the combined total of runtime + cooldown time, I get 487 EU/t for this linked design.

I think the calculator is just too confused by this hybrid reactor hullaballoo, much like in the case of the efficiency reading.

I see... that is a neat design. Especially since redstone also works instead of (or in addition to) lapis, and I always have tons upon tons of excess redstone in my worlds. I wouldn't mind spending the 2.5 stacks a full run takes on occasion, if it will get me over half a billion EU.

Also, minor improvement: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…vvrazss4pzv78lyzn1o2tz01s

The heat plating is no longer necessary. Also I was able to switch two of the advanced heat exchangers for basic ones. No idea why, but it sometimes works like that. Both measures slightly reduce the resource cost of the reactor.

And here's the equally mysterious and hilarious part: the condensator actually consumes less lapis/redstone in this configuration! Only 35 instead of 39 lapis, or 140 instead of 155 redstone.

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I know.
Improved your design:
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…oeubj02klo4gluryrkqp45lhc

Now it is cheaper but has some heat in it.
Shouldn’t be a problem as it can’t do a full cycle.

The reason why this happens is inside the mechanics.

WARNING REACTOR PHYSICS:
1. OC VENTS:
They are the workhorse of most reactors, 2 things make them so strong and are their greatest weakness:
The cool down of 20.
And the ability to draw 36 heat from the reactor.

What this does is, if the heat isn't evenly distributed over the OC vents they will draw heat from the reactor until they melt.
If they are neighboring a heat exchanger, the heat exchanger will take the 16 heat and put them to other components or the reactor hull.
That way you can achieve high cooling with almost no exchangers.

2. Heat exchangers, now we go inside to the core of Reactor physics.
Heat exchanger will try to manage the heat level of their surroundings until all is even, due to different heat capacity this is managed in %.
Here an example
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…m9jcf66vgo7fb9u0s115v9tg4
You can tinker with the cooling cells, time limit and heat exchangers.
The Heat cell (8 of them) will put heat in the reactor heat exchanger, these put the heat into the reactor hull.
The Advanced Heat exchanger will try to evenly manage the heat between himself, the cooling cells, and the Hull.
The component with the highest heat capacity will get the most heat as this is percentage based.

This is why you need Advanced Heat Vents that are for taking all the surplus heat from the OC Vents.

moving everything to a different corner only is sometimes a solution.
YFLCM
skavier470
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Quote from Requia

All my redstone goes into the centrifuge for the chrome cycle. Lapis is excess though, especially since I plan on using uranium for fabricator scrap and those quarries will still spit out stacks of lapis.

It probably consumes less because one of the incredibly aggravating things about SUC is that condensators don't balance properly, they end up taking all the heat they possibly can, you throttled the heat to it when you replaced the advanced exchangers with basic ones.

Ah... hmm. I was hoping that meant that you could make do with less than 35 lapis because you can leave the condensator out for a bit, let the reactor accumulate heat, and then shove it back in where it will cool the reactor back down (since you can't keep it from gobbling up all the heat it can get anyway). Unfortunately the adjacent heat exchanger will melt off in just over five and a half minutes. I suppose that means you could gain about an hour of condensator-free runtime, if you can automate it properly... that should save you at least 2 lapis or almost 10 redstone.

EDIT: actually, if you swap the condensator with an advanced heat vent, the reactor can easily run 50 minutes straight before you need to swap the condensator back in. Unfortunately, the calculator won't show you what happens next, namely how far the condensator can cool down the reactor before it needs switching again. There ought to be an equilibrium point somewhere, a certain swap-out duration that gains you just enough heat to dissipate it again with the next condansator run. Which brings up a very interesting engineering challenge to automate such a swap.

Oh, and skavier? your link shows a design that melts down after 4 minutes. I don't think that was the improvement you wanted to show :p

Yes, but the LZH seems to consume more heat than it needs to while it is inside. So theoretically it should be able to cancel out an accrued heat debt without spending more coolant than it already does anyway.

I might just try it in a test world to see if it works...

Quote from Requia

How do you go about removing a cooling cell at specific heat sans redpower?

Timing.

Reactor components work at a predictable level. For example, when you build a specific reactor design, you know that such and such a component gains x heat per second. So you calculate how low you want it to go, and set your State Cell to turn it off at that point.

If you wire it correctly, you can also have that lack of signal can turn on a NOT gate to trigger the Filter/Retriever setup to swap components.

Quote from Requia

This uh. Wow, 648 cooling. Can you take me through how you designed the cooling system? I've never gotten the hang of advanced vents.

Edit:Oh, I see it. The advanced vent lets you add more component vents. Shit, I need to rethink hybrid reactor designs now.

I don't recall if i posted this in the other thread, but i had a similar 300 EU/t design.

No diamond stuff, so UU shows cheaper. 656 Cooling and 5 dual 1 quad uranium cells:
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…6zlqdnr3f60khgpuu9u6seznk

The reason i was in the planner though was to work on these thorium things. I thought why not try to combine all you need in 1 reactor.
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…06sj2jw55muhmr03u500trpq8

Thorium neutral and breeds 40 cells at 0 degrees, which centrifuges back into the exact amount of fuel needed to run the cycle. So i guess it a gregtech hybrid (plut+thorium) hybrid (power+breeder) design.