Posts by Shakie666

Quote from gattsuru

You get a little over five and a half minutes (342.95 seconds) at 2412 EU/t before the coolant cells pop in the Computer Cube (running 3.06d Gregtech over 1.115.336-lf IC2), which is... pretty nice. By comparison, Thick Neutron Reflectors return 2400EU/t for 343 seconds. Thorium definitely makes more sense, both from a cost and performance perspective. Not sure if the heat vents make much sense on the corners, or if there's anything that can go in those slots meaningfully -- I'm seeing less than a seconds of difference between heat vents and empty space.

The heat vents in the corners are there to disperse heat created by the thorium cells. Cooling cells can only absorb heat from any fissionable material thats directly next to them, meaning the heat from the thorium would otherwise have nowhere to go other than into the reactor hull, with explosive results.

The thorium isn't really there for extra power, its just acting as cheap neutron reflectors.

I was thinking: what if you made a hybrid system, running the plutonium in a CRCS setup (for better efficiency), while using some of your thorium as cheap neutron reflectors? Something like this. It has the advantage of avoiding the extortionate costs of iridium neutron reflectors, and it shouldn't overheat, but i'm not 100%. I can't try it on the computer cube since i'm not on 1.5.2 yet, could someone who is test it?

Quote from Omicron

Spreadsheet updated again after more testing yesterday evening. Thorium is buggy in general (confirmed by Greg), ingame thorium reactors are stuttering and fluctuating in EU/t, and they're sticking hard and fast to 25,000sec lifetime (as opposed to the computercube, which sometimes does 30,000 and sometimes 25,7142.86). The overall effect is roughly equivalent to giving thorium +20% power output instead of lifetime, which is why I decided to represent it as such in my tables.

Heat may or may not also be off, I can't say for sure as that is incredibly hard to measure reliably with an in-world reactor, especially one that is stuttering on-off-on-off constantly. If it is off however, then it is overally lower rather than higher, because none of my previously stable setups have shown instabilities. For this reason I'm leaving the heat values in the tables as they are, since they allow for building stable designs. Still, keep a very close eye on your thorium reactors during their first cycle, especially if you're cutting it close in terms of cooling.

Also updated centrifuge maths. In a good setup you're getting nearly 80% more EU out of centrifuging your bred isotopes rather than turning them back into straight uranium. Now more than ever you should centrifuge! (And you really should leave the isotope crafting recipe deactivated because that would be very broken indeed.)

DERP.

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Oh, so there isn't a buff after all? Lame.

Increased output for thorium and plutonium? Nice. That'll make my future CRCS system even more powerful

Incidentally, since you now get 2 thorium dust for processing monazit ore in an industrial grinder, I could imagine you could just generate all your power with only thorium reactors.

I have a question: How do you simulate more than 1 heating cell in a GT computer cube? I tried clicking it multiple times. but it just cycles through the different possible components.

EDIT: Nevermind. I just tried right-clicking and it worked.

I didn't know it was configurable. I'm glad it is though, means I can carry on as originally planned.

I think Omicron, it is kinda OP, but it shouldn't be removed completely. Maybe make it so you get say 3 depleted cells rather than 8 per uranium.

Of course, the biggest advantage of this recipe is that you don't have to use the bloody canning machine!

I was really looking forward to building a big plutonium CRCS system to take advantage of the increased efficiency. The removal of crafting for depleted cells is a pain in the arse.

Still, i'm determined to make it work somehow. I'll just have to build a bunch of uranium reactors as well, though I don't know where i'll get all the uranium from.

Alternatively, the bee people should add a plutonium bee.

EDIT: Just remembered you get 1/2 a plutonium dust from running a silk-touched uranium ore through an industrial grinder... maybe a plutonium setup wouldn't be a waste of time after all!

Can't you get berylium from ender pearl dust? That would be WAAAAAAAAAY cheaper.

Quote from Omicron

But that's just how plutonium rolls - it rules efficiency, while uranium remains the output king.

Not if its CRCS

Seriously though, I wonder how viable that would actually be - use all of your plutonium in a crazy eu/t/efficiency CRCS reactor, while using the thorium in a breeder and a bunch of smaller reactors. I imagine (without doing any sums) it would probably be more efficient to just go with the bog-standard hybrids. Still, would be fun to try.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

Agreed completely. I can accept a 1:3.52 EU/Heat ratio. It'll still be a bugger to work, but at least it CAN be done.

For that matter, Precise Buses and Fuzzy Buses are now in Applied Energistics as of 1.5.1. These should significantly aid in automating a reactor. Use an ME Chest as your storage buffer and you won't even need a Disk Drive or Terminal for it. And hey, it's not like you aren't producing the power necessary to keep it going... hook it up to an MFSU that feeds from the output of the reactor and you're gold. Also, if you can normalize the heat buildup of the cells, you can use Precise Buses to automate the whole blinkin' thing. Just like you can calculate based on the time, you can precisely calculate the damage value at a specific time of any given cell.

I'm still working out the details, but I'm quite excited by this.

To be honest, I think it would probably be simpler to use fuzzy buses (buses? bi?). Its not as if you're going to be pulling cells out of the coolers that aren't fully cooled anyway. Another thing is: with my current CRCS system (automated by RP stuff), i've noticed that cells that are only 1% damaged aren't considered to be damaged at all. I don't know if this glitch affects AE (I suspect it probably doesn't), but it would make the use of precise buses/bi a bit harder.

Having said that, i'm still an AE novice, when I update to 1.5.1 i'll have to spend quite a bit of time tinkering until I find something that works.

By the way, Omicron: what motivation do you have for your design challenge? It just seems like a rather arbitrary set of rules (only 5 chambers).

All I can say for the new plutonium numbers is... wow. Now the extra power generated more than makes up for the extra heat. The example I was thinking of, with my CRCS setup, involves a 4*2 rectangle of quad cells, with neutron reflectors on the ends. With uranium, this generates 960 eu/t and 2688 heat/t, same as before. With plutonium however, we're now looking at a whopping 2400 eu/t, and 8448 heat/t. Thats a 150% increase in power, for a 214% increase in heat. For a CRCS system, where extra heat generated is less of an issue anyway, i'd say that's pretty damn good. Thanks Greg

EDIT: Just noticed the hybrid effect is now completely gone. I wonder if the plutonium buff will make hybrid reactors still worth doing? (Not that I ever used them, too complicated for me).

As a nuclear fanatic, I really like the look of this mod even in this early stage; the extra heat allowed by the infernal reactor chambers could make breeders with unprecedented efficiency, and the enlarged 9*7 inventory size will allow me to squeeze even more power out of my reactors. I also like the look of those obsidian neutron reflectors - something thats worth using before getting iridium ones! However, I would say that you shouldn't make the maximum inventory size of the tier 1+2 reactors smaller than the 'classic' reactor, especially seeing as they are also more expensive (unless you also plan on buffing the eu/t generated by a given uranium cell). Looks great. Keep up the good work

Shneekey, i'm i'm playing with GT in the ftb ultimate pack 1.02... has the plutonium output been nerfed since that version? Because it has the reduced throium lifetime, but the plutonium output seems to be much higher than what you're saying (exactly double, to be precise). I guess i'll have the halved plutonium output when this pack gets updated to 1.5.1. Thanks a bunch Greg

Well, I've just done a bit of testing with the design in my earlier post, and it definitely outputs 2880 eu/t (I just realized I got 5760 eu/t since I have the default nuclear output value doubled). That's 50% more than before, which was 1920 eu/t. However, with 360k cooling cells the micro-cycle time is down to 343 seconds - before it was 477 eu/t. That means i'll need yet more cooling towers *sigh*.

Of course Mr Gregory, you could always make plutonium give out the same amount of eu as before and still give it the doubled scaling thing; I won't mind ;).

Grrr, I was going to make a DDoS reactor with all this plutonium i've been stockpiling. Now I might as well just use uranium

EDIT: Hmm, just ran it through a computer cube. Apparently the doubled scaling more than makes up for the 1/2 reduction in eu/t. It says that a reactor configured like this should produce 5760 eu/t. Presumably that'll be halved to 2880 eu/t - still more than we're getting now.

Hey guys, another question: how exactly do you work out how many coolers you'll need for a given reactor? I have heard that plutonium has been buffed in GT 1.5.1, and I was thinking of running a bunch of reactors like this, but I don't how many coolers I would need. So how would I work it out?

I don't know if its worth doing, since it uses quite a bit of energy, but it just dawned on me that the vacuum freezer from GT can cool cells. Not on my pc atm, so I can't check how much eu is used per cell. But it would probably be faster than cooling them normally.

Just thought i'd give you guys an update, if you're having the same problem as me with the filters/retrievers.

We all know that a filter/retriever differentiates between cells with and without damage values. However, I just discovered that a cell that is only 1% damaged is not considered to have a damage value at all. It must be at least 2% damaged to be considered damaged by the filters/retrievers. This was problematic because I was using 1% damaged cells in the filters/retrievers, which were then picking up undamaged cells as a result.

I don't know if anyone else knew about this, but i've never seen it mentioned anywhere and I thought it was worth knowing to anyone wanting to set up a DDOS reactor of their own.

Well this is odd. The problem with the retrievers I mentioned apparently only affects Helium cooling cells. The NaK ones work just fine.

EDIT: Ok, I managed to get the 8 pocket reactors going, with 30 coolers to be on the safe side. It produced a nice 5760 eu/t, producing UU matter in no time. However, the problem came when setting up the logic gates necessary to automate it. Because there was more than 1 reactor, I used a retriever pulsing 48 times to remove the hot cells, and another pulsing 48 cells to retrieve some cooled cells as usual. However, the reactors turned on prematurely, and so made a rather big hole. I guess what I needed was a way to count how many times the regulators had received cells, but I don't even know how to do that with 1 regulator, never mind 8. I also don't have the time nor the inclination to learn lua, meaning using a computer to automate is out of the question. So: could anyone post a screenshot showing what a setup of logic gates would look like? Alternatively, if someone could write out a program then that would be great as well. I don't mean to sound selfish but its for the community, not just me, so anyone could setup an awesome DDOS setup and have access to tons of energy without spamming solar panels.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

If the Filter has only damaged cells in it, then it should only be pulling damaged cells out of the reactor. It shouldn't be pulling full ones. This is hard-coded into RP2.

That reactor is a kludgy and inefficient mess. I said so when I first made it. It was an example of what was theoretically possible, with the caveat that it was not by any means feasible.

If you want a HAYOish setup, use multiple smaller reactors in tandem, so it looks like you have a massive multiblock structure as your reactor, with your few dozen cooling towers set up so that all of them are being fed equally. In fact, you could probably set that up with a single Retriever set to pull enough cells for all of your reactors, and having a single Restriction Tube in the pipeline. Basically, as long as all the empty cells are pulled, they will always try to go to the nearest empty slot, which will always be on the 'reactor' side of the restriction tube, so they'll always manage to find a good spot to go to.

Take, for example, the pocket reactor I just linked. 'Only' 720 EU/t, sure, but it only needs 4 cooling towers by itself. However, when you do the math, it actually ends up around 3.5. So two of them is roughly 7 cooling towers, saving you a tower, and netting 1440 EU/t. At that point, you just scale it up. Four times that means 28 cooling towers for 5760 EU/t! Might have to slide in an extra one or two, just to give yourself a margin of error, but you're producing more EU/t for fewer cooling towers.

Plus, a bank of eight nuclear reactors connected to an expanse of 28 cooling towers is VERY HAYO!ish.

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Ok, I'll admit, I never thought of using 8 mini-reactors. It seems you've beaten me on all fronts. My matter fabricator is happy.

Regarding the filter, even if its pulling out cells without a damage value (which may be a screw up on my part, haven't checked since yesterday), I just realised it probably won't matter. This is because all of the cells get replaced anyway, so as long as it pulls out the damaged cells at all i'll be happy.

Two questions though - how long does a thick neutron reflector last? The other thing is, since the mini-reactors use uranium, I no longer have any use for my plutonium. Do you know of any good DDOS setups using that?

EDIT: Ok, I've just been tinkering with this DDOS setup in my test world, and I've encountered an even worse problem. The retriever is set to only retrieve fully cooled cells (i.e. ones without a damage value), but I just tested it and it pulls any of them out, damage value or not. I don't know if this is a bug or there's been a recent change to RP, but this means that I can't automate my DDOS reactors without a serious design rework, if at all. Is anyone else experiencing this? If so, is there a way to fix it?

Quote from Barumann

I honestly like close to everything about the nuclear revolution. There are however two minor things I do miss, though. The external cooling was, well, kinda cool. I'd like to see it come back, even if its only minor.

the second thing is cooling cells - they are both ridiculously pricey and they are not remotely useful. under normal circumstances no design uses them, which is a shame.

You're forgetting DDOS, which certainly are useful - 720 eu/t with efficiency 6 and low startup costs? You get far more power out of your uranium/plutonium that way.