Posts by Omicron

Quote from MatLaPatate

For very advanced automation, you may use the Advanced Idon'trememberwhat (Translocator ?) from GT

Advanced regulator.

(yes, it's expensive.)

Quote from MatLaPatate

As for Plutonium (mostly answering to hoho), it's no longer working since the multi pulse system, which was to me a nice improvement (especially since I somehow suggested it ^^), has been removed (ATM I think) because of being buggy. So now, Thorium OP-ness for breeding is back ^^.

Nope, the multipulse system is a 1.5 thing. It came after Greg fixed the hybrid scaling bug from 1.4. It was meant to make reactor fuels more distinct and interesting but it ended up breaking things left, right and center so it was rolled back. We now have the same values as in 1.4 except without the hybrid effect (and slightly less heat output).

Quote from hoho

Does plutonium still work as a "booster" for other fuels? I remember at some point surrounding a single plutonium cell with quad thorium ones gave some 400 EU/t with relatively low heat.

That worked back in 1.4.x. Was a bug that got fixed with the update to 1.5.

Why are you randomly throwing thorium cells in? If you want high output, just go all plutonium.

That said, good luck getting that design to work ingame. It'll end up as a crater after an hour or so, even if you somehow managed to procure enough lapis and plutonium to keep it running - which is highly unlikely: 72 plutonium and almost 4400 lapis per cycle, every cycle. But yeah, it won't make a full cycle anyways unless you rig it as a microcycle reactor on a redstone clock so it turns off while the condensators are being replaced.

Rule of the thumb: if you are making a design that involves condensators, there's a 95% chance that it only looks good on paper but either underperforms or outright explodes in actual gameplay (or both). Trying to make them happen is a mark of inexpeience with the running of reactors. As such, I recommend you go to the official reactor designs thread and look at the designs posted there (they may not have as high output, but for the price of your condensator reactor you can build 3-4 regular ones). Try to understand why they work as they do, and why they are considered good while condensator designs are not.

And then you should go ingame and make a test world and just try out designs. Plop down a gregtech computercube to make simulations, but also run actual test reactors. Grab thermometers from the NuclearControl addon and check if your stable-on-paper reactors are sneakily heating up the hull while you are not looking (like condensator designs are known to do). Look at the lifecycle of the different nuclear fuel cells that GregTech adds, which are produced out of what and what those recipes mean for supplying your reactor with cells.

Wow. That's... a lot. o_O; Definitely will require a test.

Greg wat R U doin! Greg, stahp!

Yes, it's bad. Expensive, low-efficiency, space-wasting, and unsafe (will explode after an hour or two due to heat accrued during swapping of condensators). You could never use this reactor ingame...

I recommend you familiarize yourself with the stickied reactor design guidelines, as well as the designs on the first page of this thread, and try to understand why they are built like they are. Nuclear reactors are kind of a separate minigame inside IC2, and making a good reactor from scratch requires knowledge of the rules you need to play the game by.

Quote from Shakie666

I've noticed that plutonium cells seem to give a lot more depleted cells than before (appears to be about 1.5 per plutonium cell).

Really? I have never seen any kind of cell output more depleted cells than there were active cells.

How it should work, simplified: The cell rolls a 1d4 on expiring. If it comes up 1, 2 or 3, the cell simply disappears. If it comes up 4, then it gets replaced by a number of depleted cells equal to the number of active cells that expire.

In other words, a single cell has a 25% chance to generate 1 depleted cell (but never any other number). A dual cell has a 25% chance to generate 2 depleted cells (but never any other number). A quad cell has a 25% chance to generate 4 depleted cells (but never any other number).

Unless Greg changed something without telling us (again), it should be impossible to get 1.5x the depleted cells from anything.

Maybe I need to load up Unhinged and test.

According to the simulation, they should be. But I have never built a breeder with thorium multicells ingame. Usually even one single thorium cell, properly brought up to temperature, can supply all but the most extreme builds.

You need to keep in mind that GregTech has also stopped allowing the 8x depleted cell crafting recipe from uranium, which basically allowed one to skip using uranium altogether and just mass-breed plutonium and thorium. This no longer works, thus the requirement for fast, high-output breeders has dropped considerably. The current uranium lifecycle starts in the centrifuge, where 4 uranium dust become 4 uranium cells, splitting off 1/4th plutonium and 1 thorium in the process. (Or was it 2 thorium? I forget.) Then you run the uranium through a generic IC2 reactor (you could build an uranium hybrid, but so far I've not found a good design), which yields 25% of the input worth in depleted cells, on average. Those you can breed and run through the centrifuge, splitting off plutonium which can run through a reactor and sometimes leave depleted cells again, which return into the cycle. But eventually, all of the originally inserted uranium burns out, either by not generating depleted cells, or by eventually becoming thorium through the breeding/centrifuging cycle and taking its last stint in a thorium sink reactor, which never returns any depleted cells.

In my latest GregTech world I have a group of five reactors, with about 1000 EU/t in combined output. Two uranium, one plutonium/thorium hybrid, one thorium sink, and one breeder. To this date I have not even started the breeder once. I have a couple depleted cells from the uranium reactors, but got unlucky and stayed below the average so far. On the other hand, I have a decent enough stockpile of uranium, plutonium and thorium dust from my industrial grinders. Especially thorium dust. I like silktouching coal ore. And now I have 500 of the glowy black stuff lying around. :p It also helps that the reactors are pretty much only running full burn if I need the matter fab for some reason. Otherwise they only do occasional short burns to top off the storage. I don't believe in production for the sake of production.

High-output breeders are a relic of 1.4.7's golden era of hybrid reactors (and even then, you could argue that you might as well run Pepe's excellent Hybreeder(tm), let all your reactors breed their own fuel and eschew dedicated breeders entirely). Nowadays, outside of creative-mode playground designs, I'd wager few if any people operate reactor setups big enough to need more than a small one, so long as it runs fully automated. The logistics of getting enough uranium in the first place to produce enough depleted cells for a breeder make sure of that.

Plutonium doesn't work, regardless of iteration. I tried it repeatedly.

While the multipulse system was active, plutonium charged depleted cells twice as fast, true; but it also scaled in efficiency at double the rate per neighbor, and as efficiency rises, heat generation scales exponentially. For one single putonium cell surrounded by 4 depleted cells, you were looking at 240 heat! That required so large of a cooling system to handle that you couldn't fit enough heat plating to get the temperature up, which slowed down the setup. A breeder with two uranium cells and eight depleted cells was running faster because it needed a lot less cooling and thus could reach a higher temperature.

And now that the multipulse system was retconned*, and we're back to 120 heat for a single plutonium cell with two neighbors, it's still not useful because it only charges at the same rate as uranium again. Or thorium. Which, now that the multipulse system was retconned, stopped being buggy and can once again be used to breed effectively.

* this was done in GregTech 3.07; I haven't checked the status quo since, based on Greg's statement that he's stopping to mess with nukes entirely until he can get around to implementing his own nuclear reactors.

Schneekey, you are insane :p

The one "flaw" I can see in this design is that most people who play normally will never have enough uranium/plutonium to run even one section of this, much less an entire tower. It just needs so much fuel.

Which version of GregTech in particular? (It matters)

It's hard to say whether or not your design is good, because the fuel cells are missing. You need to screenshot before you start the simulation, or create a mockup in the web-based reactor planner (it has outdated values, but you can at least still show off the design).

It also helps if you state which GregTech version precisely you want a design for, since in the early days of 3.x, attrributes for thorium and plutonium changed almost every update. They've only been stable since 3.07, and that with the caveat of "I don't know if Greg changed his mind without telling anyone, yet again".

Well, then post it as a suggestion in that thread, for peer review. If people agree it's a good design, it'll be put on the front page, either alongside or replacing the existing design. (might take a couple days)

Have you taken a look at the reactors and breeders presented in this sticky topic yet? They are among the best ones known to man. New [Official] Reactors design thread.

Basic IC2 components have not changed, only GregTech-added fuels.

If you are having troubles keeping a breeder heat stable, then you might want to look into heating cells. they are designed for exactly that purpose. They can be stacked up to 64 in one slot, and will emit <stack size> heat per reactor tick, until total reactor heat passes a threshold of <stack size> * 1000. Meaning, if you have a stack of 64 heating cells in your reactor, they will emit 64 heat per tick until total hull heat exceeds 64,000, at which point they stop emitting heat. That way, you have a mechanism that automatically keeps the reactor heated at your desired temperature, even if your cooling system is a little too strong.

They need to sit next to a reactor heat exchanger in order to work.

For one thing, it ticks only once per 2-3 seconds instead of every second. That's why your breeder is slower.

Also, if you use thorium for power generation, it does not scale up in output when you place cells next to each other. It does scale up in heat, though, meaning you get a whole ton of extra heat for almost no extra power output.

EDIT: by the way, your breeder loses heat because heat values for thorium and plutonium have changed and are no longer compatible with the reactor planner. For one single thorium cell with 4 neighbors you're looking at 12 heat generated instead of 15. Try doing this design: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…n0zm7fx61kkf9qs111qs36dtq
It should be heat neutral while running.

@ Fallen_dead: You can't "centrifuge uranium into plutonium". You'll still end up with 16 uranium cells for every plutonium cell you create this way.

@ Neko77025: if cost (and lapis) is not an issue, you can try something like this: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…6465umf9fmsr2emexcxjx4eok Mind you, for the price of that thing you could set up 4 normal six-chamber reactors that each generate 300-400 EU/t without any lapis cost.

You'll need a good way to recharge condensators at runtime, too. Direwolf20 used golems to good effect.

Don't boither using thorium in FTB Ultimate. The pack includes a beta version of GregTech that was intended as a first test/preview of 1.5.x features, not for stable play in an 1.4.7 environment. In that version, thorium is heavily bugged.

I recommend upgrading to Unleashed, or manually downgrading GregTech to a 2.8x release.

I wouldn't bother with condensator reactors unless your chests are overflowing with redstone and lapis. If you have to produce the lapis for it, that eats so much into the efficiency that other, non-condensator designs give you more EU after all is said and done.

Yeah, take a look at Requia's reactor design thread stickied above. Those designs are really among the best you can get for the buck.

Efficiency after factoring reflector costs: 2.97...

Rule of the thumb: consumable reflectors are never worth it. GregTech iridium reflectors almost never.