Posts by Omicron

Yeah well, I wasn't using that setup as a viable "cheap & spammable" design but rather just as a "truckload of quad cells" example to put the spotlight on the cost difference.

The issue with cheap reactors is that they're often not terribly efficient, or hardly put out any EU/t. In fact, the three key factors of power output, efficiency and price are probably best described in a triangle. Your reactor can be anywhere inside that triangle, but as you move towards one of the ideals, you move away from both others. The cheapest reactor will be terribly inefficient and have next to no output (a single uranium cell and a single basic heat vent in a 0-chamber reactor). If you bump up output it's automatically going to cost more, but still be terribly inefficient. If you focus on increasing the efficiency at the same price, power output will be going down. As such, you need to find an equilibrium somewhere, ideally one that matches your particular outside factors (like, if you only have a limited uranium income you need efficiency if you want to keep up the operation).

(P.S.: cooling a 3x3 grid of quad thoriums in a 4-chamber reactor, good luck... I couldn't make it work with anything but 6, despite the lowered heat in 1.5.2. :p Though if you can manage a 5-chamber variant, I'm interested in your tricks...)

Quote from gattsuru

Copper costs get killer for thorium-plutonium boxes, I'm finding, and the 3.0 nerfs hurt EU/t/copper investment here a lot. Cutting down on OC heat vents and quads helps, but that hits performance pretty hard.

Remember that if you have thorium/plutonium available, you also get GregTech's reduction in costs for multi-cells (all of them including uranium). Takes only 1/8th as much as in standard IC2. That way you can build a 3x3 grid of quad thorium cells emitting 204 EU/t for just 45 copper, which is only 5 copper more than a single quad cell costs without GregTech. And well, if you're short on copper, you can also use lead instead now.

(EDIT: And those cheap thorium multi-cells will also last 2.5 times as long as uranium ones before needing replacement.)

I've not seen the creator of the planner around in a long time... can't say if it will receive an upgrade anytime soon. I can guarantee you however that it won't be updated to the status in 2.90h, because that was a short-term beta build to test changes planned for the 1.5 port. It's quite buggy, especially thorium. If the planner was updated, then probably to 3.05+.

In the meantime though, you can use a cell mockup in planner with the same heat output as your desired ingame cell layout to design a fitting cooling system. It's not perfect, but it works, provided you have the numbers.

You also don't have enough plutonium.

But if you insist, the keyword is "microcycle reactor". You let it run for x seconds, then switch it off, exchange all the condensators, then switch it on again for x seconds, then switch it off again and exchange all the condensators and so on.

Of course, this means you're getting significantly less than the advertised 8560 EU/t, simply because the reactor is regularly switched off. But then again, this reactor design is the equivalent of a Ferrari with a rocket fuel booster bolted onto it. It's completely impractical, probably impossible to build and even if someone built it, it couldn't be driven. Nobody would ever take that idea seriously, and the same is true for this reactor. If you do take it seriously... please do yourself a favor and learn the basics first.

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.

Sometime between 3.04c and 3.05g. Greg's not telling us wen he tweaks this stuff, and I can't test every version, so I usually check one every 2 weeks or so.

Yeah, the unintended overscaling is quite dead, bugfixed ruthlessly... We now have to make do with the normal values.

On the plus side, both thorium and plutonium got a noticeable buff recently. However the computercube currently simulates it wrong. Already reported the bug earlier.

I made a tentative 4 chamber design a while ago when the 1.5 builds stabilized for the first time. Of course, values changed since then, so I can't guarantee anything. And it is quite severely unbalanced. You could however develop a 4-chamber thorium sink reactor that consumes your leftover thorium while this guy consumes mostly plutonium.

I wouldn't say 100% accurate. The cube works great in 99.99999% of all cases, but it is not infallible.

For example, in 3.04c it reported a build as stable where even an amateur can see that it isn't: Bug Report

And now in 3.05g the simulation for any build involving thorium is wrong, because Greg recently changed some values but apparently not only didn't post a changelog but even forgot to tell his own cube: Bug Report

The only 100% authority on whether a setup works or not is the actual reactor in active operation.

While I'm at it: spreadsheet updated with latest values. Thorium +20% lifetime (30,000 seconds, up from 25,000); Plutonium, +20% power output (12EU/t base, up from 10 EU/t). Heat output remained identical.

Didn't update centrifuge math because lazy. Suffice to say, the 20% across the board total output buff make GregTech fuels walk all over Uranium. Maybe a counterbalance to the disabling of the depleted isotope recipe? It certainly makes it more rewarding to breed the leftovers from your uranium reactors.

DERP.

Cell mockups in the planner work tenuously... you have to know how much heat your 1.5 setup generates, and then find something that roughly resembles it.

However, you may run into edge cases where the heat simulation in the planner ends up being wrong because there are different cell types emitting different amounts of heat at different times than what you actually want to run. So a setup that appears stable might still fail ingame. I discovered this the hard way.

This thread is also a month old, much older than FTB 1.1.0 is.

So be careful when you start saying what FTB does or doesn't have... :p

Well, and in all fairness, the isotope recipe nerf has a config option to restore normal IC2 behavior.

Still ambivalent about whether or not I'll set it in my next world. On one hand, it was always a little broken. On the other hand, I wanted to build a huge multi-reactor as well... decisions, decisions!

Indeed, multi-reactor setups push efficiency very high up. Theoretical maximum is isotope efficiency 9.2, using quad reflector double plutonium in one reactor (quad reflector quad plutonium is uncoolable, and triple reflector quad uranium is less efficienct) and quad reflector quad thorium in another. Another benefit is that if you're in the business of multiple reactors anyway, you can easily scale up EU/t even with high efficiency designs.

It doesn't even need CRCS to pull off. I made a concept of six dual plutonium + 4 single thorium reactors (+6 thorium each) paired with a single 3x3 quad thorium sink reactor (-36 thorium). I don't have the setups here to show off, but that should be pulling 1212 EU/t out of 7 reactors, with an isotope efficiency of 8.08 while being thorium neutral. It could be even more efficient by using real reflectors instead of single thorium cells, but part of the appeal of this system is that you can get that ridiculous number without investing in a single reflector.

However I shelved the idea after Greg killed the 1 uranium -> 8 depleted cells recipe, as such a system would require a constant stream of isotopes to centrifuge and now the only way to get them is running large amounts of uranium through reactors.

Cell value of 72, 506 million output -> efficiency 7.03. This isn't good for a full size hybrid reactor. It is also heavily unbalanced - if you run this off of a plutonium-producing centrifuge, you'll have 48 leftover thorium cells for every cycle this reactor runs.

This design from post #3 gives you 484 EU/t at efficiency 9.31, while being significantly less unbalanced (only 8 excess thorium cells per cycle).

Remember the planner does the efficiency for hybrid reactors wrong. Actual efficiency for that design is 7.43, which is lowish for a 1.4.7 plutonium/thorium hybrid but still quite good considering the size limitation.

Just keep in mind that ther era of overscaling hybrids is coming to an end with 1.5+...

(Also, you can replace the overclocked vent in the lower right with a normal heat vent to make it cheaper.)

Do you have Buildcraft available?

The easiest way possible to automate a reactor is to use a gate with the "no space in inventory -> redstone signal" conditional set to turn on the reactor. That way, whenever fuel cells expire, or a component melts off, or a griefer steals a heat vent to blow up your base, the reactor instantly shuts itself down because the condition is no longer true.

You can use this also to control a breeder, if you have the means to remove re-enriched isotopes from the reactor automatically. An emerald pipe can do it just as well as the redpower filter. Attach the pipe, tell it to filter for re-enriched isotopes, and slap an iron autarchic OR gate on it. Set the conditional I described above, as well as a conditional like "items in inventory -> energy pulse". Thus, twice per second the gate will attempt to pull out any re-enriched isotope it can find. As soon as any isotope finishes charging, it gets pulled out before the next reactor tick happens, and the reactor is no longer full, resulting in the redstone signal going dark and the reactor shutting itself down until you replace the missing isotope (or four, as they will all get pulled out one by one if they finish simultaneously).

Of course, that approach limits you to making your upgrades in larger steps (adding a new reactor chamber and filling it up), but it is guaranteed to work and takes only one minute to configure as opposed to several hours of fiddling with an unreliable redstone clock.

Hah, yeah, that damage value is totally borked

It shouldn't affect the operation of the reactor or the refueling system much, though. It'll just refill the 5 cells that go missing, instead of 6.

I can't say why the IIP is showing you 11 hours for runtime. 10,000 seconds should translate into roughly 2 hours 46 minutes 40 seconds.

Of course, you can test this. Let it run for an hour, observe how the number reported by the panel changes. Also check on the damage bar on the uranium cells inside the reactor, and see if they really expire in under 3 hours (and what the panel shows in the last few minutes before expiration).

I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say, but the design above will run for 2 hours 46 minutes for every 6 cells you provide in the chest, plus the first cycle already in the reactor.

If you provide 60 cells in the chest and 6 in the reactor, it will run for more than 30 hours without needing attention.

I suggest you use the zero-chamber reactor I linked to in my earlier post. 100 EU/t isn't 120, but quarries have diminishing returns on higher power input anyway so you'll hardly notice the difference between 40 and 48 MJ/t.

Next, set up an emerald transport pipe with an autarchic gate on the reactor. Set the filter in the emerald pipe to only pump out "near-depleted uranium cells". Those are sometimes leftover when an uranium cell expires. Set the autarchic gate as "space in inventory -> energy pulse". The pipe should ideally lead to a storage chest, of course.

Then place down another chest two blocks away from the reactor and fill it with uranium cells. Use a wooden transport pipe followed by a diamond transport pipe to connect the chest to the reactor, and branching off from the diamond pipe, build a loopback to the chest. In the diamond pipe interface, place an uranium cell in the exit leading toward the reactor. Place red pipe wire on both the wooden pipe and the diamond pipe. Place an iron OR gate on the diamond pipe, and set it to "space in inventory -> red pipe wire signal" and "no space in inventory -> redstone signal". Place an iron autarchic OR gate on the wooden pipe, and set it to "red pipe wire signal -> energy pulse".

Make sure you do not have a lever attached anywhere; the iron OR gate supplies the redstone signal to turn the reactor on so long as it is filled with cells.

This may sound convoluted, but it really isn't - and keep in mind that once established one time, you can re-use this setup with however many quarries you wish.

What happens is this: as soon as the reactor runs through its first 2:46 hour cycle, the uranium cells will disappear, and the "no space in inventory" condition on the diamond pipe's gate becomes false. This means it will stop outputting a redstone signal, which in turn means the reactor will turn off.

Also, the "space in inventory" condition on both attached gates becomes true, triggering the autarchic gates. The emerald pipe will remove any leftover depleted cells that may have spawned (you can throw those in a breeder later), while the wooden pipe supplies fresh uranium. The diamond pipe will force the first six uranium to go directly into the reactor, but as soon as that is full, the remaining cells in transit are allowed to try the alternate exit, which leads them back to the uranium storage chest (instead of spilling out, which would happen without a loopback path).

Finally, as soon as six new cells have been inserted, the "no space in inventory" condition on the diamond pipe's gate becomes true again, reactivating the redstone signal and thus turning the reactor back on. At the same time, both autarchic gates are turned off.

Thus you have a fully automatic reactor that will keep running as long as it finds uranium cells in its supply chest to keep replacing the consumed ones. You could plop down a big chest with lots of uranium cells, or use an ender chest and have an autocrafting system in your base continually provide new cells (just make sure you always leave some space for the cells returning via the loopback). The downtime between cycles when swapping in new cells should be in the neighbourhood of 10-15 seconds, so the quarry will not even finish slowing down before the reactor goes back online.

Have fun!

1.) It's the lifetime of uranium cells: 10,000 seconds. It cannot be modified in any way.

2.) Fully automated systems are perfectly possible. But, if you do not have a mod that lets you insert an item into an exactly specified slot, you're limited to designs that only use one cell type (only single cells, only dual cells, only quad cells). Because breeders automatically need a second cell type (the isotopes being recharged), you'll have to at least partly operate them manually unless you have such a mod. If your Tekkit pack includes Factorization, the routers can do it.

3.) There can't be a closed cycle. You can greatly extend the output of your uranium with breeding, but you will eventually need more.

Here are some good designs that you can easily automate with just some redpower filters or emerald pipes:
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…6ucaceovy6uixc92gxt2grpxc - full size, 300 EU/t, good efficiency
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…toq796klia30emh5avt7y27eo - 3 chambers, 160 EU/t, decent efficiency, will require you to fill the empty slots with some plating
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…d83b78y8enonfoolys5g23280 - minimum size, 100 EU/t, okay efficiency, no copper running cost

EDIT: holy crap ninja'd in force