Posts by Omicron

Well, to be quite honest... in my last map I built specifically for MOX from the outset, and actually never got around to it.

I started with Thermal Expansion, which was just out fresh at the time, to get my basic needs covered. Once I had a tesseract connected quarry going and started to get real resource income, I built myself an IC2 workshop (a recycling system for the quarry output to start with, and then going from there). It was to be driven by a big underground reactor core which I dubbed "The Heart of the Mountain". It was made up of eight of my three-chamber MOX reactors, for a total output of up to 5400 EU/t. Except that I started off running them on uranium because I didn't have MOX fuel yet.

I have never before in my Minecraft career built something that incredibly expensive! Three full-size 64x64 ocean quarries had run their course by the time I had enough diamonds, and that included processing every last piece of coal into diamonds as well. And I actually managed to use up all of the iron, too. In parallel to that I was using manual digging by means of Gravisuite advanced diamond drill and a heightband targeted IC2 miner as well as trading with other players to supply myself with lead, copper and tin (the custom oregen meant that the quarries produced none of that). It took me weeks of gameplay.

All during that time, I used the first sub-reactor I built to power my workshop. Well, initially it was a trio of geothermals, but as soon as the first reactor was complete, I switched to nuclear power. The 135 EU/t were easily enough to cover my needs, especially since bulk ore processing still ran through my TE setup and the thermal centrifuge isn't worth using for ore anyway.

I eventually finished building all those reactors, as well as the assorted luxury infrastructure that came after them because I could (four MFSUs, a teleporter station leading to my various friends' bases etc). I did have a full massfab/replicator setup with some 800 buckets stored up, too. But, even though I at one point ran the Heart in full power mode under uranium (still a respectable 1080 EU/t), I just really didn't need all that much EU/t. And over the entire time of building all this and generating all that UU-matter, I managed to produce just enough plutonium to be able to stock one of the eight sub-reactors with MOX fuel. If I wanted to. But I didn't really have a need...

Although it was a fun challenge, next time I'll probably build smaller

- Replaced 0-chamber design with Blackpalt's high efficiency zero running cost reactor
- Added Blackpalt's low-output 1-chamber reactor
- Added Blackpalt's high-output 1-chamber reactor
- Replaced 2-chamber design with Blackpalt's improved high efficiency reactor, after fixing wrong cost calculation
- Added Blackpalt's high-output 2-chamber reactor
- Added Blackpalt's high-efficiency 3-chamber reactor, after fixing wrong cost calculation
- Added Blackpalt's high-output 3-chamber reactor
- Replaced 4-chamber reflector design with Blackpalt's low-cost alternative, after fixing wrong cost calculation and tweaking it to make it cheaper
- Replaced 4-chamber non-reflector design with Blackpalt's zero running cost variant, after fixing wrong cost calculation
- Replaced 5-chamber design with Blackpalt's low-cost alternative
- Added Blackpalt's high-output 5-chamber reactor
- Replaced 6-chamber high-output design with Zombie's high-output reactor

Good god Zombie, 27 advanced vents... I hereby award you the "makes diamonds cry" badge of insanity.
(And as for Blackpalt, he gets the "makes list maintainer cry" badge of insanity :D)

In regards to the hull exchange variants, I'll consider them another time, this already took a good two hours as it is...

Looking at the first picture, all the batboxes seem to be oriented in the same direction. However, the batbox can only output from one face. So in 3 cases, the cable is connected to the wrong face, and only in one case it is connected to the right one. Thus, only one out of four batboxes sends energy into the building.

Solution: rotate your roof-mounted batboxes to face the right way.

Blackpalt, you show the makings of a man who is very, very bored at work. Have you considered a more exciting vocation?

Unfortunately I'm fairly busy both at work and at home right now, but I will eventually get around to digging through your list. Just give me a day or two.

Quote from Blackpalt

How do you evaluate what goes on the list, is it something like cheapest, most efficient and most power for every size reactor or something similar. Would be easier to design reactors with something specific in mind.

In most cases, I look for the design that gives the best EU/t at a balanced efficiency, i.e. around 4 base (20 multiplied). That's usually the price/performance sweetspot, where you get decent output without running searingly hot, and where you can be conservative with your fuel without getting the the point where you're starting to pay for your EU/t in metals/coal instead.

If reasonable options exist, I add in secondary alternatives that either up efficiency or output significantly while sacrificing the other, for people who like to roll that way.

I also aim to provide an option with running cost, and one without, if available.

Performance being equal, a design with no running cost always trumps one with running cost. Reflectors auto-lose and will never be the sole representative of their tier, they can only be an exotic alternative.

And then, as the final step, I look at how much initial build cost there is, with the cheapest offering winning.

Since you're discussing GregTech right now, I'll also point out that I'm following the same guideline as all other reactor design collections to date; that is, all designs are evaluated from a pure IC2, no-addon perspective only. For when GregTech had multiple extra fuel choices, some added extra sections for GregTech reactors; but since this list here deals with one specific fuel and the only thing GregTech adds is the iridium reflector, I'm not going to bother. Any given reflector reactor can be drop-in upgraded with iridium reflectors, so no individual treatment is required.

And yes, the up-front cost of these reflectors is astronomic. Back in 1.5.x I calculated them to 477 UU-matter per piece. Now obviously this doesn't work anymore because you can't produce all the ingredients with UU-matter anymore/yet, but if the recipe hasn't changed then it will be hundreds of cycles for a 4-iridium design to become cheaper than a quad fuel rod with dual regular reflectors design.

I've always treated them not as something you build because you have to be miserly with materials, but rather something you build because you really are that loaded.

Nice work, Blackpalt. I added two of your six-chambers and one of your 2-chambers to the list, replacing the previous designs.

Working as intended.

A reactor "ticks" once per second. When it does so, it goes through all its components one by one, top left to bottom right. Therefore, the order of components is important. Flipping a design upside down can screw up the heat transfer between components because they do not activate in the right order anymore - imagine a bucket brigade that goes out of sync.

Quote from Blackpalt

Building cost: How do you guys calculate this, i dont trust the reactor planer...

Yeah, the reactor planner doesn't give proper IC2 Exp numbers. The prices in the listing are all calculated with a spreadsheet I built by hand from looking up ingame recipes in NEI. See post #172 for a download (requires Excel, since I carry my title for a reason :P).

Not bad an idea, but unfortunately reflectors don't work like that... their "consumption" scales with the cells they're next to. A dual cell costs 2 durability per reactor tick, a quad cell four.

So your design has 2 reflectors taking 4 damage per tick, while the other variant has 4 reflectors taking 2 damage per tick. The end result is the same.

If you can find it in Requia's thread it tends to be a good design, yes.

We'll see if that persists, SpwnX. Thunderdark originally stated that it was intentional for MOX reactors to run at up to x5 multiplier. If the melting was reinstated, they would only be able to run at x4.4 at most. Of course, things change during development, but I'll give it a few more dev builds for them to settle on something that looks long-term. Then I'll adjust the figures in the reactor list appropriately, if required.

They melt themselves because the amount of heat you're asking them to move around is higher than their capacity to move heat around. If you want to make that work, use more than one. If that still melts, use even more.

And if you find yourself thinking "wow, that takes up so much space and so many components, that's totally inefficient!", then you have just figured out why nobody else is doing it

Regardless of whether or not melting surrounding blocks when between 85% and 99% heat is intentional, they should never melt their own chambers. If they do, then you effectively have the same result as if you simply lowered the maximum reactor temperature to 8500 degrees - namely the fact that running above that point is guaranteed to give you a violent detonation in short order. The only difference is that simply lowering the temperature ceiling would be easier to implement and doesn't require per-tick calculation...

Yep, that works. You can even make it cheaper by replacing two of the three yellow marked vents with basic ones.

You mind if I add that to my list of MOX designs?

This reactor designs thread is older than IC2 Experimental, so it includes only uranium designs. Requia doesn't seem to be around anymore to update it either. But since uranium reactors didn't actually change in IC2 Experimental, this thread is still perfectly useful as a repository of designs.

You just need to keep in mind four things for 1.6.x:
- Component recipes are completely different, so the build cost numbers given by the planner are wrong.
- Running costs for multicells have all but disappeared. Dual cells are free, and quad cells only cost 2 copper and 1 iron per cell.
- Cell lifetime has doubled, so you get twice the total EU at the same EU/t rating
- UU-matter is now so expensive that calculating building costs or running costs in UU-matter is completely impractical (yes, even with scrap). Even a single condensator can pull a reactor into the negative if you try to fabricate lapis from UU-matter. So you might as well ignore that part entirely.

Other than that, it's the same as ever... provided they fixed that bug with heat exchangers running twice per cycle. For MOX reactors, I started a new thread.

Not bad at all. c4commando's is a little cheaper still though.

This sounds like a bug to me... reactors haven't melted any block into lava in a long time now. And if they were supposed to melt blocks into lava, bedrock would be the last block you'd want to affect.

Finally got around to updating. SpwnX's 4-chamber and KCMcG's 6-chamber are on the list.

EDIT: Oh, and I dropped the cost spreadsheet into my dropbox, maybe it'll be of use to someone. Usage should be self-explanatory.

Quote from Nonotan

What? Diamonds grow on sticks!

They are very expensive in terms of iron and copper as well, moreso than most other parts.

Quote from KCMcG

I came up with a new 6 chamber design that gets 1000 EU/t with an efficiency of 20.

Edit: Also came up with a 4 chamber design that gets 875 EU/t with an efficiency of 19.45.

Will evaluate once I get home, unless Stuff Happens(tm) again.

Nice, SpwnX!

I'll further tweak that to this: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…k8vtzdolz5oucb2mlgm6hmlmo
Otherwise you're only saving a little because the advanced vents are so much more expensive than any other component.

Will update the listing when I get home to my cost calculation spreadsheet.