Posts by Omicron

I'm honestly disappointed. I really liked the whole hybrid concept, from the strangely appealing mechanic itself over the fun engineering challenges associated down to the fact that it finally made nuclear reactors worth their price and their danger. The designs that you guys came up with were downright works of art, and it's a crying shame that we now have to go back to boring, generic blocks of single cell types, at less than half the efficiency and output per tick than before... and in return we get to save a handful of copper bars a day. Woo, exciting... not

I was looking forward so very, very much to build a legit hybrid reactor in my upcoming 1.5 world. Now I feel like a child whose candy has been stolen. I'm not sure whether I'll go into the IC2 config to bump up reactor output and build a vanilla reactor that will be boring but at least worth its resource cost, or if I'll just do what I always do and produce my EU from a mixture of steam turbines, solars and methane side products... I mean hey, turbines just got buffed again lately.

14 diamonds, 62 gold, near 400 iron and six chambers is cheap now? o_O

This design from page 1 has you beat on all fronts except copper running costs, I'm afraid. And it is so much cheaper that you can run it for days until the higher running cost has made up the difference in copper. And that's still not touching the other resources...

And you can go the other direction as well: this design, also from page 1, costs minimally more copper but has zero copper running costs. It's also a lot cheaper when the other resources are counted. It's not fully efficiency 4, but 3.83 is very close to it.

So while I commend your effort, your design is far from being anywhere near the cheapest. Maybe if you can take that same uranium layout, and find a cheaper cooling solution?

Out of interest, have you looked at the GregTech beta yet, in terms of how the thorium and plutonium cells changed and how that affects reactor design?

25 hybrid reactors? Good grief, 5,500 EU/t... I bet your matter fab isn't feeling that slow anymore, is it :p

Note though that the reactor planner does the efficiency wrong on hybrid reactors. Using the approach I described here, I get the following results:

- Efficiency 8.722 for the three-chamber design (314/36)
- Efficiency 7.333 for the two-chamber design (220/30)

And no wonder that you've got excess thorium if you're running twenty-five +10 thorium positive hybrids... every reactor cycle you're manufacturing 250 more thorium cells than you're using!

Would GregTech supercondensators / superconductor wire work? Or do they only interface with the fusion reactor?

Requia, I'd like to pick up the above exchange again, because more or less out of nowhere I suddenly noticed that a.) I made a mistake in my post, and b.) when I fix that mistake, I get significantly lower efficiency values than the ones you used for the hybrid reactors in your post at the top of page 2.

The mistake I made: I proposed totaling up the theoretical yield of all fuel cells, but was not counting the fact that 2.5 plutonium cells were being consumed for the full thorium cycle. Therefore I counted way less plutonium than was actually needed, and strongly overstated the efficiency.

Now let me try again. Still going off the following numbers:
- Each thorium cell generates 1 million EU per efficiency rating
- Each plutonium cell generates 4 million EU per efficiency rating
- Therefore, we can count quad thorium cells and single plutonium cells together for the purpose of this
- Because the ratio is uneven (2.5 plutonium cycles per thorium cycle), examining two cycles makes the math prettier

Looking at the thorium neutral reactor you posted at the top of page 2, you quote a 14.68 hybrid efficiency for it. Through two cycles, it generates 734 million EU while consuming 10 quad thorium cells (5 slots of 1 per cycle) and 10 single plutonium cells (two slots of 2.5 per cycle). That's 20 times 4 million EU per efficiency, or a total of 80 million EU per efficiency. 734 / 80 gives me 9.175, not 14.68.

Another example: The -4 thorium negative reactor you quote at 16.8 hybrid efficiency: 12 quad thorium cells and 10 single plutonium cells for two full cycles, generating 840 million EU. 840 / (22 * 4) = 9.545

Third, the proposed 512 EU/t, +6 thorium positive design we were trying to cool, which I falsely analyzed as 14.222 in my first attempt at this efficiency model: 12 quad thorium and 15 single plutonium for 1024 million EU. 1024 / (27 * 4) = 9.481

The neat thing about this efficiency rating model is that it works for uranium too (with the same value as thorium), and accurately portrays normal IC2 reactors as well as GregTech hybrid reactors with the same model. I also don't think it oversells the efficiency of unbalanced designs too much like you feared, either, with less than 0.4 efficiency difference between the neutral one and the unbalanced designs. What do you think?

(I realize that GregTech's 1.5 changes will probably require re-examining the validity of this model, but unless the adjusted tick rate of plutonium has some far more drastic effects than I expect, it shouldn't take more than re-calibrating the value of plutonium... I think.)

Wouldn't it be simpler to calculate it based on EU yield per cell alone?

i.e. that 512 EU/t, 512 million EU reactor we had with the cooling cell, it had six quad thorium cells, meaning 24 thorium cells at 1 million EU per thorium per efficiency, and 3 plutonium cells at 4 million EU per efficiency. Sums up to 36 million EU per efficiency.

512 / 36 = 14.222

A question, Requia - how exactly did you calculate "hybrid efficiency" in your top of page 2 post?

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

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

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.

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.

Nuts, forgot to press copy URL

Let me try and fix 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.

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.

Quote from GregoriusT

I only change Thorium and Plutonium Cells a bit, and remove the override of the regular Uranium Cells.

Well, considering that these thorium and plutonium cells are the exact thing that hybrid reactors rely on, I hope you understand that I'm not holding on to any expectations until the update arrives

Unless you'd be willing to divulge the nature of the planned changes...?

Alright, thanks, I'll give that a whirl in my test world. If it works I might just use it in my next new world... although GregTech is planning on doing something to nuclear reactors in the 1.5 update, so who knows if these designs are still valid then.

Ah, I see. So that assumes that you have a breeder reactor to go along with your hybrid reactor? Bit of a bummer, I never touched breeders before because of the (perceived) tedium of tending to them around the clock. Can you also run a hybrid without a breeder on the side in some way?

(Unless something changed since I last looked and breeders can be automated nowadays)

Hi Requia,

could you quickly explain for amateurs like me what you mean with "thorium positive" or "thorium negative" in your post about GregTech reactors on page 2?