Posts by Omicron

Well, if it happened in a rnage of ca. 10 builds, that's a fairly good narrowing down already. I'll have confirm it with one of the newer builds when I have time later, then I can make a proper bug report.

Interesting. Which build do you guys use?

I used this one in a build 230-something world a few months back, and it worked flawlessly full cycle. I'm now going to test in on build 298, which is the last one that had any significant reactor changes, I believe.

EDIT: test says it is fully stable. Must be something introduced in a post-300 build.

Try and upload your crashlog to pastebin, and link it here.

I really like this idea!

Initially I thought it might be good to even give the encoding block a real reactor planner function, but it would still not remove the need for a web-based version - after all we want to share and link designs on the forums

Quote from xaix1999

i had noticed that wrong power tiers doesnt cause explosions. im just going to put that in the e-net wip folder. component heat vents "heal" lzh-condensators.

*snip*

if anyone has any suggestions on how to make this more efficient please let me know!

Since build #303, machine explosions by too much power have been disabled since people were griping about it and the e-net is unfinished and they didn't want to give the wrong impression.

Interesting observation with the component vents. That shouldn't happen. Gonna have to bug report that.

As for how to make it more efficient - you can bump the heat up to 9,990, at which point you get the full x5 multiplier instead of the ca. x4.2 you're currently getting. Of course, you're setting yourself up with a major explosion hazard. In fact, I am surprised that the design you posted as is didn't end up as a giant crater in short order.

See, condensator replacement isn't instant. It takes at least one tick, i.e. 1/20th of a second. If the reactor happens to execute a reactor tick during that exact world tick (the chance for this to happen is 5%, since the reactor ticks once a second), then one of the fuel rods won't have a condensator next to it while generating heat. That means the heat goes straight into the hull. Normally, condensator reactors pack a few overclocked heat vents in spare slots, which take care of such random heat spikes and bring the reactor hull down to 0. But this is a MOX reactor, so you 1.) do not want the hull to go down to 0, and 2.) cannot use overclocked vents in the first place as they will simply destroy themselves.

AE in particular makes this issue worse, since it sometimes takes a few ticks before noticing there is space to insert a repaired condensator. If I were you, I would not try to automate a MOX condensator reactor. It is absolutely not safe and stable, regardless of which solution you use. It will blow up sooner or later.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

First off, you can't get that much EU out of a reactor anymore, almost half of your EU output is completely wasted. The highest output is 2048, anything more than that and it won't work.

That is STILL wrong, Shneekey. I have explained this to you like four times already over the past three months. Power is split between all available output faces, so you can easily pull more than 2k. In fact, you can pull 40k from a 1-chamber if you really want/need to, and more from a multi-chamber. It's your own decision if you wish to insist on ignoring the truth with all your might, but please don't spread false 'facts' around to others.

Quote from Alchemist

What if I use lapis bees?

If you have a renewable source of lapis that doesn't consume EU to run, then you can easily use condensators (just be prepared to need a lot of lapis bees to supply a single reactor). However, because of the reasons I outlined above, you still don't want to make a fully automated MOX lapis reactor. It will never be stable.

The issue I see with worldgen structures is that they're really really REALLY difficult to get right on varying terrain. For instance, none out of 4 "extra dungeons/structures" mods I have tried managed to produce anything even remotely sensible in a world with BoP enabled (underground structures spawning in treetops) or in worlds created by ATG (what, a slope longer than 5 blocks? Disintegrate the entire structure into a cloud of blocks). And as far as I have been able to see, Ars Magica does not even generate its structures at all when ATG is present - which is inconvenient because you kind of need them for mod progression.

I'm not sure if it's worth the development effort if it instantly breaks in most modded environments because something changes the expected terrain in some fashion.

I disagree and will happily continue to use that argument.

Good point. A tesseract should also have the required throughput, if you feed enough into it on the other side.

It's not a bad design at all, but I doubt it makes 800 EU/t. The maximum multiplier is x5, and it's pulling a base 120 EU/t, so peak output should be 600 EU/t. Unless Thunderdark broke something again, that is

It's also a little more expensive than it needs to be. An improvement might be replacing the heat plating with component vents. This allows you to drop down 4 advanced vents to normal ones, saving 4 diamonds plus whatever 8 heat plating costs nowadays against an extra cost of 4 additional basic vents plus 8 tin and 6 iron. 12 diamonds instead of 16 is much more reasonable, especially since you could have a base output of 135 EU/t (peak 675 EU/t) by spending 14 diamonds on this design.

I just tested the compacting recycler, it's definitely not outputting scrap for every item inserted for me.

However, it is still outputting more than it should. Each stack in the screenshot represents the results from a full stack of recycled material. The average return was 17.777... scrap from 64 blocks, where IC2 standard should be 8 scrap from 64 blocks. So for me the compacting recycler gives roughly twice as much as it should.

Also:

While testing the thermal washer, I noticed that water supply via a buildcraft pipe wasn't nearly fast enough. The processing would halt and wait for more water all the time. So I broke the buildcraft pipe to replace it with something better... But, this act of breaking the pipe caused all three new machines (they were side by side) to instantly explode as if given too much power. EDIT: yeah, seems the thermal washer constantly drains water while hot, and behaves like a boiler (add water to a dry tank while hot -> boom). And even a fluiduct isn't nearly fast enough, good luck keeping this thing fed

Finally, shift-click support would be great

Admittedly I calculated off of U-235 alone, that would result in needing 91 stacks.

If he set up a smaller MOX reactor first to help convert U-238 into plutonium as well, he'd obviously need less. But then he could just keep using that one and not the silly design here (Which I still cannot see. This is why we have an online reactor planner...)

Transform that one power source down to 32 EU/t. That should take care of up to 128 luminators in a row.

I belatedly support the inclusion of the textures that Redlining made.

You may have a naming conflict with Gravitation Suite. It already adds an item called Advanced Chainsaw. This will likely confuse players who have both installed.

No.

There is zero gain to be had from making something more tedious for the sake of making it more tedious.

For some reason I can't open the attachment (despite being logged in).

But if the design really uses 96 MOX fuel rods... yeah, shows you probably haven't built a MOX reactor in legit survival play before. Good luck with this one, and may the patience of saints be with you. You'll need it!

When you're done collecting the diamond chest full of uranium ore, can you take a screenshot? That would be pretty impressive to see...

If you've never heard of Thermal Expansion, you must have really been living under a rock. It's existed since 1.4.x and started out as an expansion (hence the name) to Buildcraft, which you apparently do play. Nowadays it's stand-alone, and yes - it is one of the most popular mods around. Maybe more popular than IC2 by now. Entire modpacks have ditched IC2 completely in favor of it, and some threw out Buildcraft in addition as well.

1.) None, just two words for the same thing.

2.) Try using the names you get when mousing over components in the reactor planner (or looking them up ingame), so we understand what you mean. Be exact, some components have very similar names. Alblaka's guide uses different names, because it was written before the system was finalized and those were the development names at the time.

3.) "Vents" never pull heat from surrounding components into themselves. Only "exchangers" do.

4.) During each "reactor tick", which is once a second, the internal components are processed one by one. It starts in the top left corner and goes left to right, top to bottom until the lower right corner. Because of this, the order of the components matters.

The design you linked there is in fact one of the most complex ones on the board, since it employs many different cooling design tricks all within a tiny 3x4 space. It's a masterpiece - don't underestimate it just because it's small. It cannot work when inverted or paired with itself, because then the underlying assumptions of when how much heat gets handled where are no longer true. If you can understand what exactly each individual part in that reactor does and why, you know most there is to know.

The following parts breakdown might help you, as it puts the important stuff from Alblaka's guide into a more condensed, clear format:

Vents
Basic: Dissipates 6 heat. Pulls nothing, transfers nothing.
Advanced: Dissipates 12 heat. Pulls nothing, transfers nothing.
Reactor: Dissipates 5 heat. Pulls up to 5 heat from the hull. Transfers nothing.
Overclocked: Dissipates 20 heat. Pulls up to 36 heat from the hull. Transfers nothing.
Component: Dissipates nothing, pulls nothing, transfers nothing. Has no durability and cannot accept heat. Each adjacent component that is capable of storing heat, however, dissipates 4 heat, even if it cannot normally do so.

Exchangers
Basic: Dissipates nothing. Attempts to balance its own heat level with that of the hull and that of all surrounding components by transfering up to 4 heat between itself and the hull, and up to 12 heat between itself and its neighbours.
Advanced: Dissipates nothing. Attempts to balance its own heat level with that of the hull and that of all surrounding components by transfering up to 8 heat between itself and the hull, and up to 24 heat between itself and its neighbours.
Reactor: Dissipates nothing. Attempts to balance its own heat level with that of the hull by transferring up to 72 heat between itself and the hull.
Component: Dissipates nothing. Attempts to balance its own heat level with that of all surrounding components by transferring up to 36 heat between itself and its neighbours.

Note: an exchanger only pulls as much from the hull as necessary to achieve balance, and will even return heat to the hull if necessary. A vent capable of hull transfer, on the other hand, only ever pulls from the hull. It will always pull, as much as it can, even to the point of its own destruction.

Other
Fuel rod (cell): Generates heat, and inserts it into any available adjacent component that can accept heat. If multiple are available, it is split evenly; if one is available, it gets all of it. If none is available, the hull takes the heat.
Condensator: Gobbles up all heat at the cost of durability. Can only be restored by crafting it with redstone/lapis.
Coolant Cell: Gobbles up all heat at the cost of durability. Can only be restored by pulling the heat back out (cooling it back down, essentially).
Reflector: Pretends to be a fuel rod but isn't. Raises fuel rod efficiency. Does not interact with heat in any way, shape or form.
Plating: Increases maximum hull heat and lowers explosion magnitude. Does not interact with heat in any way, shape or form.

That design with the quad reflector quad cell is about as old as quad cells themselves are And yes, as Someone Else 37 already said, according to the "Resources Needed" tab of the reactor planner, the actual efficiency of this reactor is less than 3.

...or it would be in classic IC2. Unfortunately the planner is not updated to IC2 Experimental. However, if it was, your efficiency would be even lower because uu-matter costs increased tenfold. Even saving the 40 copper per quad cell doesn't make up for that.

You made the normal beginner mistake of focusing too much on the fuel rod configuration. That's actually the least important part in reactor design for IC2. What you are actually required to design is a cooling system. In this case, you need to build a cooling system capable of venting 448 heat per second while using as little space and resources as possible in the process. And as far as cooling system designs go, yours is quite inefficient. You can easily get that much out of 4 chambers with room to spare and almost 400 copper ingots less than your variant (again only valid for classic IC2). Can probably be made cheaper still with some effort. Unfortunately knowledge of real-life reactors is of no use in this minigame...

If you are looking for a high efficiency setup, it basically boils down to: are you willing to pay for it in copper, tin and coal? If yes, then you better have it lying around, because making it out of uu-matter will destroy your efficiency. But even then, you could be doing something else with that coal (like making diamonds, or generating EU from it), and you could be doing something else with the copper and tin (like building a second reactor).

If you're not willing to accept massive running costs (which is the saner decision in most actual use cases), then this is the efficiency king in classic IC2, running at 4.23 after all costs are paid (copper for the multicells in this case). In IC2 experimental, it is still great for uranium, but ultimately nothing beats MOX reactors which can go up to efficiency 20 on internal cooling alone.

CRCS reactors are a chapter for themselves, but they can reach numbers that internal cooling reactors couldn't dream of.

Well, I suppose if you have the resources for the reflectors on hand...

On the other hand, running more cells instead could give you a faster turnaround on plutonium for more MOX reactors or radioisotope generators.