Posts by TheSilverHammer

You are right. They were fine the way they were. It did take a lot of metal to make those solars. Sure when you got a bunch of auto miners going then you could pump them out. But before that, it took a large investment of metals to make them. If they just want us to use nukes, then remove most other energy generators. Id ask for more options as far as power, but they have enough choices in types, only they have all been nerfed.

Originally you could use wind power. That was back when you just had one kind of cable, copper. You could easily make a extreme voltage converter and those lesser MFEs. You still had to build a very tall tower and place your generators up top and transferring the power down a LONG WAY using EV. Then you got it at the bottom and lost maybe 200 EU, but who cares? Then you easily convert it back to normal voltages.

Then they screwed it all up in IC2. Now you have all these cable types and the cost in materials just to convert from LV to EV and back again is absolutely nuts. Did anyone think about that? Until they remedy that, Wind power is completely useless as a real source of power.

There was water power. This idea seemed to be still-borned. You would think that it might be take into account a very large area for generation. IE: an ocean would act as a tidal generator. Or perhaps the velocity of water flowing over it, such as a tall waterfall. But no... This kind of power needs to be re-engineered.

Then there was solar which did require a very large investment in materials because it only ran during the day, above ground and provided a little power. It was fine. If the hard core people thought it was far too much, then they could just not use solar. What is their motivation? The game isn't tough enough? Is that it? Then get a mod that introduces more aggressive monsters or something. Or just don't build solar panels.

Geothermal is OK, It is my starting generator when I start a new world. However without some kind of automated lava generation system (not to mention it eats tin) it isn't useful for anything but a small scale operation. Tin is hard enough to get. Now if you could use copper in place of tin, it wouldn't be so bad, although you will still need to manually fill a bunch of lava cells.

Nuclear: Very expensive and if you screw up, there is a giant crater where your base used to be. NO THANKS. You can keep it.

I just want to explore the world and build neat things. I just want mods that help me do that. Please reconsider your changes to solar power and/or fix some of the other issues with the above mentioned power systems. Keep nuclear the way it is. Ill never use it. People who want danger and hard core stuff, they can play with nuclear.

I used to use wind power, but with the power system changes in IC2, that made it a bit nonviable (without a tremendous amount of work). The problem with wind power is that you need to transfer power a LONG way. It can be done, but this takes a lot of advanced stuff to do this efficiently.

But that is ok. No more wind power. We got Solar power. I never much used them, but I can adapt. So I make solar arrays and all that and I am happy.

So now I playing the current version of IC2, 1.337 and starting a new world. So I go to make some solar generators and guess what. Now they are expensive as hell. TWO Circuits? That is a lot of resources for a new world (to get a decent amount of them). OK... FINE... Ill just build half as many and take much longer to get my power systems. I do not like it, but OK. So now I make my smaller solar array and it is day time. Hmm. I am not getting any power. Why is this? Oh wait, another feature has been added. If it is raining, you get NO POWER. So now solar power much more expensive and doesn't work nearly as often due to the rain. The way weather works it can rain All day.

I really must protest this. I do not like this. Please reconsider this. For rain, you can just reduce the efficiency a bit, maybe .75 EU or .5 EU per tick when it is raining.

Id also ask that you just use one circuit for solar power too. It is already expensive enough with all the tin, iron, and redstone needed.

I really like this mod, but I swear sometimes I think the motivation for some changes is almost vindictive. I just want to have fun and I do not want some hard core experience. Maybe you could put this as an option in a config file. My challenges come from building grand projects and IC2 and Buildcraft are simple tools to help me do so.

This is apparently NOT the case. When connecting 3 macators on one tin wire line, after supplying power from a generator, the tin wire line broke. From what you said, it should not have broken the tin wires since they can handle 3 EU and the macorators only require 2 EU each.

I used to do these windmill farms in sets of 16x wind generators at the top of the world. It used to work very well, but now with these new mechanics it doesn't seem very viable. The core problem is that you do need to transfer the power a very long way and now it is very expensive to do that. I think the only real power solutions now are Solar and nuclear. Yes a glass fiber cable would work to simplify things with a wind farm, but as someone said, that is a lot of diamonds.

Thanks for your reply. I do have a coding suggestion though that could eliminate the who CPU problem with interconnected cables and the like. Each tick there is power to route, I assume you are running some pathing algorithm and this search is what is taking so much CPU time. The quick and easy way to make this super-fast is to cache your algorithm's solutions. If I design some wiring system and then do not change it, the solution to the search will be the same every time, so why keep searching every frame?

Basically you only refresh the search (clear your cache) when I change the wiring system. If I add or remove a cable or device from some wired system, re-compute the path and cache that answer until I make a change again.

I have not played with minecraft or IC since minecraft version 1.6. There have been a lot of changes and I do have a question about how EU flows through wires. I can see now that it is very different.

For example in the original IC take a MFE set to output 12 EU with a copper cable (the only kind) connected to it. Then you did a Y split on the cable you would have two 6 EU cable ends. Split both ends once more and you have 4 cables at 3 EU each. You get the idea. Typically I would might connect the 4 ends into 4 Electro furnaces, for example which require 3 EU each to run.

Now take IC2. From what I understand:

1. Power packets are individual.
2. Energy storage devices output only the energy that is needed.
3. Bat Boxes output 32 EU and you can't change it

It would seem that rule 2 and 3 conflict, however let me ask what would happen.

Consider my setup above with the quad split cables with a bat box as the power source instead of the MFE and connected to 4 Electro furnaces.
Lets say I used TIN cable which is limited to 3 EU, which is fine because each furnace only needs 3 EU.

Case 1: The bat box sends out 32 EU in a 4 pules to each of the furnaces which only need 3 EU and the tin wire fries.
Case 2: The bat box only sends out what is needed, which is 4 individual packets of 3 EU to each furnace. The tin wire remains in tact and the furnaces function normally.

Which of these 2 cases is the correct one and if neither of them are, then I totally do not understand the mechanics of how EU flows through the wires. Could you explain to me what would happen if neither case is correct?

Ok, just so I am clear on this. Power on cables from different sources doesn't stack. So 10 arrays sending 1 EU each down one cable is still just 1EU worth of load on the cable, but it is just 10 individual pulses of 1 EU.

What I am getting at, is that Tin wire can only handle 3 EU and if these are individual packets, then you could get a really long tin cable with like 30 Solar panels on it and the wire wouldn't break from the load. Is this correct?