Posts by kaldskryke

10K coolant cells have a new recipe. It's a lot more complex...

You'll need to macerate several lapis into lapis dust. Next you'll need a canning machine in Fluid Enrich mode. Fill the canning machine with water or distilled water and add the lapis dust. Using distilled water reduces the lapis cost, but distilled water requires a boiler and a condenser (or a turbine :P). Once the canning machine creates Coolant, you'll have to get it into a cell which is unfortunately difficult with the Canning Machine GUI. I'd recommend using a second Canning Machine in Fill Cell mode, and then move the coolant from the first canning machine to the second, either with pipes or fluid ejector upgrades or whatever. Once you've got a cell of Coolant, you can surround it with the tin plates to get a 10k coolant cell. Or alternatively you can use the coolant in the new reactor.

There are so many tech mods for minecraft now, and it seems they're all trying to out-do one another in terms of ease, convenience, and ore-output. Some mods make automation so easy it's almost trivial. Sure, IC2 could try to play "catch up" and start septupling ores in an effort to stay relevant or something... or it could go the opposite direction instead and distinguish itself as the "hard mode" tech mod.

It's true that tediousness doesn't necessarily equal challenge. IC2E's recipes have a lot of steps, and that can get tedious if you make one object at a time by hand. I choose to look at IC2E's complex recipes as an automation challenge. Build factories, not workshops.

Quote from Thunderdark

not its a overpressure valve 1 = 1Bar over standard...if set to 0 you need 100Hu/mB the cheapest you can produce steam.

Oh, good

So, right now, even with a condenser I am slowly running out of distilled water for my two-stage turbine.

I think the mass-balance gets screwed up somewhere. As far as I can tell:

- The boiler turns 1 water into 100 steam.
- The turbine turns 1000 steam into 1 distilled water and 900 exhaust steam.
- For each operation, the condenser turns 10000 steam into 20 distilled water.

Yeah, that doesn't quite add up. The condenser should either output 100mB of distilled, or change its maxprogress to 2000.

As of build 551, it looks like the condenser has a purpose now...

Steam Kinetic Generators (which really should be called Steam Turbines, IMO) will now cause explosions unless there is somewhere to "output" their exhaust.

- If the input steam was superheated, the exhaust steam can be put into another turbine to generate more power.
- If the input steam was not superheated, the exhaust can only be put into a condenser, which must be placed adjacently.

I suppose you could choose to allow the explosions instead of using a condenser, but I don't think you'd be able to regenerate enough water to keep the Steam Boiler fed. I'll have to test that

The reason you're getting steam in the output tank is a typo in line 113. It's supposed to make sure that any "leftover" steam that can't find a place to go will explode. Any leftover water gets returned to the tank. It's checking for types "3" and "4", which would correspond to steam and superheated steam, but the enumeration in getoutputtyp goes from 0-3 rather than 1-4. So if you have any leftover steam (actually type 2), it will get put into the tank :S.

I'm not sure why you're only getting 200h/t into your boiler, the cap in the code is 1200. Perhaps one of your heat exchangers is pointed the wrong way?

The pressure valve setting is interesting. If you have your valves tuned precisely, you'll get a steady flow of steam at maximum efficiency. If you're even slightly off, you'll end up getting steam in batches at a cost of 200hu/mB. That's because if the heat input isn't exactly what the code expects, the steam generation will go to a "default" mode where each mb of water will drop the boiler temperature by 0.1 degrees. Since the heat capacity of the whole system is now fixed at 2000, that means it costs 200hu/mB in this default mode.

You're right that a pressure valve setting of 220 will give you superheated steam, requiring precisely 200hu per mb of water. Easy peasy. Just set the water flowrate to 1mB per liquid heat exchanger that you have connected.

A pressure valve setting of 1 will give normal steam, requiring exactly 100.4545454545...hu/mB input for a smooth flow of steam, which is theoretically the cheapest you can produce steam. However, getting exactly 100.45454545... heat is effectively impossible. A setting of 22, however, will require 110hu/mB which is actually possible.

Setting the pressure valve above 220 seems a bit silly, as it increases the cost of superheated steam for no reason, and only works nicely at settings of and 242, 264, 286. Anything else will get you regular steam again.

The good news is that superheated steam normally costs less than twice as much as regular steam, which means it's actually worth making. The bad news is that the precision needed with the pressure valve makes the system very awkward. A little bit of rounding would be nice.

EDIT: time to start looking at the steam turbines. Just from peeking at the code: Awesome! Adaptive speed! Using superheated steam will output regular steam! Using regular steam will output... 90% of the original steam. So, multistage turbines are now useful!

First look at the build 549 steam generator... wow! Looks pretty awesome. I can't seem to get it to work well without constant steam "explosions", but I'll keep testing.

I did some quick testing of the steam boiler today with 545. My test setup is basically Liquid Heat Exchanger -> Steam Boiler -> Steam Turbine -> Kinetic Generator.

Prior to today I was getting about 60EU/t from 200HU/t and occasional steam explosions as the turbine just couldn't keep up. Meanwhile a stirling generator would happily provide 200EU/t without issues, for a lot less cost.

Today, I'm very happy to see that I get 320EU/t (per 100HU/t) and no more steam explosions. The stirling generator now provides 50EU/t from 100HU/t, which is inefficient and I'm okay with that because it is so cheap.

I'm glad that steam is a much more efficient way to generate EU, but it's not perfect yet.

The power output comes in pulses because the turbine consumes steam faster than the boiler can make it, which leads to a brief "dead time" between operations. It would be really neat if the turbine had a speed-up and slow-down, consuming more steam per tick as it speeds up. That way it would become eventually become balanced with the steam input rate.

Much worse, the system can be exploited. Heating a boiler with an Electric Heat Generator creates more EU than it uses. A positive feedback loop, free energy, of roughly 200EU/t. Well, not actually free because the turbine will wear out.

I noticed the heat capacities and heat of vaporization haven't changed, so I'm guessing the balancing is far from done. I just wanted to let Thunderdark know that he should make sure EU generation is never more efficient than 1EU per 1HU, or whatever the Electric Heat Generator's ratio is.

No, Yeganer, not only would that be a lot of code to add to wrenches, but there is already a pre-established standard for setting ejection direction in IC2. I think the steam generator should have upgrade slots that will take a fluid ejector upgrade.

This discussion should probably be moved to the Steam Generator thread anyway.

First, you need to create bio chaff, which can be gained by macerating plant matter such as saplings.

Next, you'll have to enrich the chaff with water in the Canning Machine to produce the biomass. Then run the biomass through the fermenter to get biogas.

EDIT: note that biochaff may require multiples of the plant items. For example, it takes 8 tree leaves to create one biochaff, or 4 saplings, etc.

Quote from Chocohead

It already auto-outputs steam. What more do you want of it?

Oh, I didn't realize that. I was a little annoyed about its lack of upgrade slots for an ejector. Whoops

Earlier, I had assumed that the steam cycle would be more like:

Water -> Reactor -> Superheated Steam -> Turbine -> Steam -> Condenser -> Water

Thus, the reactor could either be cooled with water OR coolant, and each would have its own advantages somehow. Perhaps one would be better for efficiency, and the other would be better for high-power setups. But I'm interested to see what the superheater is like and what kind of gameplay it will bring.

And of course, let's not forget molten salt cooled reactors, which have gained a lot of media attention lately. Whereas sodium can be very reactive, molten salts are much more stable (although potentially corrosive).

Yeganer, I would not say that water is necessarily safer than other liquid coolants. Water may not be very reactive, but most water-cooled reactors must operate at very high pressure... PWRs more so than BWRs (150atm vs 75atm). That amount of pressure is costly and dangerous, as the vessels and piping are under much more stress. A piping failure will usually cause the cooling water to flash to steam, which could lead to a loss-of-cooling meltdown. A meltdown involving steam can actually get hot enough to dissociate the water into hydrogen and oxygen, which can lead to a hydrogen explosion (such as the disaster at Fukushima). Nasty. The low pressure requirements of sodium and molten salts is one of the most attractive things about them.

Back on topic. I've been playing around with the Steam Generator in a legit survival world, and I'm finding the cost of distilled water to be very high. If it takes 3500HU per mB to vaporize water, then a single bucket of distilled water effectively costs over 3.5 million EU. Since coolant is now made with lapis dust and distilled water, it is proving to be very costly to create enough coolant to even think about running a reactor. I've also become painfully aware that Overclocker Upgrades take three coolant cells, which is over 10 million EU. Without a reactor, that's quite a lot of power to scrounge up.

When thunderdark gets around to balancing passes, I think I'll be arguing in favor of much lower steam costs overall.

EDIT: Just noticed build 535 and the different recipe for coolant. Hehe...

Quote from Thunderdark

if reach 100C every sec you get 1000-2000 Steam on 100 Heat

Thunderdark, as you know, the heat capacity of the boiler and its water tank is not the only thing affecting how fast steam is generated. That should be mostly dependent on the enthalpy of vaporization of the water.

I say should because in real life, water has a heat capacity of 4.18kJ/kg.K. Heating 1kg of water from 25C to 100C therefore takes 314kJ. Water's enthalpy of vaporization is 2260kJ/kg. Thats 7.2 times larger. It takes 7.2 times more heat to vaporize the water than it took to heat it up.

In IC2E, the heat capacity of water is 40HU/mB.C. Heating 1mB of water from 25C to 100C therefore takes 3000HU. After looking at the boiler class file, I found the enthalpy of vaporization is currently 480HU per mB. That's about one sixth! Clearly in IC2E the rate that you can create steam is far more dependent on heating the water. The actual vaporization takes very little energy, and this is quite unlike real life.

This raises a couple of points:

1) If my boiler is constantly being fed fresh water, then at steady-state it takes 3480HU to make a bucket of steam. The rate that I can produce steam with a Liquid Heat Exchanger is about 29mB of steam created per tick (on average, as steam is always made in 1000mB increments). This is already hard to manage, because Buildcraft wooden pipes can only extract at 10mB per tick.

2) If my boiler is not being fed water, and I have waited for the water to reach 100°C, then it only takes an additional 480HU per bucket of steam. With a Liquid Heat Exchanger that's about 208mB of steam per tick, which is practically impossible to manage with buildcraft pipes. I'd need to use a much more powerful pipe like EnderIO's pressurized pipes, which can pull at 200mB/t. I really don't like this. Even if I switched to a Electric Heat Generator with only one coil, that's still over the 10mB/t that a buildcraft pipe can deal with.

3) The very long heat-up time of the boiler is not very fun. Thanks to your recent change, we can easily change heat capacities in the config file (yay!) which makes the waiting less boring. However we can't increase the heat of vaporization to compensate, and steam production volume is again very hard to deal with.

It would be nice if we could also change the heat of vaporization. However, I think it would be far, far nicer if the volume expansion of water to steam was much less. I realize that in real life, steam expands about 1700x (at atmospheric pressure, of course), but such large volumes of steam don't cooperate well with current fluid mechanics in minecraft. It would be a little realistic to assume that pipes are pressurized, and steam is quite compressible. Could you change the ratio to ~100 or less?

I agree with Omicron. The increased EU cost of UU matter is not a problem, it's that the required blocks for recycling has gone up too high. By the time I've quarried enough cobblestone to make a single diamond from UU matter, I've likely found 32+ diamonds from the quarry, plus another handful from coal dust. It's even more ridiculous to use UU to make iron, copper, or tin. Using UU for worldgen materials has gone from "expensive, but convenient" to "too expensive to even consider". The only thing worth making from UU is iridium.

Scrap should feel like a nice way to get a small benefit from an excess of low-value items. As it stands right now, scrap is so necessary that it's "worth it" to create elaborate item generators that lag servers, and I think that's insane.

Increasing the amplifier value of scrap would be nice, and so would allowing other items to be used as amplifier, but I can't help but think there's a better solution out there. Perhaps the "amplification" should occur at the Replicator merely as a speed boost or reduction to the UU consumption?

I registered to chime in on this issue. I've had a peek at the code so I can clarify things a bit, hopefully without spoiling all the fun.

Firstly, the snippet of code Thunderdark posted in the other thread doesn't seem to be omitting anything. I think the weirdness you're seeing is a result of execution flow. As you may already be aware, each component in the reactor is evaluated sequentially, starting from the top left slot, moving left to right, top to bottom. For example, this behavior is the reason that in some reactor designs overclocked heat vents at the top are more susceptible to overheating than ones at the bottom. This execution flow also influences MOX behavior, as the "heat effect" is calculated per MOX cell before the MOX cell adds its EU contribution to the reactor total. It's not unlikely that the heat level of the reactor will change between MOX cell evaluations, even within the same reactor tick. So even if the reactor is balanced and it's heat stays "constant" from tick to tick, the heat does change during the tick.