Posts by BrickedKeyboard

Recently I began experimenting with using buildcraft or Redstone power piping to interact with reactors. It does work sorta ok because the reactor has an inventory just like a chest. However, there are a couple of things that the current implementation does wrong :

Buildcraft/Redstone Power cannot access anything but the top row most of the time because you actually leave the entire inventory grid open even for a 4 chamber reactor. Instead, whenever an item gets inserted where it is not allowed, it gets ejected. Since Buildcraft/Redstone Power fill a chest row by row, they cannot insert into the right-most slot in the top row for a reactor with less than 6 chambers because the item gets rejected.

I have managed to get items into the next row from the top by inserting items extremely fast via pipes such that say 10 buckets enter the reactor in 1 tick, before the reactor gets a chance to eject anything, and so the items in valid slots stay.

Fix for this : fill the extra slots not in use with a spacer item. (say the "fire" block) If the reactor is destroyed or wrenched, make sure that the code that causes all the contents to drop exclude this spacer item. Simple, and reactors would interact properly with buildcraft/Redstone Power.

This bug is on your end, not these other mods because those mods are working correctly - your mod is just exposing slots that are not actually valid destinations. Another fix for this would be to change the inventory registration for Forge.

It would also be nice if the side blocks could have their inventories accessed by mods, but this is a lesser consideration. It actually adds a balancing element in reactor design in that you can't connect a 6 chamber reactor to pipes.

Right, Rick. Also it would be nice if the extra slots in the reactor were filled with invisible "spacer" items that we can't see and never drop. (that way the water buckets would stop popping out the top when you fill the top row. The cause of this is that Redstone Power is trying to fill those extra slots that you can't see with water buckets and they aren't allowed there. This problem would be completely avoided if for a 6 chamber reactor the inventory were actually stored in one of the blocks that is not the middle one. (say the top block always)

In that case, buildcraft and Redstone Power would interact with the reactor correctly. I will file a bug report on this.

40% of max is not equal to 4000. Apparently, the max goes up with the number of chambers and the amount of reactor plating. I am guessing that it is always at 4000 heat, which means for a multi-chamber reactor it would vaporize the water at slightly more than 60% health for the reactor components.

Try the thermometer mod.

Doesn't tell me how long it takes to re-enrich uranium, but it gives me a good guess :

Assumption : it takes a full cycle baseline to re-enrich uranium at 0 heat. So at 4000 heat, it would take half a cycle. I set a timer to 80 minutes upon reactor start and that should be when it is time to change out the breeding fuel.

Yes, Vendi, and it's version of pipes (brass "tubes") are tons better. It doesn't have buildcraft's building machines, but the part it does have is already much better than buildcraft.

I need several pieces of information to finalize the design on my Generation 9001 Matter to Energy converter :

1. At 4000 heat, how many reactor ticks does it take to enrich a depleted uranium cell if the cell is adjacent to only one block of uranium? The reactor planning App has no information on this.

(as in this design http://test.vendaria.net/index…IXIUUUIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX)

2. How many reactor ticks are in a second? Is it 1:1? (it is not 20:1, while there are 20 minecraft ticks in every second)

3. How long will the fuel in a reactor last always? Is it 10000 ticks?

Thanks.

Of course it's stable. Mine isn't bottlenecked.

But the more practical design is the one I just showed with the breeding built in. The breeding will be slow, (since our reactors run at 4000 heat) but the reactor will still produce tons of power with great efficiency while it is breeding. Obviously there isn't enough uranium around to get enough fuel legitimately to keep a reactor like this running without breeding. I took a look at other breeding reactors, but since they don't have our active cooling systems, and they produce too little power in breeding mode, they suck and are a micromanagement fest.

My Generation 9001 design when I have it fully ready this evening will require this much in the way of maintenance :

Whenever you feel like it, or when you notice you are out of power, go to the reactor and remove the spent fuel and the rebred fuel. Add the coal dust to both and reload the reactor.

That's it. Could even make an autocrafting table do the coal dust step automatically. Player would still have to remove the nearly depleted fuel unless...Hmm...I'll get back to you on that :P.

But in any case, feeding the reactors will be pretty easy.

Since you seem to be beating me to the punch :

This one works : http://test.vendaria.net/index…UXUUUUUXXUUUUXXXXXXXXXXXX

Reason is that it has TWO filters pulling buckets out of the reactor. The bottleneck in your design is you only have one filter extracting the empty buckets (you could use 3 deployers and 3 coolant injectors which is what mine will use when I rebuild it)

A preview of my "production reactor"

Name will be the Generation 9001 Matter to Energy converter : http://test.vendaria.net/index…IXIUUUIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Key is that it breeds itself more fuel, more than it uses I think if you use a timer to shut it down in mid cycle and remove the recharged fuel. Replace the top row of fuel with fresh fuel and viola http://test.vendaria.net/index…IXIUUUIXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Run that the other half of the cycle, for a net output of 430 EU/tick, a net efficiency of 4.08, and at the end of a cycle you'll need ~2 uranium to refuel it per net cycle and 36 coal. If you have a scrap fed mass fabricator, you can just fabricate both for a huge net energy gain (not sure the exact ratio because I don't know how much scrap reduces the cost of mass fabbing)

It would only require user intervention every 2-4 hours. Rest of the time, just leave it alone.

Also 360 EU/tick and efficiency 4.0.

Somewhat of a safety factor on the cooling system : each filter can extract 1.5 buckets a second flat out, and it needs about 1.75 buckets a second to run.

Fourfire : I turned it up to 70. (and the gunpowder nuke down to 15 because I think the nuclear TNT is lame, real nuclear bombs are very complex and expensive)

Maybe I should turn it higher.

As for labeling, Dezuman, the previous Mark 5s were difficult and expensive to run continuously.

I was using two deployers for filling buckets, 2 filters for inserting them into the reactor, and two for removal. I thought the reactor was outputting a lot more heat than it was in game. (apparently 1 "tick" for HEAT is 1 second while for power it is 1/20 of 1 second)

Dezuman's refinement is nice, although the next thing to try is to just fill the entire reactor with uranium except for the top row. Wonder if that will work...

For my "production" reactor I will make it simpler and more like yours, Rick. 293 EU is a little better than the 260 I run at now. Please post a screenshot of what it looks like when it is working.

To those who are wondering how this works : it is made possible by these machines that are part of Redstone power but not Buildcraft :

1. The filter. This is a machine that takes items out of an inventory (like a reactor or a chest) but only if they match exactly the item in the slot of the filter. So I have filters take empty buckets ONLY out of the reactor, and full buckets only out of the deployer.

2. The deployer : this "deploys" many item types as if the player were using them. It can use an empty bucket on a pool of water and fill the bucket.

If you are running Redstone Power PR2b (and there is no legitimate or good reason not to be running it; it has no crash bugs and is rock solid and enormously expands the game) then you can do this design : http://forum.industrial-craft.…age=Thread&threadID=2049&

There's really no competition here. I have one running at 260 EU/second with an efficiency of 3.71. Don't believe me? Log in to my server and see for yourself. (see brickedtechnology.blogspot.com)

It's not that bad. It actually will take a fair amount of time to overheat (a minute or two) and there's 6 buckets in the top row, giving a thermal reserve.

Also, I am using dual injectors of water buckets as well as dual deployers pumping the water. So far I haven't had any problems.

But yes it is dangerous. On my server there are "elemental creepers", several of whom could instantly fry the cooling system and then the reactor would soon detonate.

Using Redstone Power 2, I just built a prototype reactor using the same water cooling system I had before. I'm up to 230 EU/tick and a reactor that is starting to resemble a ticking bomb. I have yet to hit the limits of my cooling system. It IS stable, it does NOT heat up past the boiling point of water, and it can be refueled immediately after use. It doesn't require any consumables other than fuel.

Here's a teaser screenshot :

I haven't finalized the design...I think even more power output from a single reactor is possible. Basically we are shoving water into the reactor at high speed and it is boiling, taking the excess heat away with it. This method would work in real life and it is actually how high power commercial reactors are cooled.

We are doing all this in SMP on Bricked Technology, my server. It is on a 4 gigabyte VPS and has a sandybridge CPU, and a lot of mods installed. Go to brickedtechnology.blogspot.com for details. If you log in, I'll show you what I've got.

I just built a prototype reactor and tested it in game. (in SMP, no less! Go to brickedtechnology.blogspot.com if you want to log on my server)

It uses Redstone Power 2 for an active water cooling setup. I have to go soon, but I'll post screenshots when I get back. It produces a stable 100 EU/tick, it has an efficiency of 3.33, and it does NOT accumulate heat. It reaches the boiling point for water, 4000 heat, and is stable from there.

In fact the cooling system is working a lot better than my calculations indicated (I thought it would be a Mark II even with cooling because I computed the maximum speed of redstone power filters and transposers to be lower than it was)

It uses 9 filters, 2 deployers, 2 transposers, and 13 sequencers. No time to calculate the costs, but it was not expensive. It does not consume resources to run. (vs the tin water cell Ice cooling method which destroys thousands of tin per cycle)

This is the reactor design, although I think I can do even better now that I know how well water cooling works.

http://test.vendaria.net/index…CXCHCCPXCHHCHXXXXXXXXXXXX

No, I get the same glitch.

On the bright side, all that stuff does work as is. You have to sometimes use the wrench a bunch when you are not sure which direction a machine is facing, but it all works.

I have a reactor in SMP. It is still fueled, and there are no redstone currents near it. It sends power to a mass fabricator located a fair distance away, but still visible. The power goes from the reactor through a medium voltage transformer with redstoned applied and then it's just high voltage cable all the way to the mass fabricator.

I eventually got the reactor working by breaking and resetting the high voltage cable and applying and removing redstone from the reactor. But upon logging off, it was no longer working when I logged on.

The wiki doesn't explain where to connect the redstone. Also, how do you avoid blocking your cooling water flow when you install a redstone wire? I do have redpower 2 so I can use the good wires, I just don't know where to connect them.

No, but you could add a check in the code for each of those machines to see if the chunk they are trying to access is loaded first, right?