Posts by MJEvans

There are two /real/ problems with the use of solar panels at the moment.

• Some consider the ease of building giant solar arrays a game breaking problem.
• Building vast arrays of solar panels floods the server/client with multiple 1eU/t packets each second for each panel.

(Production rate) Both of these aren't related to the actual production rate of solar panels. 0.5 eU/t would actually be more realistic, but for the moment I'd like to set that aside and focus on the two bigger issues.

Cost doesn't seem out of balance either. Solar panels are already, arguably, costly enough to produce. Aside from needing slightly higher tech and every piece of equipment to produce, nuclear reactors are actually a fair comparison; at least with the safe designs.

What seems to be the problem; as pointed out by others, perhaps without realizing exactly this; is the density of generators. Having hundreds of active anything forces lots of updates and many more things to track and synchronize. Even if the grid is multi-threaded by logically making each node of wire it's own work unit the calculation there would still be sub-optimal and would involve many elements.

So fix /that/ part of the problem directly. Make it so that a flat grid of panels only connects at a single point. That also has a fringe benefit (from multiple angles if you think carefully about the ramifications) of making any large array of solar panels produce packets that natively fill copper wire. If a 7x7 (max width) diamond is made then including the center, which would be the collector's location, it would have 16 tiles. Growing that to 9x9 would make for 32 tiles. Those are the two possible sizes that I think should be used; others aren't multiples of 2 and thus aren't as easy to make compatible with the wires.

However this isn't quite enough; there still needs to be incentive to build as few generators as possible. Thus the cost of a generator panel should be higher. Probably a recipe like this:

If capable of outputting 32eU/t... (from however many attached panels; glass and advanced circuit aren't /quite/ represented well here)

Otherwise normal insulated copper wire and a normal circuit would work for 8-16 eU/t limit.

The individual side panels should thus be cheaper, since they can't interface with the power grid*:


(tin wire)

3 glass, 2 coal dust, 1 circuit, three tin wire.

*There should be one exception for interfacing the lesser solar panels to the power grid. Any normal storage tech that recharges things (batbox, MFE, MFSUnit) can have a solar panel /directly touching/ a surface and receive any power it might generate. This would make for a limit of 5*eU/t generated by panels without using a proper collector.

The above modifications would open up initial access to solar panels /slightly/ earlier (right around the time when generators are starting to be a pain to use, but still making the actual output somewhat similar to a generator in what it could produce). It would also more balance what solar arrays are capable of later in the game, and also provide the ability to make /flat/ grids as are so desired.

Also, I think that solar panels should be not-full-height, so that mobs can't spawn on them.

Solar Arrays !




:Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline:
:Rubber: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline:
:Rubber: :Rubber: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline:
:Rubber: :Rubber: :Rubber: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline:
:Rubber: :Rubber: :Rubber: :Rubber: :Rubber Trampoline:

Solar Panel :' breaks as a smiley

PS: This is the //third// time I'm trying to post this; if it's vanishing or -moving- for moderation and NOT database failure issues -let me know- so I stop trying or know where to find it.

Except any real radar would also be able to see the machines that are no doubt down there.

Odd, I have yet to experience that even though I /have/ had chunks 'hibernate' (no updates) I was so far away.

I think it's more that the water shifts /where/ the explosion goes. One of mine that blew up had a full layer of water above it, normal stone around it, and sand beneath it. The vast majority of the explosion dug down.

Looking at your post's signature, if you have trouble reading English, you may find it more productive to Request a Translation of the key facts in to your native language; or possibly even use an automated translation tool such as translate.google.com to get a rough idea of what the rules are (rough enough to begin experimenting).

I'm not sure about before, but I am sure that last night I started a new topic in a suggestion area. This morning I happen to check on it, only to discover that it doesn't exist and the link I pasted to someone else is broken.

http://forum.industrial-craft.…page=Thread&threadID=2863

I can see two possible ways for this to happen:

1) Database issue; something simply caused it to not be stored properly.
2) Moderation; for whatever reason a mod moved/deleted/hid the post.

I'd like to know, if it is the later shouldn't I have been sent some kind of private message at least explaining why that occurred since I can't think of any reason the content would be bad? If it's the former, then is there anything that can be done or any 'problematic times' I can just avoid posting to the forums?

That's still enough of a pain in the butt. I finally finished adding an extension to the new resource collection area on my server where RP2 pipes shuffle stuff through a macerator/furnace bank as necessary and a brief BC crafting table stage makes blocks out of the ingots. Crazy volume of pipes used for that. It'd be barely manageable with BC pipes (tons and tons and tons of iron... and stuff leaking out everywhere). I made all of the ReStone in the chamber that resulted from my test my self, but placed a loose cube (it's one layer short due to the surface I was building on) with 3 thick walls.

All I need to do is contain the worst case explosion possible for the given target reactor; which in this case was 5-6 units of uranium.

12+ you're probably correct in that you need whatever cap-containment is. 5 would leave only 6x6x6 within the core area (I prefer to build within a 16x16x16 chunk since I've seen them transfer out of order to my client... must make it an atomic load).

Tin does 39 without loss. Glass fiber does 39 without loss (Yes the wiki is outdated, test it your self). There are a few other things you should experiment with or read my other posts griping about how 'that doesn't work at all like in real life'.

It would be /so/ much easier to wire things up nicely if there were a block that; with upstream power available, it would output a redstone signal. (or vice versa)

I've easily encountered enough uranium near the surface for a good sized reactor, sometimes right beneath it. There really is no sweet-spot for it; just drill baby drill.

In preparation for building the new breeder I have been planning I wanted to test the explosive power of nuclear reactor cores.

The test beds were ReGlass and ReStone. I figure I want the result to be a solid outer shell of intact blocks as a safety margin.

The reactor core was placed in the center of the bounding box, 6 uranium in a 2x3 are left inside and it is then sealed in.

ReGlass: 6 uranium == Walls 4 thick; outer layer survives. (However lots of layers sacrificed)
ReStone: 6 uranium == Walls 3 thick; outer layer survives.
Very few inner blocks sacrificed (it seems that only a single lateral shot across 3 blocks managed to escape; the outer wall was unharmed; the reactor and 3 inner blocks were all that was empty, though I did not bother to check through corners (I did see some ReGlass kitty-corner to the core missing in that experiment)

As I understand it ReStone has a blast resistance value of something like 100-150 per block. Distribution of explosion being one thing, how powerful is the actual explosion? I remember seeing something like 45 in the config, but the uranium add more, and I'm also not sure of temperature over time is an issue (obviously temperature at terminal is merely terminal).

I could see a /very/ slow burning reactor convert a cone of material beneath it to simple moving lava; while a rapid heatup might have a few times the force of a slower heat up that did explode.

Guilty. My open-desert CARUC reactor got out of line in breeder mode at least once before I realized the pressure plate was a bad input for 'heat up' and I think one other time when the filters by it grabbed the first few buckets (gee I now know you can use panels to partition tubes x.x).

That crater was... spectacular, lag inducing, hell. I think I probably took out about 30 layers of normal stone with it.

http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=101l101001101521s1r11r10

This one is what I'd do if building this (which I wouldn't as I'd use a CASUC/CARUC design); it's 'only' 100eU/t but uses 1 less chamber per reactor and even had space for a small safety margin.

PS: The reason for the odd cooldown time on the other one is that it does not assume 'gated' operation but the maximum portion of a stable cycle. If run properly it will cool.

Honestly this looks super-fun. I just won't ever touch it until it has an SMP version. I don't even need the moon, the other bits are enough.

I don't see your refillable item lockup case; refillable items only get more full; it might branch out a bit finding the cheapest cost, but at worst it's just a large number of paths that all have endpoints. Caching the cost at each recipe would also help a lot in these cases (and calculating the set before hand implicitly does that).

The idea is that iterating over a potentially vast number of recipes (such as the ones RP2 adds for block manipulations) may be excessively time consuming.

Having a single pole seems a bit annoying; maybe it could be a kind of chute instead? A square man-cage that can't be fallen out of would be nice. Though as soon as RP2 has frames it won't really matter for me anymore.

The only way I see this actually working is to assign every item possible an energy cost. Said energy cost would be based on the ingredients and permutations required to construct the item. For all of the normal minecraft and IC2 items this could be pre-calculated; I'd highly recommend adding buildcraft and RP2 items to the built in list too. For any other items it would have to work backwards through possible recipe paths until it hits known cost ingredients. The cheapest path should become the price.

Said price could be paid directly in energy (built in UUM creator that never exposes it) or in energy and UUM (works sort of like scrap does in the mass-fabricator; but reflects the high power of UUM) (also at higher speed here).

It's a cube, only the core reactor's encompassing volume counts. If you picture the 'core' as the center of a 3x3 cube you can see how it takes up 1 of 27 blocks.

Interesting... I don't know how that got typoed; I didn't even know about those.

Here's the actual link: http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=101k101001101521s1r11r10 (Note for anyone having seen my earlier post that the after ? is the same.)

Wait, it counts every item instead of 'the stack' as one item? I haven't actually set this up.

There's also the fact that I can't seem to figure out how to 'side down the pole' in SMP. (Boots off == me fall and die. My pole /is/ abusing the space between it and RP2 tubes for my movement though... is open space outside the pole block required?)