Posts by MJEvans

The problem with that is that real silicon is a grown crystal that is slowly extruded. More or less a seed crystal and then a glacially paced pull only candle-dip kind of growth occurs above a painstakingly precise tempered vat of semi-molten silica. Wafers are made by slicing (or sometimes sheering if that crystal geometry is there and desired) then growing the wafers thicker though various polishing and vapor deposit phases. I guess, however, that any machine capable of making industrial diamonds could also take some input sandstone and squeeze it hard enough to force a crystal structure to line up. That might be a good way of making silicon.

You 'smelt' the ore: that gives you an ingot, not macerated powder.

If you want to watch what's going on grab one of the 'wallhacks/xray' texture packs (there's an OK one linked on the normal minecraft wiki): it can be quite fun to watch the miner in action and is also a good way of troubleshooting it hitting crap in the new features like abandoned mines.

Since it doesn't seem to have been documented anywhere else and the electrical engineering forum was the /closest/ thing to an on topic place I could find I'm posting this here (esp since you will likely want to use this while wiring things up)

Using a mod I found the recipe for scaffolding:

Scaffolding behaves similarly to four ladders siding a plank box top; yet only takes up one block (as ladders do) instead of 5 as the ladder on plan equivalent would be; it's extremely cost effective; in the face of jet packs and it's limitations of use this seems like a fair balance to me and lets those planks go to treetaps.

Warning: the grab edge is /razor/ thin; you will want to shift to the limit of the edge, facing the platform, if your boots won't stop your fall.

Scaffolding requires a block beneath it to be placed and appears to break similar to reeds; I have yet to find an upper stack limit.

There appears to be a bug where it's possible to place a scaffold block on top of another as it is being destroyed; subsequent blocks of scaffolding cannot be placed on top.

I agree that these should have a loss setup similar to copper cables; in fact those are used in the base of the recipe.

I also love (absolutely love) the idea of non-full height blocks for use as roofing; this prevents things spawning up there.

It would be excellent if these also took the shortest path to a 'receiver' (a properly rated TF used in step-up (redstone signaled) mode is my suggestion for that; though for 1eU/t panels this would imply a non-existent <32::32 TF).

Since the panel on top would count, that would allow for a 7x7 diamond (3 out from a central post) which would then integrate in an x,z off by one shift. Finally, a perfectly flat roof that's useful.

Don't forget that solar panels also have a risk of being destroyed when moved. This adds to their actual cost (Since it is then possible you'll loose that entire investment of components).

Of the parts going in to a solar panel, only the glass, rubber, and stone (you /are/ building it the way that saves 3 iron right?) are renewable. The 3 coal dust, 6 iron, 4 tin, 1.5 copper, and 2 redstone are potentially lost (though typically only 1 copper and 3 coal are lost since I tend to get back generators; I'm not actually sure how many drop nothing).

Solar panels aren't over-powered, your other sources of power are /under/ powered. The only exception to this are nuclear plants; but these aren't the multi-gigawatt behemoths we know of in real life; these are compact SciFi style reactors that have their own integrated heat to power conversion mechanism instead of steam turbines. While I think building a real reactor in IC2 might be fun, I'm afraid both that minecraft is a poor place to do so (lack of fun shapes/physics) and that it would instantly jump from 'fun puzzle thing' to 'export controlled potential terrorist tool'.

Now, one way of making solar harder would be to have wires destroy based on wattage, and to make current induce damage to surrounding tiles if over-current, while having voltage require additional insulation (or glass fiber cables) to prevent dangerous leaks if you touch the cable. /those/ would increase the challenge of building giant solar flowers.

From the description I read this as the foam has an 'expansion' phase when it's malleable and then a permanence phase when it is not. If it's like glass where breaking it doesn't drop anything then I don't think it's a good enough material. Glass at least is translucent and can be crafted from stone via maceration and re-heating, so it's redeemable as an end-product of the lava/magma+water infinite supply chain. Clay however could only be produced via uu-mater and this is simply far too costly for these ends.

Hummm I'll /wait/ to upgrade until this is fixed. It might even be a sub-release version but it's definitely blocking.

Quote from Rick

Redpower 2 is making a computer inside minecraft so i think it would be nice it there was some addon that would allow IC2 stuff to work together with the redpower stuff.

Or maybe addons could be useful enough on their own and then possible extras form glue that interfaces between the two.

I was hoping there was finally some actual discussion or at least 'that would be awesome' 'I could really use that' 'no this sucks, it's X' in reply...

As pictured it already looks like the high side and outputs are proper. If this is SMP there is a good chance some things aren't facing the right way. I would suggest removing the MFS output fiber (so you don't accidently overload something) then electric wrenching your TFs to an improper way, then the proper way for their 3 dot port to receive the higher power. Finally you can do the same thing with the MFS (it will happen in place as long as you don't point it where the dot face really is) and re-apply the glass fiber to let the power out.

The other potential issue is your MFS might be receiving a redstone signal and thus hoarding power until full.

Quote from RawCode

water 30
lava 30
obsidian 60
tex blocks 100 (including glass and door)

Oh did water get nerfed too?

Read the electrical engineering forum's sticky topics, or perform a test your self.

I saw that on a thread mentioning Obsidian being nerfed (it is now explosion resistance 60 instead of 6000; Re-enf glass is now something like 70 and re-enf stone is ~100; Any water at all (flowing is best since it will regen) is 500. To stop a worst case nuke explosion several layers of water are needed. The 'spectacular' explosion picture (stuff a reactor full of uranium) seemed to take out between 3 and 5 blocks of water. A normal reactor can probably suffice with 2-4 blocks of water (most of which you'd want for coolant anyway)).

Actually as I explored in the Electrical Engineering section with an MFSU to macerator (via stepdown TFs) test; glass fiber cable is lossless up to 39 blocks (I tested 39 and 41 since 1 per 40 is the secondary documentation figure and I had a nice curve to try it out with).

In all of the above cases what you're effectively asking is for the mod to maintain an out of world data-storage space that it then uses to keep track of the data.

Actually that would be a rather neat solution to 'unloaded' parts of the grid. You'd have all of the electrical systems also stored inside of a real database and just use a simpler playback to determine what effects occur until things become 'inactive'.

I think he means a more condensed version of the fuel; since you can't turn the charcoal in to charcoal dust and then create a charcoaldust cell. Additionally the generator typically used with coal puts out a paltry 5eU/t.

Miner Assembly System

It should be possible to control a programmable mining rig in a manor similar to an embedded computer. Operations would not be at a high level but would be similar to an Application Specific Integrated Circuit operating on optimal instructions.

I see the mining rig having the following topology:

(mem mapped) Registers:

Facing: [0-31]
(currently only 5 bits: correlates to the outer ring of the 9x9 area an OV scanner traditionally covers, enumerated clockwise from face on direction 0 being 0. (In debug there is a direction indicator: this has a rang 0-3 which maps on to this if left-shifted by 3.))

Scanreg0
Scanreg...
ScanregN
(register mapped array, slots 0 through 3 for OV scanner, 0-1 for OD scanner, value dependent on current layer and facing direction; changes to layer tracked; the value of each register yields the a value representing that block (suggest use the actual block value))

Scanreg-1: A special register, with any scanner it returns the value of the block immediately beneath the shaft's current depth; otherwise it returns if it's block that can be mined (-1 if it cannot be mined, a scanner should only return -1 if the block's mining is impossible; not improbable (bedrock mining programs might be desired))

ChestCheck: Write a block ID to this, read returns the current count of the last written block ID in the chest.

StatusReg: (contains machine status; might include power/etc, will include a bit that reveals if there is more pipe, if a pump is attached with empty cells waiting)

(actual) Registers:
G0
G1
G2
Instruction Pointer

Three bits for pseudo-registers, and 2 bits for actual registers. A sliver of ram (maybe 8 words?) implemented similar to core memory might exist; the instructions would be mapped in to the same address space (various possibilities, and opportunities for 'danger'). I also propose MASS (add storage to the end) as the name for the instruction roms for miners.

It may be desirable to make a more advanced miner that has 4-16 slots in the center instead of just one. With the map height now only defaulting to 128 and not limited to it having the ability to load from multiple pipe stores would be excellent. There are also some additional operations that I would like to use this 'input' material.

Possible instructions:

Obviously the various copy (immediate), register, memory to register; store register to memory would be required. Standard logic and arithmetic ops: (and, or, invert/ add, subtract, compare).

Then there would be operations dictated by 'writes' to the status register.
Mine the next block being faced.
Mine the next block down the stack (and advance).
Replace the (nth farthest away) being faced (for simple programs if the block is too far place it in the first possible slot or not at all; unable to replace block might be a status flag).
Replace the block beneath.

The replace and mining operations should all reference a given 'slot'; replacing a pipe section with anything else also requires a storage operation so that should go back to the pipe stacks.
Mining operations also have a storage result, which might go to EITHER the stacks OR the chest.

This is exactly how I'm powering my miner in the SSP world I started during last night's login lockout. However I feel that it's cheating to send 40eU/t in 1eU/t pulses x solar panels down the wire.

edit:
Actually I can see a case for this in low use areas of a workshop: trickle-charging a batbox and then delivering the output to hungry machines or wiring up a huge bank across a wall would be a nice application (though I /still/ feel that the wire 'blowing up' on voltage and not wattage isn't fair).

Quote from Hotbread

this would make the game run even slower, it takes a decently good CPU to run a small workspace without lag, because of the calculations of the EU per tick going thru wires and such, this idea would add yet another calculation for every single bit of wire.... just no, just, no.

What basis do you have for this? As far as I know I am suggesting the formula's complication be increased by a single additional multiply op. The packet's size should already be in L1 cache and the additional operation would be absolutely negligible in comparison to all the other factors. Plus the possibility of simplifying in game power distribution nodes could actually reduce the expensive parts of the operation by reducing the search tree for power draw/sink operations.