Posts by Blackpalt

The largest stable mark 1 i ever did was 1344 Hu, however i would prefer the more efficient 1280 hu design i made after that. i did a few mark 5 and mox aswell. The largest mox i did was at 1000 Hu with an absolutely insane efficiency (but still quite low output) i kept it between 60-75% heat. i also did a regular reactor as a mark 5 at about 1360 hu but im quite certain i could achieve much higher numbers if i spent some more time on it. just got a brilliant idea for a quite funny 5x5 design which should have extremly high efficiency and output. If things work like i think this will be an amazing design compared to what i have done previously.

edit:
There we go, this is just a theoretical build that im gonna try out soon but it should work out due to the 5x5 still cooling even while its off. The basic concent is to use the most efficient cooling available 20 venting per spot in even numbers of 100 for superheated steam. it takes about 1 minutes for the overclocked heat vents to be destroyed so as long as you make sure that their total amount of heat they can hold does not get exceeded your fine. You turn on the reactor, let it accumulate heat for a while. shut it off and let the vents remove all the heat, then once its empty again you turn it on again. As long as the cycle time is under the time it requires to overheat the overclocked heat vents it should never destroy them. So basically you use the overclocked heat vents as storage for heat which continue to produce power while the reactor is off.

I'm sure one could improve a lot on this design but it should give a indication of the basic idea.
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…9b2nt4vypb2yz21h6k7hrcem8

You run it for 10 seconds, then you let it cool for another 19 seconds. this means it will produce 23200 heat (most of which is stored in the overclocked heat vents) which will dissapate over 29 seconds at which point you turn it on for another 10 seconds and so on. The issue might be that heat accumulates in some components over time which might become a problem. gonna do some practical tests tonight to see if it works out.preferably you do this with a decent buffer of hot coolant to smooth out any variation.

Should produce about 1600 hu or 1200 eu/tick at an insane efficiency. as the design puts out 4640*0,75= 3480 eu/tick (if superheated steam) over 20000s this should be an efficiency of about 1392 million eu per cycle or an efficiency of 43,5 (43,5 million eu per fuel rod).

This is the biggest one i could make, not sure if i would actually wanna use it due to the reflectors but it should produce 1350 eu/tick
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…zwew4c8cymoawxayqi6wxqpds
The cycle of this one would be difficult thought so not sure if it works in indefinetly as you would either have left over heat or have short periods of not enough heat to keep the superheated steam going.

I did quite extensive testing of the 5x5 reactor when it was quite new and sadly it did not perform very well. They ad an extrem amount of complexity and material cost and a few bugs with the superheated steam (never got it completly stable). the biggest reactor i did produced about 1400 HU or about 950 eu/tick but it was crazy expensive and extremly complex and unsafe. The only real quality it has over the regular reactors is that they have superior efficiency compared to the regular reactors. But compared to MOX they produce quite a small amount of power for the size andcost.You can also do 5x5 mox reactors which i did try. However the problem with 5x5 is further emphasized with mox. Extreme fuel efficiency but low power output (lower than regular 5x5 due to less effective heat vents) and it also requires aditional mods to controll the reactor. (basically you have an unstable reactor that you swith on and off to keep it between 60-80% heat) the design i did had an efficiency of about 80-100 million eu per mox fuel rod but at quite a low power output, something in the order of 500-750 eu/tick at the most (don't remember the exact numbers, did post it on the forum at the time).

The main problem is that they don't really ad anything but higher efficiency while being extremly complex and expensive. Ifyou compare them to regular mox reactors or wind power they really aren't worth the effort as you can just make more mox reactor or wind turbines for the same amount of power a fraction of the cost and risk/complexity of a 5x5.

So TL DR

5X5 pros
Very efficient (easily a factor of 1,5+)
Funny and neat to build (if you like that kind of stuff)

5X5 cons
Expensive, VERY expensive (Several times more than a regular reactor, think thousands of ingots, not hundreds)
Low power output for its size
Quite unstable if you use superheated steam (at least when i used them) (and without the power output is even lower)
Uninteresting design choice on reactors. High efficiency is ALWAYS better than a less efficient design due to heat being the "fuel" which scales with higher effiecency on the reactor. ie, high effiecency reactors has both higher eu/rod while still producing the same amount of power as a low efficiency reactor. Old reactors where more interesting as they had a tradeoff, higher efficiency or higher power and you can't have both at the same time.
Very complex and hard to automate and make safe without other mods like steves factory manager/ender io and nuclear controle.

Unless you like the challange i would stick with mox or windpower

Quote from SpwnX

That is a very good idea in my opinion.
I wish we had to build tower foundations for each of the mills though... Hmmm... I got an idea.

I like where this is heading

I don't really see the loss of power in cables being a problem in the long run. Instead of moving the energi with cables (which leads to loss) you could instead move the energy by building a charging station up at the windmills that charges batteries. You then move the batteries without loosing power using some kind of item transporting mod (ender chest comes to mind). down On the ground you empty the battery into a energy buffer of choice. Then you send upp the empty battery again to be recharged in the charging station.
If i remember correctly direwolf did a setup like this in the beginning of their previous forgecraft series. Quite early game and unaffected by the power loss in cables and completly blows away all other alternatives for making early game power aswell as being better (AND CHEAPER!) than most late game power production.

Swing the nerfbat already

Thanks, that saved me a lot of time.

Althought it's quite slow i'd have to say it sounds somewhat balanced. At that speed i should be able to use 3 or so fermenters per macerator/canning (20 sec per macerator operation). It should produce about 12000*2,5=30000 eu per sappling (or 0.9375 bucket of biogas in net gain) which is 28.8 eu/tick. In terms of energy efficiency that is a lot better than forestry ethanol which was my hopes to begin with.

The complete setup would be 1 macerator, 1 canning machine, 3 fermenters, 5 liquid heat generators and 2 stirling engines. Then you should have a small net gain in biomass produced from the canning machine

An alternative setup i can think of is for us hoarders is to use lava in a liquid heat exchanger for the fermentation process. this would reduce the size of the setup by a factor of 3 and also produce about 266% more biogas per time. Obviously i could use the lava directly for power so i'ts not actually a net gain in energy but rather a net gain in biogas production.

Edit: I just realised its 62.5 seconds per 1 bucket of biogas (and 1 sapplings gives 2.5 buckets of biogas). That actually means to be able to keep up with the macerator you need 30 fermenters or 10 fermenters on lava.

I recently figured i would give the new biogass a go to see how it works as an early game power source and if possible i would like some suggestions of how to improve the efficiency of the setup.

The setup im currently using is 4x oak sapplings (from a tree farm from another mod) is put into a macerator to produce 1 biochaff. The biochaff is then blended with water in a fluid/solid bottling plant which gives 1 bucket of biomass which is then ejected into a ic2 fermenter. for every 1 bucket of biomass you then slowly produce 10 buckets of biogas which can be burned in either a fluid heat generator or a semifluid generator to produce 16 eu/tick. In theory this should produce a good 2,5 buckets of biogas per sappling minus the power used in the production of the biogas. Atm im using some of the produced biogas to drive the fermenter by automatically ejecting the biogas into a fluid heat generator that supplies the fermenter with 32 hu. I started the process by using an electric heat generator however i noticed that this actually used more or close to the power produced by the system and the system would not actually produce power.

While it is now producing excess biogas with a fermenter+fluid heat generator this does not amount to much as a large amount of the biogas is needed to ferment the biomass into biogas. Also since im only using 32 hu (max is 100 with fluid heat exchanger or electric heat generator) the process is very slow. Also i haven't taken the power needed for the macerator and bottling plant into acount in this setup which leads me to think that the overall power gain from this setup is quite low. probably only a few buckets of biogas a minute

What ile do next is probably add several more fermenters+fluid heat generators to speed up the production speed of biogass so it breaks even with the macerator/bottling plant. Atm with 1 fermenter, 1 bottling plant and 1 macerator the fermenter is a HUGE bottle neck in the production

Does anyone have any idea of how i could improve this setup as it seems rather lackluster right now?

Tomorrow I'm gonna do some further in game testing to see how much excess biogass is produced per minute per fermenter and also do a rough estimate of the net gain in energy from the setup. Hopefully i will have some good numbers then

As it is right now the most efficient way of producing power with nuclear is probably making a lot of low effiency 1 chamber reactors with regular eu and then start making mox as soon as you can using the old mox designs. It is cheaper, produces a lot more power and isn't very complex. as you get more plutonium you make the mox reactor larger and larger starting with the small mox design untill you can build the really big ones. Resource wise that should be the most efficient as long as you have enough lead. If you are short on lead i would probably go with large innefficient reactors.

Next server im skipping 5x5 and i'le build several small nuclear reactors and go towards eu mox reactors as soon as possible. This design comes to mind
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…mhokuftdzickl5rndv6338irk
Very cheap to make and with a respectable amount of power produced for its complexity and size.

I usually have plenty of uranium so it's rarely a problem playing singleplayer. I can imagine it being different on a server thought.

I think you did something wrong setting up the reactor, check the components, im two version late and as far as i know they haven't changed anything fundamental in how the heat vents work. Checked the changelog and since with the new versions they changed something in mox reactors but not with regular reactors so it should not matter.

It worked just fine for me and has done so for a lot of people for quite some time. Could you give me a picture of the setup? seems weird it works for me but not for you

Strange, it was running nice and stable just 1½ week ago and this was before i implemented my safety. Changed to a mark 5 reactor after 1 cycle thought so i might have to test it again in creative. Have they changed anything major with the reactors lately?

Also it's not my reactor, that one was made by zombie quite some time ago. Have you tested if it works in eu mode?

Edit:

Made a short test with stirling and steves factory manager and it works like a charm, no problem so far. It does take something like 5 minutes before the heat output stabilizes as it needs to heat upp some components before it reaches full capacity.

http://prntscr.com/4udpi4
http://prntscr.com/4udmtk
http://prntscr.com/4udn76

The setup is extremly simple with steve's. Just one fluid port and steves puts the hot coolant into the liquid heat exchangers and then it puts it back in through the same fluid port. Code takes like 1 minute to write, doesn't get easier than this.
http://prntscr.com/4udp08

I let it run for about 20 minutes with no problem. It fluctuated less and less in heat over about 10-15 minutes untill it stabilized at 1280. Are you sure you set it up right? im using version 2.2.646 of ic2 exp

I dont even get half of what you meant with all that. Could you take some pictures of your setup ?

stable mark 1, its the high output low efficiency reactor from the regular reactor thread.

I would use the maximum efficiency thought as it is a lot more efficient (more than double)

I might have said this several times before but all the designs found in this thread works for 5x5 reactors and they are all stable mark 1 reactors

[Official] New Reactors design thread.

To calculate the 5x5 output just double the heat generated in the old reactor planer.

Due to how the heat generation scales with efficiency for 5x5 generators it is a lot better to use efficient designs rather than high output low efficiency generators.

The best full scale stable mark 1 reactor from that thread is this one
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…adh05nlzbpykw84kwczan05q8

Stable, cheap and produces 1280 Hu/s with only 12 uranium rods, half of which isnt even quad core. doesn't require any diamonds. Also since it produces 1280 Hu/s you can also easily automate it with ic2 only. You use 6 steam cycles (just watch memenths video) with 12 liquid heat exchangers fully loaded for 1200 Hu and you then dump the rest into a liquid heat exchanger with only 8 heat exchangers and a stirling which uses exactly 80 hu.

IMO the best reactor by far for 5x5 as it stands right now both with respect to price, ease of setup and efficiency.

Ofc it still gets crushed cost for cost by windpower but as far as 5x5 reactors go, this is the one you should go with. it also works well with a stirling setup or just as a regular reactor so you can easily adjust how complicated you wanna go.

Also about windpower: The carbon wind turbines last FOREVER. we are talking hundreds of in game hours. i had one since the start of my current survival server and its down to like 80%. The amount of power you can produce before you break one of those wind turbines is absolutely insane

I never actually realised how bloody expensive the new reactors are, holy shit thats a lot of resources.

Think nuclear could use some buffing or windpower some nerfing
You could make something like 10 wind turbines at 160 height and it would produce 800-1000 eu/tick for about a stack of copper and tin, 400 ish iron, 90 steel and 2880 coal powder. that does not feel right considering the cost of that reactor

I can comfirm that the high power high output reactors produce 1344 Hu/s so you need at least 14 liquid heat exchangers and a number of fluid ports that can handle thaat. I would guess you need 14 liquid ports if you are going pure ic2 exp. From the sound of it you don't have enough stirling generators to cool the reactor.

If you are using the old reactor planner you can't look at the eu/output but rather you multiply the amount of heat generated times 2 to know the amount of Hu/s it will produce. in this case it's 672*2=1344

For regular reactor the 5x5 is a huge uppgrade with an almost trippled output and a lot higher efficiency at the cost of a lot of additional resources and complexity.

when you compare regular mox reactors and 5x5 reactors there really isn't any gain but higher efficiency as it is a lot more expensive, lower output and is infinitly more complex aswell as requiring external mods. Also the efficiency really isnt that much of a concern considering that if you have enough plutonium to make a mox reactor you usually have heaps of uranium 238.

TLDR
5x5 is awesome for regular reactors but not so much for mox, just use the old mox designs

Quote from mementh

What
mod can handle this ammount of fluid going through it but sort it so it
has a priority line ? IE first set of exchangers ALWAYS gets the first
200hu/t .. second gets the next and so forth and the extra 10-190 goes
to stirling generators? ( would
( seriously i am curious if this is solvable somehow)

The only mod that i know of that can do all of this at once is steve's factory manager. Ender io can handle the output but lack a dense mode on their cables.

Extra utilities transfer pipes with the right upgrades might work as well however i haven't tried it so im not completly sure.

I would love to comment on it but i'd rather use the old reactor planner as im more used to that one.

Just from the output i know that all old mark 1 reactors still work and especially http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…adh05nlzbpykw84kwczan05q8 performs very well at precisly 1280 Hu/s.

Thats the reactor of choice i would go for with regular 5x5 reactors as it is relatively cheap, has very high efficiency and has a high output while being completly stable.

Regular mox reactor designs as found in it's own thread (page 6) are way way superior to regular designs and produce 2-3 times more power usually so i think its a good idea to go with this. No reason not to use them as they are very easy to set up. if you are not using the plutonium for mox you might as well use it for RTG pellets.

advanced heat exchangers pull heat from the core and can be used if you need 8 more heat cooled in an awkward spot as in the corner surrounded by component heat vents. The real staple is the component heat exchangers, see this as an example.
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…pbcurq980tcmzfs7pujc8faps
This design pulls exactly 1000 Hu/sec and actually work as a 5x5 mox reactor. It never varies in heat output so it can easily be used with superheated steam designs and the reactor plating makes it heat up slower. it still rises about 4-5% at a time when at around 60% heat with a maximum temperature of 32000 so i think having plenty of reactor plating is required for cycling mox designs or they would heat up so fast it cant be controlled even with nuclear control. The only additional mod this design needs is nuclear control, the rest can be done with ic2 exp

Advanced heat exchangers can also be used in a combination with overclocked heat vents and advanced vents for maximum cooling design. However these designs are not completly stable in cooling. They usually vary a bit in output but are stable in the long run. This is due to components needing a differential in temperature to be able to transfer heat so it cools of and heats up again in cycles. ive used this in a cycling mark 5 regular 5x5 reactor with a output of about 1350-1372 Hu/s
http://prntscr.com/4qsdln
This reactor is cycled between 10-30% heat however it would work for non cyclic designs as well, just reduce the amount of fuel rods so that it cools more than it produces. This would probably work fine
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…7wzoxh4j1n6slbt3ekq8ilce8

Basically the components you can use with mox 5x5 is overclocked heat vents with 4 component heat exchangers, and in the places where you cant surrounder the overclocked heat vents you either go with heat exchangers for 4 cooling, advanced heat exchangers for 8 cooling or reactor heat vents for 12 cooling or the overclocked heat vent, advanced heat vent and exchanger combo. They are actually quite easy to make as the only thing you are varying is the components at the edge of the design.

It is the heat vent of choice for the old type design of mox reactors. While it does not cool as much as the overclocked heat vent it has the bonus of not pulling any heat from the reactor which makes it able to pull only as much heat as the fuel rods actually produce while keeping the reactor stable at high temperatures. If it was increased to 20 you would still use overclocked heat vents as they don't require the use of heat exchangers to any great degree which still makes them better in total. However it would grealy increase the output of old style mox reactors.

If they where buffed to be on par with overclocked heat vents then there would be no reason to use overclocked heat vents at all except for new 5x5 mox reactors which i don't really see happening.

Sadly it does not work at all without other mods

The problem lies in that the heat production increases with reactor temperature. So its either a zero temperature mark 1 reactor (which is not really a mox design) or it is a mark 5+ reactor. From my knowledge you can't run mark 5 reactors with only ic2 exp.

The only way iv'e gotten it to work is using on/off regulation on the reactor with nuclear control and then it still only works with a very specific type of design.

The design that works is the indirect cooling design where the fuel rods does not connect to the cooling directly in any way. You instead pull heat from the reactor and make sure that all the heat that is pulled can be cooled off. you then cycle the reactor on and off while to make sure the reactor does not overheat while you let the cooling do its work.

In any of the direct cooling designs where heat is pulled from the fuel rods, as the reactor starts producing more heat, it will pull more than the components can handle untill either the reactor cools down or the components break.

From my knowledge im the only one so far that has posted working 5x5 mox designs as none of the old designs work to my knowledge. My reactor has run in survival for about 1½ cycles now which is about 15-20 hours in game time so its extremly stable. However the only gain from these types of reactor is that the efficiency is increased, the output is actually lower than regular reactors. my mox can output 750 eu/tick at the most at an efficiency of about 100. If i made a similar mox reactor of the same size it would produce something along the lines of 800-1200 eu/tick and this design would be easily automated with ic2 only and would not require a complicated steam setup. (non 5x5 designs)

As it is right now i would use the old style reactors as they produce a lot more power and it is A LOT cheaper, althought it is at a lot lower efficiency. However considering the only thing getting spent is uranium 238 im not really that concerned with efficiency in mox reactors.

eu reader from ic2 exp