Posts by psusi

  • The new 5x5 IC² Reactor

    My reactor has a single quad uranium fuel rod surrounded by neutron reflectors and puts out 400 heat ( with some extra buildup so have to cycle it ). Two faces each have dual heat exchangers feeding a boiler making super heated steam, driving two chained steam generators ( per boiler ) producing a total of 300 eu ( 100 from first turbine on super heated steam, plus 50 from the second using the remaining regular steam ) from the 400 heat, which is 50% better than stirlings.


    I suppose if you are only using regular steam with a single turbine then you would only be as good as a stirling, so perhaps steam could use a little buffing.

  • Steam generator improvements

    Quote from Chocohead

    I didn't say there shouldn't be, but heating up coolant is a silly method of doing it. Having long metal pipes to conduct heat, but have noticeable losses and warm up times in doing so make much more sense and feel more IC2y.

    In real life they pipe around the hot coolant rather than use metal heat conductors... I figured this was trying to model a real nuclear reactor so piping coolant instead of just attaching the heat exchanger directly to the containment dome would be appropriate.

  • The new 5x5 IC² Reactor

    Holy crap that is a lot of solar! Doesn't that lag your game to hell? Also you only get that 320 eu/t in the day time.


    A properly regulated nuke can easily generate 300 eu/t day and night, and doesn't generate the lag that 300 individual generators do. Also eventually you can make rtg fuel pellets and load them into a radioisotope generator that will put out 32 eu/t forever.

  • Fluid distributor seems too expensive

    Quote from Chocohead

    Because the best BC pipes can only move 40mb/t, while a steam boiler can output 100, 200mb/t etc. So you can use the fluid distributor to split the flow over multiple pipes, so all the steam or superheated steam can be moved at once. And, it can combine the multiple flows into a steam turbine too, so you only use one block face as well.

    Why would you want to transport steam? The only thing you can do with it is drive a turbine, which you may as well just attach to the steam generator.

  • Steam generator improvements

    Quote from Chocohead

    That I out right oppose. Heating coolant is stupid, since it is designed to cool uranium fuel rods, not transfer heat.


    Why shouldn't there be a way to transfer heat?


    Quote from Chocohead

    You can anyway, I can't see why just using lava wouldn't already do what you've suggested.

    You can use lava, but not heaters ( burning renewable fuel ) since their heat output does not match up with the heat the steam generator required, and as noted in point #1, they currently go fubar unless you give them an exact multiple of 100 heat. The second point was intended as a way to address the problem of limited number of faces on the steam generator into which you can inject heat. Another possible solution to that is to have a multi block steam generator like railcraft. Then if you need to attach 8 heaters, you just build a larger steam generator. The reversible heat exchanger is probably easier to code though.

  • MOX in the 5x5

    How on earth do you run mox in the 5x5 reactor? Since it puts out more heat at higher temperature, rather than more eu, you can't balance heat output with heat generated to maintain stable operation. You also can't regulate it with a fixed duty cycle. As soon as it the core temp rises by a single %, the heat output ramps up exponentially to meltdown.

  • Steam generator improvements

    I have two improvements I would love to see:


    • The steam generator mechanics are terrible. It requires an exact amount of heat that only matches up with a fully populated liquid heat exchanger to produce steam, otherwise it spits out water, relying on a fluid regulator to keep it flowing. It should instead have internal water storage and take whatever amount of heat you give it and generate as much, and only as much steam as it can from that heat.
    • The liquid heat exchanger should be reversible, allowing you to create hot coolant from non nuclear heat sources.

    These two changes would allow some much more interesting mechanics:

    • You could run a steam turbine from 1-5 heaters attached directly
    • You could have a farm of heaters generating hot coolant to concentrate and transfer the heat into the steam generator
    • It actually gives a use to the radioisotope heat generator, which can participate in your heating plant

  • Jetpack fuel / flight time

    I don't see how refueling after 6 minutes of flight time would get annoying unless you like to stay on fly mode at all times. I have not had to refuel my jetpack at all yet after using it to fly around the nether for a few minutes to get some glowstone, and drop down into each hole my miner digs to check them out and fly back up. I think it still has something like 80% left.

  • distilled water evaporation?

    I saw this a lot at first but then I think it stopped. Do you have the steam generator constantly outputting steam, or do you stop/start it a lot? I have a hunch that when you stop/start it, some steam seems to leak out of the system ( visible ) and you lose that water.

  • The new 5x5 IC² Reactor

    Quote from viper2g1

    What is the proper way to use the fluid regulator? I have the dark side connected to the LHE and it is powered, but it appears to be doing nothing. I have a problem where I either have too much hot coolant causing my reactor to heat up, or too few hot coolant causing my superheated steam to revert to regular steam. I have to constantly add and remove two copper heat exchangers to keep the balance. I thought the fluid regulator would help in this situation but like I said it doesn't seem to do anything, and I can't find any posts/wiki information about it.


    While I'm here, I have been using scars design from a few posts back - Reactor: http://goo.gl/GO5Bd and this is what it looks like - http://i.imgur.com/zwP30QK.jpg and http://i.imgur.com/oPVgHp9.jpg


    Is there a more efficient way I could be doing this? I currently sit at 912 heat and about 650 EU generated with this setup, but like I said it takes manual work moving the heat exchangers.

    You use the fluid regulator to pump water into the steam generator, not to regulate coolant. Just connect the liquid heat exchangers directly to the fluid ports in the reactor. Two of them fully populated with heat conductors will produce super heated steam in the steam generator with 1 mb/t of water, and consume 400 heat/t from the reactor. If your reactor core produces more heat than that, then yes, the hot coolant will build up until it is either full, or you are out of cold coolant, and the core will heat up. This is why you need to use the redstone to cycle it on and off in a carefully controlled duty cycle.

  • Jetpack fuel / flight time

    The jetpack is the best thing since sliced bread, but it feels overpowered. According to the wiki I guess it used to have a flight time of like 200 seconds, but now it seems to last *forever*. It also seems odd that you can cram 30 buckets of biogas into the thing. I propose a few changes:


    1) Should only hold 4 buckets of fuel
    2) 4 buckets of biogas should only get you ~75 seconds flight time
    3) Extractor on a bucket of biogas gets you a tiny pile of fuel dust. 9 of those gets you a fuel dust. Fluid enrich biogas on that gets you rocket fuel. Rocket fuel lasts 5x longer than biogas, giving you over 6 minutes flight time.


    Then again, maybe rocket fuel should be extracted from electrolyzed water?

  • Fluid distributor seems too expensive

    Quote from Blockmaster139

    It's not a pipe...more like a fluid sorting machine ;)

    No, it isn't. It pulls fluid from all but one side and pushes it to the remaining side, or vice versa. It doesn't take multiple fluids and doesn't sort them.


    If you are going to use BC for pipes then what need have you for the fluid distributor? BC pipes already can split and combine multiple flows. I'd rather not use a bunch of completely different mods when it is this one that I like. It seemed that this was the fluid transport system this mod uses; but it's kind of silly expensive.


    It really isn't a machine so it doesn't seem like it should use a basic machine casing -- just tin casings, like a fluid cell.

  • 40 block long electric ladder!

    I thought the idea was to attach the magnetizer to the *side* of the pole every 40 blocks to get an unlimited height pole, but alas, it seems it must be at the top and bottom giving a max effective height of 40 total, only using half of the effective range of each magnetizer.

  • Fluid distributor seems too expensive

    Quote from Blockmaster139

    Machine casing + 5 fluid ejector = 23 iron + 13 copper(if you use the metal former) + 25 tin.


    That's not really very expensive

    For a block that is a glorified pipe, it sure is. It takes 16 of them to pipe the biogas around 6 fermenters... 368 iron is pretty steep just to automate the process of collecting and transferring the biogas. It certainly should not be more expensive than the fluid regulator, which everyone already seems to consider to be expensive, but at least it holds 10 times as much and regulates the rate of transfer.

  • Fluid distributor seems too expensive

    So the new fluid distributors are pretty neat. In creative mode, I managed to set up a stack of 6 fermenter/heater pairs surrounded by distributors to pull the biogas out of the fermenters and feed it back into both the heaters, and 4 semifluid generators to produce 64 eu/t, with another set of distributors on top to feed in fresh biomass from a canning machine full of biochaff. I was very pleased with this setup and went to my survival world to try it out only to realize that the distributor requires a machine casing and five fluid ejector upgrades to make! That makes it even more expensive than a fluid regulator. Please consider changing the recipe to output either 4 or possibly even 8 of them per batch.