Posts by Nightdagger

I've never suffered a shortage of uranium, honestly. Between the miner that IC2 gives us equipped with an OV scanner, the quarry from BC mass-clearing huge amounts of terrain and gathering everything it finds, and simple cave-diving, I usually end up with several stacks of uranium waiting to be put into a reactor.

However, a proper breeder reactor setup can turn 1 uranium into 8 fuel cells, at the cost of some time and a not insignificant amount of risk if you're running the breeder hot. Which you definitely should.

Quote from NotCoach

One million EU generated for free in conjunction with a cobblestone generator. Once you have a proper feedback loop built you can turn it on and ultimately create matter without any loss, only perpetual gain. Cobblestone should probably be excluded from Recyclers and Mass Fabricators.

Well, if you're going to try to balance around mods, then you'd also have to exclude wood and wheat, because Forestry farms allow you to produce that stuff by the ton, and gives you an electric engine that you can use to power the farms so they're essentially "free" to run. And you can combine that with Buildcraft's automatic crafting table to turn the wood into planks, and the planks into sticks, and the sticks into fences, and recycle the fences. And even from a standard vanilla Minecraft standpoint, you'd want to exclude sugarcane and cactus, because both are easily automatically farmable. Should probably include eggs too, because you can build a mass egg factory and get dozens upon dozens of eggs, and...

See what I'm getting at here?

If you think it's that cheap...don't use it. But you can't expect a mod to be balanced around all possible exploits even from the vanilla game, much less every mod in existence.

Quote from mijnboogje

try this one instead, also 6 cells but more EU/T and higher eff
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=1k10101001501521s1r11r10
small edit: i know this is an mark 2, 40 minutes cooldown is not realy that much. after i finish cycles i just cool it with water until it is not using it anymore. then fire it up again and lets go. never melted down on me

Same amount of uranium, same efficiency, but 8 less heat dispensers and less than half the cooldown time. Even has a free space if you feel like reducing the cooldown time even further by feeding it ice.

http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=1k10101001501521s1r11r10

It still doesn't quite match the efficiency of the dezuman design, but it does have a significantly shorter cooldown period in exchange for 3 additional heat dispensers while still maintaining 2.5 efficiency, with a higher effective EU/t. You don't get quite as much out of each cell, and it's a bit more expensive than dezuman's design, but you do get the energy faster if that's important to you.

Only slightly less expensive than the ones you posted, but some of the coolant cells you had in your second design weren't necessary:

http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=1k10101001501521s1r11r10

I know it doesn't make much of a difference at all, what's 13 coolant cells compared to everything else, but hey.

Quote from raGan

Some say you can't use EV directly in SMP for some reason, but i have never tested it.

Very good to know, since I just started playing on an SMP server and have taken it upon myself to build the power network for the hub city at spawn.

Watch episode 19 of Direwolf20's let's play, he sets up a very similar system and describes how it works step by step.

A deployer...that's actually pretty goddamned ingenius!

for you!

Mine has to be either excess cobble and dirt from BC quarries, or excess wood from Forestry. Depending on how much cactus I need for waterproofing and how much sugarcane my energy collectors from EE can eat, I use those too.

Oh, one slightly odd thing about Power Converters' geothermal mk2...make sure that each geothermal has it's own dedicated lava pipe, not a split one from a single tank. If you feed multiple geothermals from one pipe, some of the lava disappears and you get less than the expected output for a volume of lava. If you pipe from a central storage tank to smaller buffer tanks that each feed their own geothermal, it works perfectly.

Oh, and it produces energy at 20 EU/t, just like the original one. It's a pretty nifty machine...I tend not to overuse them because it makes power generation a bit too easy for me, why mess around with other forms of power generation when you can feed 25 of these things and supply an MFSU with power as fast as it can dump it?

Check out the power converters mod by Power Crystals here: http://www.minecraftforum.net/…more-updated-dec-19th/#pc

He has an advanced version of the geothermal generator that runs on straight lava piped directly into it. However, if you want to be "fair" about it, edit the config file for it and change the Scale.EUGeneratedPerLavaUnit value from 50 to 20...if you leave it at the default 50, you'll get 50k from each "bucket" of lava instead of 20k, which makes the generator 2.5x more efficient in fuel consumption for the whopping cost of 8 pieces of glass. Probably also want to change the value of Scale.LavaCostInEU from 50 to 20 also, so that if you ever use his lava fabricator it doesn't cost you 50k to create 1 bucket.

The mod has a lot of other neat toys too.

Basically, get yourself an EU reader, go between the transformers to the EV signal, and spam-click it until you capture a packet. You'll know you got it when you get a reading over 1 tick that was something other than 0. If your system was really only losing 5 EU/t over that distance, that packet should read 2043. I'm betting it'll read somewhere closer to the 1990 range.

Measure it on the 4xHV cable connecting the transformers...what you're seeing is likely energy loss from the energy net on the receiving end, not involving the transformers at all. The transformers on your end will output full packets regardless of the energy loss on the HV cable...

For example, I just set up in my test world the following system. Batbox - upstepped LVTF - 41 units of glass fiber cable - LVTF - batbox. Stuck a rechargable battery in it. Reading between first batbox and upstepper: 32 EU/t. Reading between transformers: 127 EU/t over 1 tick when I finally clicked fast enough to capture a packet. Reading between the receiving transformer and receiving batbox?

128 EU/t over 1 tick.

Energy was lost through the transmission system. You won't see that energy loss after the transformer, you have to read it between them.

You're losing energy somewhere in addition to your transmission net.

Yeah, glad you mentioned that, I hadn't thought about the fact that 10 of them would overload the input capacity of a single LVTF and produce a backlog.

Of course, that made me stop and think: Why upstep it from LV to MV to HV to EV?

And I hooked up 13 geothermal generators to 4 pieces of copper cable (4 on each side, 4 on top, 1 on the end) feeding directly into an upstepped HV (skipping the upstep to MV and HV and going right to EV), running over 1 length of 4xHV, downstepping to HV, then feeding into an MFSU. Got 258048 out of 260000 in the MFSU. Exactly the same output as having those 13 geothermals feed into a pair of upstepped LVs, then an upstepped MV, then an upstepped HV, then back down to HV into the MFSU. With one difference, of course...the 13 geothermals backlogged the two LVs, so it was actually MORE efficient not to use them!

Again, it's entirely possible I might be missing something here, but...why step up using 3 transformers when you can just upstep any voltage directly to EV and get exactly the same results?

Yeah. It's an extension to your storage, at a slight energy loss, but when you stop to think that you'd have been losing a lot more energy if the electrolyzer wasn't there at all than you do in using it...yes, they're very much worth it. Toss a stack of water cells in the thing and don't worry too much about your MFSU filling up. And if you fill up all of those water cells? Stick another stack in there and store the electrolyzed ones for a rainy day when you're running your mass fab at full steam!

Yeah, when looking at reactor design, it's not the total output while running that counts, it's how efficient it is overall. Your reactor is only producing effectively 66.26 EU/t because it can only operate a little over half the time, requiring long cooldown periods in between. It's also relatively expensive for a reactor only producing 67 EU/t overall.

Compare with http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…=1o10101001501521s1r11r10 which produces effectively 78 EU/t, can run for multiple cycles without requiring a cooldown, has a very short cooldown period when you do have to cool it off, and is much cheaper to set up.

Actually, what I was looking at it for is powering a bank of geothermals that I don't want cluttering up my house. I want to put the power plant a fairly decent ways away from my house so I'm not constantly tripping over wires. I'm planning on 10 geothermals in the bank, but I don't want to splurge on an extra MFSU just to act as a storage buffer prior to transfer and a batbox or MFE as a buffer wouldn't be able to transfer the power it'll be taking in, so I'm going to wire all of the geothermals directly to the upstepping LV transformer. That way I don't have to worry about the buffer, because the transformer itself will buffer the signal and send a packet whenever it's full, and I can save on resources while still getting a good chunk of the power out of the power plant, as well as reducing clutter in my house. Which is worth it's weight in gold to me...or iron as it were...but not diamonds

I think the problem is just that I'm not testing with a large enough sample size. After all, some incompleted packets could be getting hung up in the transformers, so I decided to test it with much larger amounts to minimize that. I set up the same system as last night, except with an MFSU on the receiving end, and fired 300k energy at it through 300 single use batteries in the batbox, and ended up with 298624 EU in the receiving MFSU, which is only about 0.5% loss. The missing energy is only 1376 EU, which could easily just be hung up in the transformers waiting for a bit more energy to come at it to pulse.

Just for the sake of completion, I then wired the same system, but with 40 pieces of 4xHV cable instead of just 1, to incur some loss in the system, and pumped 300k through the batbox. I ended up with 293888 (97.9% efficiency, or 2.1% loss), getting packets of 2016/2048, only 1.5% loss over a 40 block span...the extra loss I attribute to hung packets. Another 300k through the same batbox left me with 588288 in the receiving MFSU...only 2% loss, including the hung packets.

I'm thinking my initial test was flawed in that I might have had the batbox hooked up to the transformers when I started feeding energy into it to hit the 2048 and disconnected it somewhere along the way. Even though the receiving batbox wasn't hooked up, the transformers might have pulled a few packets to start filling their internal buffers. Regardless, for transmitting small amounts of energy, EV is inefficient as hell, but for large amounts it's definitely a great option, and the more energy you transmit through it, the less you'll notice the hung packet effect.

So yeah. I was missing something. More power.

That's why I tested it with 2048 EU in the first batbox. The upstepped LV transformer should have pulled 32+32+32+32 to make 128, the upstepped MV should have pulled 4 of those packets of 128 to make 512, and the upstepped HV should have pulled 4 of those 512 packets to make 2048, then the HV should have downstepped that 2048 packet to 4 512s, and so on. There should have been absolutely nothing left over, but a large chunk appears to have just vanished.

So I was messing around with some long distance power transfer today, and ran into a bit of a snag. I was getting far, far less energy at the other end than I was expecting, so I set up a small system to test what's going on. The rig I used was batbox - LV redstoned - MV redstoned - HV redstoned - 1 piece of 4x iron cable (which should incur no loss), - HV - MV - LV - batbox. I stuck a rechargable battery into it, and the initial batbox has 16 EU left in it, but the ending one only has 7808 EU. That's 2176 unaccounted for. I thought maybe some packets got caught in the transformers, but the maximum that could have gotten caught would be 3 pulses of 512 in the HV, 3 pulses of 128 in the MV, and 3 pulses of 32 in the LV. That only adds up to 2016...leaving 160 EU missing.

I then, through a lot of patience, set up a batbox with exactly 2048 EU in it. I wired it, knowing that if all is well, there should be absolutely no packet waste whatsoever, the end batbox should end up with 2048 EU in it. It ended up with only 1664.

Screenshot of the setup is here:

So am I missing something? When I put 2048 EU into the batbox, it should have pulled packets of 32 to hit 128, then pulled packets of 128 to hit 512, then packets of 512 to hit 2048, then transferred a single packet of 2048 to be broken down into 4 pulses of 512, 16 pulses of 128, and 64 pulses of 32, right? I don't notice any loss when sending long distance transmission stepping up from HV to EV then back to HV using an MFSU on both ends, but for sending small amounts of energy like what you'd get from a wind farm two MFSUs seems extreme...you might as well just use glass fiber at that point. Even MFEs aren't really cost effective in that regard.

Anyone have any advice? Am I just being a noob and missing something obvious?

Edit: Actually, disregard that, I'm going to retest using the latest version of all of the mods involved and see if the problem still exists.