Posts by DrSNAFU

Right now it’s a slow capacitor to cushin overage and provide during brownouts. (Very useful for windgen setups) But yeah, 10eu/t is on the slow side considering one small tower of windgens can get upwards of 40-50.

If their functionality is changed and discharge rate upped, I can see them used as portable MFEs complete with full charge. Heck, if they’re allowed to interface with Batboxes, they could even replace MFEs in a low-current setup.

Throwing in my two cents, I’d like to be able to adjust at what percentage of their parent storage block they’ll start to charge/discharge. As it stands I think it starts to discharge at 1/4 and drawing when the storage is at 3/4.

Quote from immibis

I prefer either solar, or wind, because of water's low power output.

Erm, I'll try being a bit more concise this time.

If I’m not mistaken, solars and water mills produce roughly the same eu/t. You have to factor in that you get TWO watermills for the materials and solars are off half of the time. Solars just trade their expense for ease of use.

But if you believe the fancy computations in other threads, then wind blows them both out of the water.

I’ve sworn off solars since they got so expensive. I’m using wind exclusively now while planning to add water in the near future.

I’d say that water beats out solar hands down at this point. Think of it this way, solars produce 1eu/t, but since they don’t produce at night that’s knocked down to .5eu/t. Water gens however produce .25eu/t when surrounded with water. Double that since you get TWO water gens for the materials and you have .5eu/t, same as solar. Consider also the rain which knocks out solar gens and the horrendous building costs of solars and we have a clear winner.

Other factors include where you want to build, and how much work you want to do to place them. Granted, placing solar is easy as pie if you live anywhere near the surface of the world. Wind-gens are troublesome to engineer if you live in lowlands and watermills require some engineering to properly set up. Still, there’s no place in the world that solars can beat out either water or wind. The only merit they have is looking pretty. Bleh.

Another member (SpawnX I believe?) has a setup that I've re-created and I absolutely love it. Making giant rafts of cables and wind-gens blotting out the sky is beyond fugly. Instead of having one gen, each hooked to its own dedicated bat-box and a half dozen cables servicing it, you might go for something a bit less efficient and a bit more practical. Take your standard watermill tower and take out the gaps. Essentially, run a cable to the top of the sky and then cover it on all sides with wind-gens to make a tower-cluster. Run that either to a bat-box or straight to a transformer and out into the trunk line. Space the towers apart as you would individual gens on a standard setup. That way you get a more space-efficient design but retain much of the generation power. How tall the towers get would depend on what type of wire you want to use. I'm also experimenting in mitigating the chances for windgens to fizzle tin cables.

Yep, when you first place the pump the plunger will rise to the top (even with no water present) and stay that way through the cycle. Once it actually hits water or lava, the pump will start spitting out filled cells and the animation will start again.

You of course need power, which is represented in batteries in the diagram but 2 copper wire along the back attached to a geothermal is an excellent means of power too. You’re likely to get lots of lava cells if you hit the right spot.

They do have their uses. I use a windgen setup so there are inconsistencies here and there with my power input. It helps soften any power loss by giving me a boost when I need it and absorbing any overage I can’t use. However once your power generation and complexity of your setup reaches a certain point, they’re just not as efficient anymore.

First of all, they have a rather slow rate of charge. If you have a LARGE input, they simply won’t keep up and some will still go to waste. Same goes for their output. It’s only enough to run a handful of appliances. (what is the total throughput, something like 10eu?)

Yep, you just put them against an MFE, no matter which side and they’ll operate like part of the MFE, like an addon. (or a Teleporter) There’s no real way to control when the system starts storing and discharging. I had the exact numbers on hand before but I don’t right now, discharge begins at something like 1/4 MFE charge and it starts storing at (again, guessing) 3/4 charge.

Electrolized water is a great way to keep power in a chest. They’re stackable and contain quite a bit of juice, at a small loss of course. But then again, if all you want is storable cell-power you’d be much better off going with Lava Cells in a Geothermal than electrolyzed water. And if you don’t want your MFE to max out and waste power, just throw a Mass Fab on the circuit and let that soak up the extra EU.

In the end unless you do use 2-4 of them on your MFE, you’re probably only going to get real use out of it in a Teir 2 setup.

Some things you need to remember. You need to send the output to a transformer or storage block before you incur any loss from the mill so you can raise the packet size. 1 EU loss from a packet of 512 is nothing compared to 1 off of every packet of 1-5.

Secondly, bat-boxes can only output at 32eu/t. The gens can output up to 5 and (rarely) beyond. So if you use batboxes, you might be maxing them out if you use only 6 gens. I’d recommend using transformers. Even a LV transformer (cheaper to make than a batbox) can output at a RATE of 128/t, and you can choose whether to use the 32 or 128 packet sizes. (I’d go for the latter, but that uses gold cables.)

And of course always use the proper wiring for the proper voltages. Copper for LV, Gold for MV, and HV wire for HV and EV.

Most of the issues about wind farms are entire perceptual:
1: “My base isn’t that freaking high!” It doesn’t have to be! Just the wind farm. You can use MV transformers and HV cables fairly cheaply to get the power down to the ground using HV flow.
2: “You need to space them all out, it’ll look like crap!” If you want to space EACH and EVERY one out, yes it’ll use too much wire and look like garbage. Just look at SpwnX’s setup. Clusters man, clusters! You’ll get only minimal loss and the compact nature will absolutely murder Solar in the same vertical space.
3: “Long distance + low voltage wiring = big headache” This is the only really legitimate grievence. You have three options for lossless wiring until you get to the xformer. A: Use tin. Yes, you’ll fizzle some wires every so often but the wires are beyond cheap and they’ll work for long lengths. B: Use diamond fiber. They’re expensive, but they’re also good for long distances. C: Use copper and make shorter towers. Have a stack of 4 clusters before the power heads into the transformer. Maybe add another 4 lengths of wire before the next transformer. (Haven’t tried that…)

Hrmm… are there any side-effects to redstoning windgens?

Bottom line is, windgens are far easier to setup and use than people make out.

I’ve just used SpwnX’s tower design on the SMP server I play on. I’m MORE than satisfied.

I built on a mountain so I only needed 27 (9 tin’s worth of) cables to feed all the way from the top of the sky layer down to the MFE in my modest workshop in the top of a mountain. I only needed 6 of them (laid out in his tower format) to power my entire lab. I’m up to 8 now and I’m going to up to 28 when I get home and make my mass-fab.

In single player I was able to get 75-90eu/t from one tower of 32, and with TMI’s ‘rain’ function, up to 100+. I never got the tin cables to fizzle in SMP, probably because I couldn’t evoke a thunderstorm.

In SMP however, my cable line has fizzled twice, both from the top layer cluster of cables. (I find when wires fizzle, they only do so in the direction of power flow. So if any of the lower windgens had made the 5+ burst, the wires above would have been intact.) So I don’t think that having 28 gens would increase my chances of fizzling any more. None of the lower gens seem to be able to do it. (Maybe I should test that by removing the top cluster and replacing them with wood/dirt blocks to see if it fizzles again…) If true, the fix would be quite simple for reliable tin/windgen setups.

If I might address those who don’t like windgen cluster setups… All that fancy math is really pretty on paper, but it deals with single generators, isolated and at the top level of the world. Unfortunately using them in such a way is completely impractical. A real-world setup would be so large as to fill the sky with a lattice-work of gens and wires. The cost of producing something like that would skyrocket past that of solar panels.

I find that SpwnX’s cluster formation packs plenty of oomph into a small form factor that blows Solar out of the water. (At least for those of us who like to live on mountains :3) And with some transformers and HV cables, you can pipe it down to wherever you live. Try it and see!

Before we begin:
1: Yeah, obsidian really isn’t going to do it. Use AT LEAST 2 layers of reinforced stone/glass with any reactor setup. All it takes is one mistake…
2: Never put an MFSU close to a reactor. Even if you have it properly insulated, that’s TEN DIAMONDS, and you do not want even the slightest chance that a blast could follow the wire to the MFSU.

Now, I’m sure we’d all appreciate it if you were a bit more clear with what your setup is, and where the bottle neck is you’re trying to fix.

A: Are you saying that the 4eu/t output is too low for what you think you need?
B: Are you saying that the appliances aren’t drawing power from the storage devices?
C: What voltages are you using? Of course with Glass Fiber that doesn’t matter much with lengths below 20.
D: Try to remove the IC/BC stuff and detector cables, see if that lets stuff draw.
E: Try to describe to us the exact setup, voltages, wire lengths, what appliances are hooked up with what.

Try to simplify your setup to determine where exactly the issue is. Make a couple of bat-boxes and batteries, and connect them to different sections of your setup to try to determine where the flow is getting bottlenecked. Shoot some power through and see how much of it makes it to the other side. I find it enlightening to use SinglePlayer/TMI to mirror my setup and troubleshoot in a failure-free environment.

What I call Phase 1 consists of 1 generator, 1 macerator, 1 electro-furnace, and 1 rechargeable battery. That’s bare-bones for a mining setup. That way you’ll start macerating your ores and smelting them down. You’d have to use tree taps and the furnace to (inefficiently) extract rubber until you have enough resources to add an Extractor to the setup, along with wiring and probably a bat-box in Phase 2, solar panels are added around that time too.

YAY! Philosophy! I've seen plenty of people hold onto their fundamentally flawed beliefs no matter how much damning evidence is given to the contrary. Isn’t that the principle behind Faith?

I enjoy arguing so if the person can at least muster a decent defense for their notions, I’ll muster some respect for them. My version is: “Everyone is entitled to their informed opinion.” Since as you’ve already illustrated, arguing with an imbecile is no kind of fun at all.

My answer to the question posed: Use EV whenever feasible, unless you have ready access to glass-fiber. I did my own rather crappy calculations and once you’ve gotten past the lossless lengths, the higher the voltage (used with appropriate wires) the better. The glass-fiber is of course the exception to this rule, but extra-long lengths are impractical until you really start producing indust-diamons.