Right, both of your comments make sense.
Can you elaborate on the q-suit problems?
I am having some problems with my q-suit when in the nether.
Most notable is the helmet makes me think I'm not hungry but in reality I'm starving.
I also find that a q-boot jump sometimes also warps me sideways very quickly (straight into a lava pool of course).
Occasionally I get booted for speed hacking. The server is on my LAN.
Are these known q-suit issues in the nether?
Nice work. A pain in the arse to test that.
Would be nice if some of the fundamentals (E.g. "As of 1.7x, water mills will not share a water block") would be made clear. By all means let the community figure out the the best applications but in the absence of reliable measuring tools, the laws of physics should be stated clearly. It'd also save people from having to cheat to get the information by having a look at source code.
Whenever I've set it up, I do it like this:
[Generator]
[cable][cable]
[miner][pump]
[chest][chest]
Empty cells in the top slot of the pump. You didn't accidentally put empty batteries in there? 
I know you get a LOT of questions Richard, but sometimes I think you're a little too quick to flick people elsewhere. I have indeed posted this to mcportcentral. I'm posting here as well because, as I mentioned, I'm also seeing a problem in SSP which is not mcportcentral's domain.
There is a fundamental question which only IC2 people can answer: Are IC2 tools supposed to operate the same in the nether as they do in the overworld? If that is a yes then I know for sure that I need to troubleshoot. If you say they're not then I probably don't need to waste time on it.
Another encouragement for me to ask here is that when running Single Player,
it seems a charged and uncharged diamond drill operate at the same
speed. That's another question that only IC2 people can answer.
The middle-ground issue is a comparison of drill speeds in vanilla IC2 SMP vs bukkit SMP. Thus I ask, in vanilla IC2 SMP, does a charged diamond drill break dirt and netherrack so fast that it makes a zip sound or is it just a rapid popping?
If no one here cares to relate their experiences then so be it. I'll build up a vanilla IC2 server when I have the time and energy but I was hoping that someone else might be able to offer some advice and observations.
May I suggest that the maximum water for a single core reactor be reduced to 25? The current max of 26 does not allow for a power cable.
I suppose Breeders might not use a power cable but it'd be a rare breeder that surrounds it self with 26 water, I suspect.
Aside from the practical considerations of getting people or mobs to run on the treadmill, a quick reality check suggests that the energy output you get from a treadmill is negligible. Less, I submit, than a paddle in a stream or a turbine on a stalk.
What would be more useful might be a piezo generator that converts a redstone pulse to EU. Then you could put a handful of pressure plates in your sheep pen and they can generate electricity while they jump up and down for hours on end in exactly the same way that real sheep don't. (For the humourless, this suggestion is a joke. Nothing more. Deconstructing the idea will just prove you didn't get it.)
Haven't checked it yet. Just wanted to thank you very much for making and sharing this with the community. I know how many of my brain cells avoided an early death because I could use your tool instead of trying to calculate
Possible is one thing. Practical is another...
You'd need to use redpower2 and possibly buildcraft.
1. Buildcraft (or manual) to create empty cells from tin.
2. One or more pumps with rp2 transposers sucking out the coolant cells and feeding them to the reactor
Eventually you're going to run out of tin and thus run out of cells and go critical.
A better way IMO is to use pump+compressor to make snowballs then another compressor to make ice from the snowball. Then you feed the ice to the reactor. That way you never need to supply any materials, it just keeps on cooling.
The main problem of course is that all this only works reliably in SSP. The lag issues in SMP will, in my experience, sooner or later result in a meltdown even though the same design is stable in SSP.
Good additions, thanks guys.
Indeed the number of diamonds required to travel that 300 blocks is not small so that's a good reason to use EV.
The ability to feed a single cable with multiple power sources was also mentioned to me via private message Indeed I use that technique with 16 MFSU to feed my overclocked machines. Using 4 x MFSU will send the equivalent of EV down a 512EU/tick cable.
This does not appear in the compendium; apologies if it's already been denied.
As I was documenting cable behaviour this evening, I noted:
1. How iron cable can handle both HV and EV
2. How glass fibre cable breaks the linear progression of cable efficiency.
3. The shortness of the progression.
I suspect at the moment that few people bother transforming power to EV since glass fibre is just too cheap and convenient and serves most purposes. As such, I'd like to suggest a rejig and expansion of cables. I'm refining the idea and typing at the same time so consider this a first draft and open to discussion and further refinement
1. I suggest consistent naming of the cables based on the voltage for which they are rated.
2. I suggest an expansion of the cable range to separate EV from Iron.
- VLV Cable - Made from Tin, no changes other than name.
- LV Cable - Made from Copper, no changes other than name.
- MV Cable - Made from Gold, no changes other than name.
- HV Cable - Made from Refined Iron, handles up to 512 EU packets.
- EV Cable - Made from Advanced Alloy, handles up to 2048 EU packets.
Wrap 1-3 layers of rubber around them to insulate as normal.
3. I suggest a serious nerf on glass fibre cable. In the real world, it's signal wire and not (yet!) capable of carrying power effectively. However it IS virtually lossless. I suggest reducing the voltage rating of glass fibre to 32 EU packets but leaving the 40 block range (or even increasing it). To compensate, perhaps increase the yield from crafting from 4/6 to 10/15. This should suffice for the majority of wiring in people's workshops and bunkers for those that care to burn a few diamonds in exchange for not having to place batboxes all over the place.
4. New cable - AHV Advanced High Voltage cable that has a lower voltage drop than HV. Crafted by adding carbon mesh to rubber then wrapping it around RefIron.
5. New cable - AEV Advanced Extreme Voltage Cable which would behave like current glass fibre (40 block / lossless) but handle EV. Crafting should be suitably complex like making insulation from carbon mesh and advalloy and wrapping it around a regular glass fibre. I also suggest that this cable NOT be able to make bends. Not sure if it's possible to prevent cables from connecting on a side but Buildcraft does it so hopefully it can here too.
6. The AEV cable is of course PLASMA so needs a very HAYO new transformer that converts EV to Plasma. Naturally this is an Advanced Machine.
7. Potentially some rejigging of the voltage drop rates across the board so as to give consistency and encourage people to use the higher tier cables.
Right, bed time. Looking forward to your critiques!
Uninsulated cable and Tesla coils both have some way to detect players and mobs that are several blocks away. I'm sure that code could be used and can probably trigger any result be it direct damage or an affliction.
As to snow blocks vs sand, I understand that all blocks have a hardness setting which is what makes dirt easier to break than stone or obsidian. Snow is just a block that only has a small hitblock. I expect it's hardness is very slow. I wouldn't suggest that fallout blocks are as easy to remove as snow but you don't want it too difficult. The main thing I was going for though was the look. I think a greeny-brown snow-like layer over almost everything in a radius 10 blocks greater than the crater would look fantastic
On the same subject, I'd like to see the sides and top of each machine, rather than just the front face, indicate which machine is which. Also, it would be nice to have the top faces change to indicate the machine is active. At the moment, only the Macerator does this (and it's front doesn't!).
When a reactor goes foom or a nuke is detonated, I'd like to see a radioactive coating applied to everything in the area (and for surface blasts, applied to a much larger radius than the actual crater). I'm thinking something like the snow layer you get in Taiga biome. Like Tesla coils, you'd take some damage when you got with a certain range of the fallout blocks. Perhaps instead you could trigger a long lasting radiation sickness using the Hunger or Poison code. With a tip-of-the-hat to the Fallout game, Rad-X (rad resist potion) and Rad-Away (cures radiation poisoning) could be crafted. Using a Canning Machine to make them (instead of the Brewing Stand) would be more in theme with IC2 and give another reason to build a canning machine.
The fallout blocks would not evapourate nor be subject to destruction via explosion. In fact if it's possible, fallout in the area of effect of TNT would be doubled if there's room to place the extra blocks. The fallout blocks need to be shoveled up. You'd get "irradiated muck" which, like snowballs, you could combine to form "irradiated dirt" blocks. Into the Canning Machine and you get Radioactive Waste that looks like a 44 gal drum with a nuke sign on the side. Then throw the waste into a furnace and you'd get normal dirt block.
I appreciate that there are much higher priorities in the IC2 world but there y'go. My suggestion for the day
Xeno
No tl;dr. I spent 20 mins writing this so you can bloody well read it
Hopefully you know that EU travels in packets of a certain size. So to move 1024EU from a batbox to a machine using copper cable, it's broken up into 32 separate packets of 32EU. Using gold cable it's 8 packets of 128EU or just two packets of 512EU using glass cable. A power source can only produce one packet per tick (1/20th of a second) so sources with higher voltages can move EU more quickly because they move more EU per tick. OK, that's the basics out of the way.
All cables lose a certain amount of EU per packet, per block travelled.
Insulated copper loses 1 EU per 5 blocks. So if you have a batbox or transformer every 5th block (only 4 bits of cable between the batboxes), you lose only 4 x 20% of an EU which is rounded down to zero EU. You never lose anything. But if you ran, say, 30 blocks of insulated copper you'd lose 6EU from each of those 32EU packets. So if you sent 20,480 EU (split up into 640 x 32EU packets), you'd only receive 16640 EU total at the other end. Also it'd take 640 ticks (32 seconds) to move it.
HV Cable (aka Iron cable) has the highest loss per block. When properly insulated (HVx4) it can handle Extreme Voltage (EV) of 2048EU per packet. It loses 1EU per packet per 1.25 blocks. So the same 20,480 EU will be moved in only 10 packets. Each packet loses 24 EU over the 30 blocks. This is a much higher loss, per-packet, than copper cable BUT because the packets are so big there are not many of them so the total loss is less. Only 240EU (30 blocks / 1.25 x 10 packets) is lost over the 30 blocks. So you're left with 20,240 EU at the destination.
Gold cable (MV) fits in between copper (LV) and iron (HV) cable.
That's the basics. Higher voltages are useful for reducing the loss of EU over longer distances. This is exactly how it works in the real world. The power lines way overhead on the big towers are 11,000V compared to the 110-240V in your wall socket.
---
Glass fibre cable throws a bit of a curve ball. It breaks the Copper-Gold-Iron progression because for its relatively high carrying capacity, it has Very low loss over distance. It loses only 1 EU per packet for every 40 blocks and can handle 512EU packets. So let's do a comparison in the name of SCIENCE \o/
Let's say we have 10,000,000 EU (a full MFSU) to move over a distance of 300 blocks (from your reactor in town to your Fortress of Solitude out in the hills).
Glass Fibre
10,000,000 EU becomes 19,532 packets of 512 EU
7.5 EU lost per packet over 300 blocks. Rounding up to 8 EU.
156,256 EU total loss.
10M EU sent, 9,843,744 arrive in 977 seconds (16.3 mins).
HVx4 Cable
10,000,000 EU becomes 4,883 packets of 2048 EU
240 EU lost per packet over 300 blocks.
1,171,920 EU total loss.
10M EU sent, 8,828,080 arrive in 245 seconds (4 mins).
So what do we learn from all of the above?
In Copper, Gold and Iron, the higher tier cables can move power more efficiently. For most cases, the resource costs of the transformers is negligible. However Glass Fibre is so efficient that it's probably the best for the majority of cases. The only time that you'd want to use Extreme Voltage would be if you needed to get a Very Large amount of EU over a long distance in a real hurry. I can't think of many situations where you'd need to do that. Teleporters or terraformers perhaps?
I use glass fibre for almost everything I do. As yet I haven't needed to run cables more than 40 blocks.
Anyway, I hope that helps.
If you would like the official description, it's here on the Wiki
http://wiki.industrial-craft.net/index.php?title=Cable
edit: Tweaked the explanations and formatting for greater clarity.
Hi folks,
I'm currently running 1.64 using the bukkit port. When I'm in SMP and using a charged diamond drill, both dirt (not grass) and netherrack disappear almost instantly. I hold my mouse button and wave my drill around and the blocks disappear so quickly they make a zippp noise.
However when I'm in SSP, the speed is dramatically reduced. It's still quite fast, but slow enough that the noise is a distinct pop pop pop pop.
Comparing with an uncharged diamond drill (acquired via NEI), it appears to be the same speed.
Anyone else seen this behaviour? Is this an aspect of the bukkit port or does it appear in 'vanilla' IC2 as well?
The were removed because it's pretty munchkin (overpowered/cheating) to enchant unbreakable tools.
With vanilla enchanting if you get lucky you can get a fast pick, a very durable pick OR a pick that has a special ability like Fortune.
If you're VERY lucky you can get 2 of the above. Fast and Durable. Or Durable and Fortune.
if you're INCREDIBLY lucky you can get all 3.
However, even a very durable pick has a finite lifetime and so you have to keep working on making levels and repeat enchantments to try and replace it.
IC2 tools NEVER break which takes me back to my first sentence.
haha I did the opposite. From some earlier testing, I had my macerator hooked to a batbox filled by 4 water mills. I deliberately didn't connect my MFSU bank to the macerator power line until after I'd put in the necessary upgrades. So I put in the upgrades, put in some rocks and stood there for several seconds wondering why it processed 1 block and stopped
OK, just tested and it seems you're correct. The difference between 15 and 16 OCs over a stack of cobble was noticeable but I couldn't determine a difference between 16 and 17. Even a 0.3 tick per operation when multiplied 64 times becomes almost a second which should've been noticeable even with my Mk I Optical Measuring Device. We can thus conclude that the 1.3 is rounded down to 1 which adjusts my numbers by 1, as you say.
Thanks again for your feedback.
And to any of you who haven't been to university, this is what's called Peer Review and it's a foundation of modern science. SCIENCE ROCKS!
k, updated the wiki.
Not sure what you mean by the rounding.
Recycler - OC's, EU/t, number of ticks
10
110.0
1.3
11
175.9
0.9
I'd think that the game would look at 11 or more OCs taking 0.9 or less ticks, round up to 1 whole tick and thus 11 OCs becomes your effective limit.
Do you disagree?
OK, did some testing. Your number of 20 secs per operation for a macerator is correct. Tested with both smoothstone and coal. I could've sworn that coal took longer to macerate but it appears not.
So Macerator and Extractor are 400t/op, Furnace is 128t/op and Recycler is 45t/op.
I define Maximum Benefit as the point where the length of a single operation first drops below 1 tick and is thus effectively 1 tick. Of course you're "wasting a small amount of power" but if you don't cross the threshold, you're not quite as fast as you can be.
Revised numbers using the 160% power in 1.71 are as follows:
Macerator: 17 OCs - 5903 EU/t
Extractor: 17 OCs - 5903 EU/t
Furnace: 14 OCs - 2161 EU/t
Recycler: 13 OCs - 176 EU/t
I shall now update my addition to the wiki. Thanks for helping out!
And sincere apologies for metalchic for highjacking her thread but it was in the name of science!
