Posts by jandrese

The thing I don't like is putting in Redstone or Lapis to cool a cell. It doesn't make any sense to me. It would make more sense to send them into a cell chiller, which consumes a bucket of water for every 5k heat or so.

You can wear rubber (or Quantum) boots to reduce the amount of fall damage you take as well, but for the most part you just have to be wary of jetpacks in SMP.

I just wish I had discovered this before setting up the fully automated rocket fuel facility.

Wind Gens can produce a goodly amount of power for not a lot of space if you're willing to make big towers of them. If you have Advanced Machines then small arrays of MV and HV solar can produce way more power than you need.

I lost my very first gen on like the second thunderstorm that rolled through the server. It was a miscalculation on my part, it was at effective level 81. After that, I've been extremely cautious about placing the gens.

The only thing I would note is that there is no capacity limit on the cables, just a per-packet size limit. You can send a million EU/tick down a tin cable as long as no packet is larger than 5E.

The caveat is that all of the storage devices have a fixed output limit of 1 packet at max size per tick. So a MFSU spits out a 512E packet every tick if there is someone on the line that needs all of that power. The MFE only spits out 128E packets, and Batboxes deal in paltry 32E packets.

Transformers also have a maximum conversion rate, but if you're talking about EV then you don't have to worry about it until you're generating far too much power anyway.

An update on the Wiki suggests that unmanned water mills were removed from the latest version of Tekkit. Does anybody know what the story behind this is? It seems weird that unmanned hydro was the one removed, since the manned mode is the broken one.

The manned mode seems either useless (manually bucketing water into the mill) or brokenly overpowered (that RP2 setup that makes a gross amount of power for the amount of resources spent on it).

That doesn't stop other people on my server complaining about the "sewage treatment plant sound" coming from my house.

The stupidly cheap component cost for water mills is offset by the increased wire costs (but that's just tin), and more importantly, the MUCH more involved installation, especially if you want to install a useful number of water mills. You have to open up a ton of space, deal with water, etc... Also, you're going to run through a ton of wire if you're getting the full 25 water blocks out of each mill. In most cases you install it as a "tower", which reduces the power output but greatly speeds up installation and burns through much less wire.

Solar is stupid easy to install in comparison. You just plop it down somewhere with a view of the sky and you're done.

While I agree with you on the wind gens, water gens shouldn't be a problem in that regard. They just output power in relation to the number of water blocks nearby, and cap out at about half the power of a solar panel (0.25E/t). Making a HV water gen would be easy. You would probably have to more or less ignore the "manned" mode though and just have each bucket pump out 2EU/t for a short period of time just like it does on the regular water gen.

HV water would be a heck of a lot easier to install than a traditional water gen though.

Explode? Mine just stopped working, which was annoying because I had to figure out why i wasn't getting any power after the storm blew through.

Remember however that every block in their airspace counts as lowering their level by 1, so if you have a big tower of windmills you can place them up higher to compensate for the fact that a lot of the airspace is obstructed.

If you care about squeezing just a touch more efficiency out of the system, you can make the flowers only 3 blocks tall (12 windmills per tower), so they're all in approximately the same boat efficiency wise. The gens on the bottom will be at -4 levels to the gens up top, which means you can put the top gens right up at level 92 for maximum efficiency without the chance of random failure.

You forgot to mention the one big downside of running that manned watermill setup: The horrendous noise. It's worse than wind gens, although you can at least hide that water setup deep underground so you don't hear it all of the time.

Heck, I'm already questioning my use of Nuclear power. Nuke reactors aren't exactly cheap to make and don't put out that much power with any sane design (120E/t tops generally for a Mk I non-CASUC) and you can build an awful lot of maintenance free green generators that have no chance of spontaneous explosion for the same cost.

It seems to me that Nuke plants in general have a lot of risk and hassle for what doesn't appear to be a lot of payoff compared to spending a similar number of resources just building wind gens and making a big windmill farm, except that the Nuke plants aren't as ugly to look at. This is especially true if you build a proper containment vessel for your reactor so any screwups on your part don't punish your neighbors).

Solar is overpowered? Wouldn't that be "all green power gens are overpowered", since they all produce about the same amount of energy per unit input? Heck, a properly set up Wind farm is even more efficient than solar, and Water is super consistent and very close to the same efficiency. The primary advantage of solar is that it has easy placement, which is hardly OP.

Sure it makes Nuke plants look like a bad buy in the long run, but that's really the Nuke plant's fault.

It's not really that hard to beat out a nuke plant for power output, especially if you're looking at sustained power output instead of peak. Sure you can make a nuke plant output 1500E/t for a short time, but keeping it running at that rate is near impossible. 120E/t is basically the "sane" max, before you start getting into mass ice manufacturing (which saps up Energy at a prodigious rate) or something. 120E/T is just 6 geos!

For all of the "holes" in the shielding, I make a block of reinforced stone just past the hole to catch the explosion. I have not blown up any reactors yet though, so I can't say if this actually works.

Roughly:

I'm going under the assumption that explosions can't do right angles very well and will waste most of their energy against the stone.

Having toyed around with breeders for a bit now, I'm severely questioning their utility. For instance, the "easy breeder" which is a 6 chamber reactor that is filled with dumb Reactor Plates except for 5 empty spots (so a neutral breeder) so you can actually heat it up with lava (only 5 buckets!) has a big problem in that you can only breed 4 depleted cells per rod used, and even that can only be done if you're paying attention and swap the depleted cells out at the right time. Bigger breeders are near impossible to manage if you want to do something other than babysit your reactor. It just doesn't seem worth it.

The big problems (for me):

1. Heating up a reactor takes too long for anything that has any active cooling at all. A simple spreader/cooling cell flower adds 60,000 base heat capacity to the reactor (30 buckets!), which makes it impractical to heat up with buckets, added to the fact that you have a very narrow window between "breeds at a reasonable speed" and "smoking crater" makes it risky to use regular reactions to heat the reactor up.

2. Reactor cooling components melt at 10,000 heat, even if your reactor hull is good to 16,000, making that extra hull mostly worthless (if you hit it and start melting down your cooling components, the hull will rocket up to explosion in no time flat).

3. Because you're down at 1eff for the rod while it is breeding, you have to factor that into the equation. If you breed 2 rods using 1 when your normal reactor has a 2.2 eff rating, then you're losing 1.2 eff right off the top.

4. Mostly, it just takes too damn long. Almost an hour and a half at maximum speed. At best you're looking at two breeding runs per rod. If you spent your time mining instead of babysitting the reactor, you would almost certainly run across more rods than you would get out of your breeding program, and not have to spend hundreds of copper/iron/etc... making the reactor in the first place. It's far too much effort for too little payoff. If the rods bred in like 15 minutes or so (at max speed), then you could hang around your house building stuff and breeding rods one day to replenish the stock, but the current system basically requires you to run the breeder 24/7 to make it pay off. Nuke plants already have a disadvantage of being fuel based compared to the more common solution of just installing a ton of solar these days, why make breeding so uneconomical to boot?

Would it have really been so bad to have a little thermometer built into the side of the reactor window similar to the energy level on energy storage units?