Posts by brumster

Quote from Shakie666

I would just like to mention I tried building one of these myself, following the guide in the video on page 2. It worked perfectly, except when it came to putting the cells back in the reactor. Using the redstone setup in the video, the reactor came back on before all the fresh cells had been replaced in the reactor (i.e. they were still travelling through the pipes when the reactor came on). How can I make it so there is a longer delay before the reactor turns back on?

My design in the early video relies on the fact that there's an "invisible" 9-item buffer in between the reactor and the relay, which slots the cells in pretty much instantaneously. It relies on you have an extra 9 cells always in the 'circuit', obviously (ie. in the whole pipe system). The downside is it limits you to reactor designs needing no more than 9 cells. So the minute you need 10, you cannot rely on that relay holding enough in it's "buffer" to allow instant swapins - you will need to delay the reactor startup sufficiently enough for the additional cells to come down the pipes. The suggest of a counter linked to an item detector is the safest bet.

Best o'luck!

Good work, chap

Absolutely

I suspect I'm like many - I have a creative test world that I muck about with ideas on (fine-tuning turtle programs at the moment) with an idea to implementing the good ones in my play-it-by-the-book survival world. I think this is one of those ideas that's won't migrate across, but has been interesting to do all the same

I've not looked at any mods based on UE - I like to keep my (Minecraft) life simple so lump it with some of the more mainstream mods, but I've always thought it would be wonderful to have an electrical energy implementation a bit closer to real life - at least with the concepts of current and voltage, so you can trade the two of them off each other in terms of costs (run a low voltage, low current circuit for lighting at a cheap cost energy and resource-wise, but your mass fabricator needs 10kV and a thumping great 1000 amps of current.

It's a real shame of the differences between all the mods in our community - the implementations, the maturity, the user base and maybe sometimes the politics - all really hamper getting them to worth together. You then get bridging mods that look to cross the gap (often IC<->BC) which I'm thankful for, but have gotten bit in the past (Crossover mod sometimes lagged behind releases leaving me without an upgrade path until all of them came into line).

For now, I make do with IC2. While the actual implementation of energy is maybe simplistic compared to real life it's actually very user friendly, the tier system gives a degree of complexity to it to keep it interesting and relevant for the machines you want to drive and - mainly - IC2 has plenty of machines of some functional value!

Ok, here's the vid I promised - appreciate it's on a small scale to what you had in mind, but the intention is to show how the method works.

http://youtu.be/Bvv1pv5T46c

Yes, thankfully the metadata isn't important other than it's either 0 or non-zero.

I've got 6 cooler reactors cooling a 9-quad-uranium (and 9 60k coolant) 780EU/t reactor. There's slight over-capacity on the coolers I think, because 1 is always full of recharged coolant cells and another is partially used, so it probably only needs 5. It also needs (25*6)-9 cells for the cooling towers, 9 for the main reactor, and 9 in the loop ready to slot in - 165 cooling cells.
By my reckoning, then, the whole of my setup needs :-

3428 copper, 7642 tin, 36 bronze, 1726 iron, 49 rubber, 56 redstone, 14 glowstone, 14 lapis and 990 water cells (so about another 250 tin).

This is quite depressing really, I figure you can probably make a few smaller Mark 1 reactors pumping out a constant ~100EU/t and it would be far more cost effective. Damn the loss of CASUC! However it is quite a pretty system, I think - I like this concept of it.

edit: But when there's a Mk.I EB design in the reactor designs thread putting out a low-risk 420EU/t for just 1031/65/0/316 copper/tin/bronze/iron, it's just not worth the hassle is it? Jesus the reactor design is fubar'd in IC2

Ok, I think I've got this sorted now - will leave it for a few cycles just to verify things.

Did things a little differently, but only slightly. For starters, I kept my main reactor to only a single effective chamber so there are only 9 cooling cells in there - this has allowed me to use a RP Regulator to feed it with coolant cells. Fill the input and output buffers with 9xcells and the regulator will swap all 9 straight into the reactor in one quick step, negating the need to pause the restart of the reactor to allow the pipes to clear.

A filter on the other side of the reactor (with a single part-used(!)) cell pulls them out, and this needs pulsing 9 times of course. This pipes into your cooling reactors with the same layout of components as you've used - just a grid of component heat vents and cells.

Being pulsed by the same pulse generator is a retriever connected to all of the cooling towers. This pulls remotely out of the reactors and just saved lots of filter, but I guess you could do it with filters just as easily (remember to use RECHARGED coolants in your retrieve/filter buffers so it only pulls out fully cooled cells). Downside of the retriever is the obvious need for blutricity.

Anyway, that then pipes the cells back to the reactor - to the above-mentioned regulator.

I put enough coolant cells to fill everything bar 9 slots across the cooling reactor - so start the system off with a full main reactor, *a full regulator* (so that it's ready to go filling the reactor on cycle), then fill as much of the cooling reactors as you can but leaving 9 empty slots - otherwise you obviously won't have space to dump out the used cells from the main reactor.

I'll do a vid later, once I've tested a few cycles and made sure it can cool enough to stand infinite of them

edit: Ha, no was the answer - that'll teach me - to busy writing this forum entry and it went boomski on me

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

I have encountered a problem. Apparently, filters with a full cooling cell don't want to pull out cooling cells that aren't full... this poses significant problems for my design...

I have been banging my head on this one all morning >:-( and can confirm it. I thought it was an issue with filters over retrievers so switched to the latter but it's still the same. So just put some part-used cells in your retriever/filter config

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

You pulse a state cell connected to a timer to pulse twenty-four times, yes. Initial testing has shown that setting the state cell to 24 seconds with a timer rate of 1s is sufficient to move them.

Excellent, thanks, I'll give it a try.

Quote

Also, I've got an idea for a primitive round-robin system in which the cooling towers and generator tower are set up in serial rather than in tandem. So the filter on the generator tower moves to Cooling Tower 1, the cells in Cooling Tower 1 goes to Cooling Tower 2, etc until Cooling Tower x(the last) feeds back to the generator tower.

<chuckle> this is exactly what I've done, I saw you idea and thought this might make an easier approach, just from the sense of tweaking timings. I've got a loop at the moment with 4 single-chamber reactors, just to play around with and prove the theory. 1 is the generating reactor, the other 3 are identical coolers and the coolant cells just move around them all. With a very short loop it should be posible to keep the reactor down for a minimum period of time. It may be expensive in terms of fabricating 4 reactors but they're only single-chamber jobbies, and it just sounded like the nearest idea to what I'm after since CASUC left us.

Quick question - your post implies that the filter can pull all the cooling cells out in one redstone pulse, is that right? If so, how did you 'stack' the filter with cooling cells, since they don't stack? Or do you pulse the filter the required number of times (which is all I can figure here, but maybe I'm missing something or it's a versioning issue with IC2/RP?).

Yes, please keep alive, I prefer it also. I don't think new features are needed, it's a "well developed, matured" mod many thanks for your efforts with it.

Supporting the thread necro, but I notice no-one's mentioned that you can always set up a quarry at sub-ground level, to minimise how much mining of basic dirt/cobblestone you need to do. If you're after the higher value ores it can save some time (although personally I just used to funnel the useles ores into recyclers, which I figure is pretty de rigeur).

I've now moved to CC Turtles though - fine-tuning my code, but I have them dig straight down to bedrock and then work their way up. Prioritises the valuable ores, and I can set a ceiling on them at which point they end their cycle and return to the surface, calling it a day. Saves mining the top-soil if you're not after the basic ores. I know it's not IC, but worth considering for some maybe. Otherwise, quarries were always my favourite (and the mining laser)...

Quote from narc

I don't know where you saw that, but the IC2 team's motivation for removing CASUC was: "it's far too powerful, nobody was using non-CASUC anymore".

It was more meant pre-emptively, don't worry - I wasn't directly quoting

I've actually got 2 reactors - a small one, non-casuc, just a 0-chamber one that tickles away generating energy into an MFSU to run ovens, macerators, etc. My point being, there is a place for non-CASUC I think. I've then got a large multi-chamber reactor, a hark back from the casuc days although I'm now re-engineering it due to the changes made in IC2. It just powers a mass fabricator, nothing else.

I've started a new world now since the old one just doesn't work any more, and all those snow golems were looking a bit lost with nothing to do

Never mind... I will accept the changes and just get used to not generating EUs on quite such a grand scale, without investing in Computercraft and these condensators. I appreciate it *can* be done if I really want to, it's just a whole load of effort again. It's just a shame there wasn't a config file option to just keep the feature for those who wanted it.

I've got to admit, I too am a bit disappointed with the removal of cooling-by-ice/water

While I'm no nuclear engineer, granted, I play Minecraft for a bit of semi-realistic enjoyment and getting a powerful reactor going, with lots of investment in an ice-cooling system, was a nice challenge and gave me plenty of power on-tap when I needed it (mass fabricator for example). I'm not a regular on these forums as I just like to 'play' and get on with it... but the removal of this cooling approach seems a bit of a shame. To play the line "oh but it's not realistic to the real world" is a bit naive as, from what I've just read, we've now got some magical heat black hole devices we can put in our reactors to help cool them down?! WTF?!

If the developers of IC2 want to be all real-world accurate with their nuclear physics then so be it (maybe it's not a mod for me then). How about a whole new range of reactor add-ons where you can effectively engineer a cooling circuit with BC/RP2 fluid pipes? Some cooling/condensing machines separate to the reactor chamber itself, and the appropriate piping, and then some sort of heat exchanger block that can be placed outside and dump heat to air? You could add environmental effects such as ambient temperature outside, which will affect the cooling rate (put the exchanger in a snow biome will result in much more efficient cooling - or maybe even place the exchange in water/sea, or high up a mountain where there is a natural wind effect?).

Balance these new machine blocks appropriately - so that cooling is expensive for high-end reactors - to keep a challenge there. Maybe introduce different coolant fluids so that standard MC water is not all that efficient at moving heat, but by changing the fluid to a dedicated special coolant you can effectively move more heat down your fluid pipes?

Apologies if this has all been discussed before - a quick search on "ice cooling" doesn't offer anything easily noticeable. Maybe consider some text in the wiki explaining why the ice/water cooling approach was removed? Was it even discussed on here? Maybe a sticky?

Anyway, thanks all for the work to date - shame about this one though, seems a backwards step to me

Quote from _Tim_

Beat me to it. Glad you got it sorted!

Thanks Tim - your screenshot was pivotal in getting me there, so much kudos to you, sir !

Scratch that - the impending thought of you guys slating me had me push on with it, and I've solved it. But none of the documentation/wiki makes this very clear...

In _Tim_'s screenshot (below) from the above thread :-

The location of the feed pipe is critical - it MUST be UNDERNEATH the mass fabricator to load the lower slot.

Doh!

Hey peeps,

This seems like such a simple thing to want to do and despite searching endlessly I can't find anything that shows how to do it, that works for me. I've seen some screenshots of a simple buildcraft pipe funneling scrap into a MF, but when I implement it, it doesn't work - the scrap gets put into the "top" slot in the mass fabricator (ie. where the UU matter should turn up) rather than in the bottom slot. If I wait until at least one piece of uumatter has been generated (thinking it might default to the bottom slot), the scrap just barfs out of the feed pipe. I've tried conventional buildcraft pipes, redpower2 tubes and even the "insertion" pipe from the AdditionalItems mod - all to no avail.

Can anyone give me a simple suggestion on exactly how I can feed scrap into a mass fabricator via some automated mechanism, that puts it in the right slot!?

Sorry if this is a proper n00b moment - I suspect I'm at one of those points of frustration where I can't see the wood for the trees.

edit : This is the thread that had me investigating, but no luck so far :-
http://forum.industrial-craft.…mass+fabricator#post26286

Cheers,
brumster