Posts by Nphyx

Thanks for the info. So basically you might as well push all your steam through one kinetic steam generator to save on materials, that's good to know.

I actually set up my windmill stacks to minimize EU loss, but I don't seem to be experiencing any EU loss over distance, nor are the machines blowing up from overload (which I know I've done accidentally at least a few times), nor do the cables seem to care whether they're getting greater EU/t than they're rated for. I guess those features haven't been reimplemented since the last time they were broken?

It's been a couple years since I played IC2, and there's been at least a couple months worth of development progress since then (kidding, kidding... sorta). The new reactors got me excited, so I've been playing with heat reactors, trying to find a way to maximize the heat output of a low-maintenance core. The basic requirements are: no replaceable parts besides the fuel rods and neutron reflectors, and low meltdown risk. The best I've been able to do so far is a consistent ~750HU/t, translating to about 525EU/t through superheated steam. The reactor planner (v3) doesn't seem to accurately report heat vent output, but here's the layout:

http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…u1h0pdift7fi9iofg1an6t5og

These will run with zero chance of any of the parts melting. Is there a better way to squeeze more heat vents in there? Mathematically I have too many heat exchangers and not enough vents, but due to layout constraints I couldn't find a better pattern.

I've got the system setup using a number of other mods - nuclear control, pressure pipes, and project red - but I think this should be usable in theory with vanilla redstone timers and vanilla IC2, if you're a real masochist. Could put quad uranium rods in it for better efficiency, but I don't want to risk a meltdown if lag/chunk loading issues cause problems with the regulation system (which happened in my tests). You could also replace the neutron reflectors with heat plating for lower operating costs, but thick neutron reflectors barely put a dent in my resources. I'm not sure why everyone complains about their expense.

I have a couple questions/complaints I haven't been able to answer due to lack of documentation or impracticality of setting up experiments.

First off, is there any reason to run a boiler setup with anything other than exactly 2 liquid heat exchangers at exactly 1mb/t, 220-221 pressure? I can't figure out the point of even having settings on the boiler, since it only appears to work at very precise settings with what appears to be completely arbitrary math and a completely opaque GUI. Why even have a range of 0-300 pressure and 0-1000 mb/t when no other settings do anything useful (other than the similarly singular optimal design for distilling, which appears to be 60HU/t, 100 pressure, 1mb/t)? Why not just have a steam & superheated steam setting? Trial and error with 300,000 possible combinations isn't a game mechanic.

Second - distilled water generation - in order to have enough distilled water in circulation it seems incredibly impractical to use vanilla IC2, and impractical in general to generate distilled water. It's slow as dirt to create, for one thing. A two-boiler setup with electric heat generators outputs a measly 200mB/t for 400EU/t, which took something like 4 hours to generate enough to keep the 4 boilers from the reactor filled. This made boostrapping to a 5x5 reactor from wind power unnecessarily costly and time consuming, especially with the boilers fighting for power with the refinery (macerator+washer+centrifuge, OMFG slow and expensive). Solar distillers are basically free, I guess, if you don't want a useful amount of distilled water.

Furthermore, every time the reactor goes down and comes back online again the (apparently cosmetic) initial puff of steam as the boiler begins producing superheated steam causes leakage. In the end, I just ran fresh water through the reactor boilers till I filled up a huge tank as a buffer, then switched them to distilled after clearing calcification from the boilers. This would be impractical with vanilla IC2 due to lack of pipes or tanks. Is there a less stupid way to do this that I'm overlooking, or is it basically just "not finished"?

Kinetic steam generators: I was initially running one turbine-turbine-condenser stack per boiler until I stumbled on the fact that the turbines can handle a practically unlimited amount of steam (maxing out around 4000EU/t output for ~6000HU/t input in my tests iirc, using an infinite superheated steam supply). This isn't documented anywhere, and there's apparently no efficiency cost for pushing lots of steam through a single turbine stack vs. running multiple stacks. Am I missing anything?

Steam turbine blades: OMFG, expensive. When I was running 8 kinetic steam generators it took 4 (!) blast furnaces in continual operation to keep up with refined iron demand (27x refined iron per blade x8 for about 1 full cycle worth of blades). Total cost to run the furnaces was ~90 EU/t (counting compressors to keep air canisters circulating). I didn't work in the cost of running the refineries since they're always producing, or the metal shapers for rolling the plates. I can't find any info on the wear equation for turbine blades, and they wear too slow to do an A/B test. Do they wear out based on flat operation time or an RPM-to-time basis? If the latter, should be way cheaper and more sane to run a single steam generator stack for cost reasons as well. If the former, the cost and production needs are the same, which means 5x5 reactors are not as efficient as they appear (a flat requirement of continual 90+ EU/t consumption for blast furnaces is ~15% of my reactor design's output, cutting its total efficiency).

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Overall, this is pretty cool compared to the old system and puts nuclear farther into the endgame, complex engineering bracket (where it belongs, IMHO). I can't imagine doing this without fluid pipes and tanks though, and without redpower/project red and wireless redstone I'm not sure I'd have the patience to build the control system.

OTOH, wind generators are now crazy powerful, and I kind of feel like other than the larger space needed for a wind farm, they're now more cost effective and maintainable than nuclear. Carbon fiber blades are practically free unless you're burning coal for some reason, and scaffolds make raising a windmill to a reasonable height pretty trivial. So why not wind? The only answer I could come up with was "because it would be fun" and "eventually free energy with the plutonium pellet things".

Or I guess you can just make basic EU reactors.

Correction: those aren't even javascript snippet versions, they're just the plain old HTML buttons. There's no voodoo going on there.

Quote from GregoriusT

But there are many stupid people who use that links.

I don't know why you people feel the need to lie, but let me school you a little here.

A: using "View Source" on a website is not "hacking". Your friend, if he exists, is a tool and a douchebag trying to impress you. Likewise Mr. "informatics student". The reason I come to this conclusion is that one does not need to view the server-side portion of the source code (in this case, the PHP code) of a website to see the paypal integration part for simple donation buttons. Those are all done in javascript+HTML snippets, which is interpreted on the client side (i.e. in your web browser) and can be seen with view source and further examined using the developer tools that come standard in many browsers (or in the case of firefox, exist as plugins). Again, I repeat, this is not "hacking" - either in the MIT sense or the underground sense or in the mass media sense. Claiming that it is "hacking" is asinine and an insult to all three kinds of hackers.

B: I repeat, the donate buttons are client-side javascript snippets provided directly from paypal. They can only be superficially customized and all that they do basically is create a link with some appropriate GET query variables (google it) and wrap that link around an image. Those variable just help Paypal establish to whom the donation is supposed to go. One cannot create a paypal donation button that splits its receipts between multiple paypal accounts. In fact, no variety of the paypal API will let you do this.

C: Any non-technical user can verify what account the donations are going to simply by looking at the account name displayed during the paypal checkout process and cross-checking it against the account name found there when direct linking from the mod author. Paypal, not the website where you clicked the donate button, controls 100% of the content on that page. You can verify this by observing, in your browser, the SSL security certificate from Paypal Inc. which is demonstrated in Firefox, for instance, by the blue or green highlighted company logo that shows up on SSL secured websites in the address bar. You can further verify that all elements of the page you're viewing are coming from where they claim to be coming from by using aforementioned developer tools, which your average "hacker" or "informatics student" may or may not know how to use properly (in firebug, open firebug, go to the "net" tab, and view the entries under the "domain" column).

D: Paypal's API is extremely, almost insanely, paranoid and provably secure. No two-bit (no offense to KakerMix et al) programmers or mod compilation authors or website administrators have anywhere *near* the skill required to even attempt to break Paypal without a SWAT team showing up on their doorstep pretty soon afterward (and that unfortunately is not hyperbole). It meets and exceeds the extremely complicated and obnoxious industry standards required by the credit card industry to accept and process credit card payments. I am intimately familiar with those standards, having just had to implement them recently at work, and let me tell you, your little skiddie "hacker" friend would have less a chance of detecting a successful paypal exploit than of detecting neutrinos passing through his balls.

It doesn't really matter how I know this stuff, since I could claim to be anybody I wanted to be here on the internetz, but if either of you guys wants to tangle with me over this go ahead and try.

Also, while we're playing armchair lawyers here, these accusations could easily be construed as libel and people have had their lives destroyed by the justice system for saying less about the wrong people. Be careful who you go around accusing of being hackers and thieves, kiddos, especially when you don't know what you're talking about. Not even a little itty bitty tiny miniscule bit about what you're talking about. In fact so little that I'm saddened that the authors of this mod even allow this crap to persist in their forums. Further, I'm saddened by your inability to use Google to find out how incredibly little you know before you open your mouths about your dumb conspiracy theories, given that there are millions of pages search results of tutorials on web programming, paypal, real hacking (by any definition), identity theft, credit card fraud, and copyright law, that you could have perused in pursuit of these theories of yours.

TL;DR: STFU, pissant trolls.

To admins: hope ^ that doesn't upset you, but these guys have it coming and you must know it. Why do you let this garbage pollute your reputation, even by association? I only know about (and love) your mod because of tekkit, and whether or not you like it a large number of your fans use tekkit. Hating on it or letting douchetards hate on it is one thing, but these are blatant, vicious, retarded lies. I will hazard a guess your own experience as developers should tell you how stupid these accusations of donations theft are. I hate to have my first post here be a flame/rant, but this kind of garbage really gets under my skin.