Why is this even a 'thing'? If you don't want to use RP2, don't use it. Sheesh. It's not like you're paying for it.
The Ore Dictionary is a great resource for cross-mod compatibility. However, when another mod provides a resource at a far more prodigious rate, you might not want to use it for your recipes, because it will throw off the balance you have designed for.
And hey, Elorram may be reclusive, but at least she isn't the drama whore that FC is...
Hmm... it's been almost... what... a week since we've seen one of these?
LHZ's consume lapis at a prodigious rate. Well in excess of what your quarries will bring in. And it isn't cost effective to UUM it either.
In brief: Yes, you get over 2k EU/t. No, it isn't worth it, because you don't have the lapis to run more than one full cycle. You will need a diamond chest full of lapis blocks to fuel this beast. And you'll have to pause the machine in order to refill it.
If you are wanting to pause and rechage it, look at the DDoS or the HVC variant. At least they cycle around static resources rather than just consuming every last bit of lapis that exists.
Has the speed of the cooling towers been reduced? A test tower seems to average at around 3h/tic, rather than the expected 12.
Not to my knowledge. It cools four heat per adjacent component heat vent. So you should be cooling 12-16 heat per second, depending on where in the cooling tower it is currently residing.
There's another version which can cool off quite a bit more, but it requires a stack or so of gold.
Then I will go ahead and update all 29 mods that I have...
Probably a good idea. Of course, it's a good bet that what you are running is rather similar to either of the main FTB packs, so you could get a good head start by getting the latest version of it first.
I use RP2.
Filters and Retrievers only look to see if the items have a damage value, not what that precise value is. So I have eight damaged cells in my Filter, and eight non-damaged cells in my Retriever. It pulses both simultaneously, via redpower bundled cable and colored insulated red alloy wire.
I wrote a ComputerCraft program to run the whole thing. It uses rp.setBundledOutput for most of the functions. While it is running, it sets the output for the color attached to the reactor itself as 'on' for one cycle. Then it turns it off, pulses the filter and retriever once, waits for a redstone signal from the item detector to make SURE they are actually IN the reactor, then turns itself back on. It generally takes all of about two seconds.
probably. especially since gregtech lets you triple your copper output. I guess gregtech users should just judge their own. Although, that still would be worth it, using a DDoS or HVC reactor, since you get much better efficency, or using plutonium.
And being able to spin Gold out of Lava means the primarily rare expense of the HVC (gold) is largely mitigated. Although if you can spin out Copper and Tin as well, that would make DDoS more viable, once you get static costs taken care of.
Thorium is an interesting fissionable material, however it just... the EU/t output is so low that you might as well be using Geothermal.
Plutonium is good, though, if expensive. The Plutonium DDoS can generate 1920 EU/t, although it requires 13 of the gold-based six-chamber cooling towers, or 21 of the dual-chamber gold-based cooling towers. The upside is, of course, EFF:6, meaning you're at least getting good value for your Plutonium.
The plutonium reactor for the HVC would have to run on a one-second transfer cycle, so it would be very susceptible to server tic lag. It would also have a cooling cycle of 38 seconds, which means 38 OC vents per Quad-Plutonium, or 304 vents total. Which means 10 dual-chamber cooling towers, plus one additional cooling tower for the loose change.
yes, this sounds like it's the right direction. I'll put in a stack of these heating cells. How can I check the heating of the breeder - is there a way in vanilla ic2? How do I heat up the breeder?
Heating Cells will heat up the breeder.
Perhaps, but if you get any server tick lag, your whole system could go boom before your failsafe goes off. Then again, the same was true of an old-school CASUC system, so take that how you will.
If you are pulling them out while the reactor is running, you have a significant chance of core heat buildup occurring if it happens to pulse while there is no cooling vent. In that event, you're looking at over 2k heat being produced in that single lapse, which will cause your OC'd vents to melt before your next pulse, causing catastrophic failure of the system.
If you are pausing the reactor every other second for a second, you reduce effective EU/t generation by a third. Granted, considering you're looking at over 900 EU/t from the reactor, 2/3 of that would still be over 600, which is better than any of the Mk. I reactors have, and would be MUCH safer.
Now then, let's run some numbers here...
Each OC vent cools itself by 20. Each quad-uranium cell produces 336 Heat. Therefore, in two seconds, it produces 632 heat (minus the 40 from the cooling from both seconds) This means you'll need 32 micro-cycles per full cycle.
32*8 = 256 OC vents required for this setup, which means about 43 rows of vents. Since a 6-chamber reactor has 9 rows, you would need *FIVE* such six-chamber cooling towers filled to the brim.
Each of these reactors would cost you 1,156 Copper, 381 Iron, and 108 Gold.
In other words, you're spending twice the copper, a stack and a half of gold, and almost 50% more iron, but saving yourself a whole bunch of tin.
Or you could just flicker the reactor, in which case you have re-invented the Mk. III reactor. Would save even more on time and resources, plus have less of a chance of explody during transfer.
My setup uses 35 cooling towers for every 4 generating reactors. I have only just begun to build the system, but I eventually hope to have 70 cooling towers and 8 generating reactors. With output set to 5 times normal, The output rivals a fusion reactor, and I get to line my walls with reactors, which is an added bonus.
That actually sounds pretty awesome!
QuoteAlso, I have been thinking, would it be better to use heat vents or heat exchangers instead of coolant cells? The microcycle time would have to be much shorter, and you would need lots of extra components, but theoretically, the cooling would be higher. The resource cost for all the extra components might make this impractical, however.
Heat vents wouldn't be able to keep up with heat generation. With 8 quad-uranium cells and the reflectors, you're looking at 2688 heat per second. If you are talking about replacing the 60 cooling cells with vents, that's not going to work either. First off, the cooling cells take up all the heat given to them, the heat vents can handle... what... 35? Not practical.
Because the cooling cells take up the heat, there is no core temperature rise, so none of the usual methods of transferring heat from the core to the components won't work, because it isn't generating any.
If you are talking about something like this, you're spending over a stack of gold to be able to buy yourself twenty seconds on your micro-cycle time. Mind you, this does bring up the micro-cycle time to precisely 200 seconds, meaning you'll need exactly 5 cooling towers, so you do end up saving yourself a cooling tower, meaning it might actually be worth the cost.
Now, this does work better on a Thorium reactor, micro-cycle times jumps from almost 12 minutes to 20 minutes and change. This means that you'd only need a single cooling tower to run with it. Of course, the Thorium reactor is a mere 192 EU/t, which doesn't really make all the hassles really worth it, since you can get the same kind of energy output from a battery of 10 geothermal generators (less if you use Gregtech's Thermal Generators).
It would have almost no effect on a Plutonium reactor. It would add a whole 4 seconds to your micro-cycle time.
yes but again as they share the OC vents the cooling per cell wil go further down.
http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…l5no8v83d3kqduvbdefq7gcu8
So that one has... what, 60 cooling per cell, if I'm looking at it right?
Okay, so with a typical 60k cell, you're looking at precisely 1k seconds for a cooldown cycle. With a micro-cycle time of 175 seconds, you're looking at probably 5-6 cooling towers necessary.
Now where this gets really fun is when we start playing with GregTech components...
With Thorium cells, you're looking at needing only two cooling towers, since you are looking at about a 700 second micro-cycle time. Granted, only 192 EU/t, but you're looking at a grand total of 192 million EU out of the reactor in a full cycle.
The Plutonium reactor, however, only needs 13 of these cooling towers to be able to hit the 'continuously running' without need for cooldown between cycles. But at 1920 EU/t, this is a fair tradeoff.
The 360k cooling cells would have a 100 minute cool cycle. This means 6 cooling towers for the Uranium cells, as each cycle is just over 1,000 seconds. You'd still need 2 for the Thorium reactor, since you're looking at a 4,000 second micro-cycle and a 6,000 cooling cycle. And the Plutonium one would still need 13. So you wouldn't be saving any towers, but you would be cutting down the number of micro-cycles per total cycle.
Also there is a redpower gate that does the same thing if you want a more compact version of the t-flip flop go for this, cannot remember what it is called sorry.
Toggle Latch
That's an interesting design, but there's a kind of a hitch here...
Your cooling tower only holds FOUR cells. Sure, it's cooling 60 per cell, but you'll actually need two cooling towers per micro-cycle!
By way of contrast, my cooling tower cools 12-16 per cell, but it holds SIX times as many cells, meaning one tower is good for three micro-cycles.
So let's do some math:
80 cooling per cell means a cooling cycle time of a mere 12.5 minutes for a regular 60k Cooling Cell. However, you'll need two towers per micro-cycle.
With the standard reactor setup as previously mentioned, you've got about a 3 minute micro-cycle. Which means you'll need 4*2=8 plus probably at least two more just to keep up with the fractions, since you don't want everything to blow up. In other words, you're going to end up with just as many cooling towers
Having said that, you're going to end up using fewer cells due to your higher cooling per cell, which will constitute a massive savings in tin, even though you'll be going through stacks of gold instead.
Is it possible to 'double up' your design so you can hold eight coolant cells?
All true.however, in my case, my cooling tower design is not the one in the op, it is my own custom 2 chamber design. because I like to have a wall of reactors. With this design, the cooling towers are almost always working.
Care to share with the class? I am not seeing how it could work in a two-chamber reactor. What kind of EU/t are you getting out of it?
how do you handle the split second where the cooling cell isn't in the reactor, or will that not matter as long as its less than 1 second?
Reactor turns off during cell transfer.
bear in mind that even if you have enough cooling towers to hold all of the microcycles, adding more cooling towers will still increase your effective eu/t as you can run the reactor more often, up until th epoint that you can run it constantly. In my current game I am building a setupp with four single chamber, 8 quad uranium celled reactors, with 64 cooling towers. It is certainly a large build.
Quasi-true, depending on the setup.
The 'optimal' or maximum amount of cooling towers useful to you would be dividing your cooling cycle time and dividing it by your micro-cycle time. You'd probably want to round up from there.
For this setup, your micro-cycle time would be approximately 175 seconds, with a cooldown time of approximately 5k seconds (if we are being conservative and only taking into consideration the 12 cooling per cell ones on the edges rather than the 16/cell) for around 10 towers total (it calculates out to around 27-29 micro-cycles per cooling cycle, and each tower can handle three such micro-cycles).
Therefore, for four of them, you'd only need 40 at most. 64 is overcooling by over 50%. You could put another two generating reactors in there easily, possibly a third, depending on how the fractions work out with the internal cell slots.
Hi, i'm new to the forum, and all I can say is WOW, whoever came up with this is a genius! I never used tekkit, so I never had a chance to play around with the old ice-cooled CASUC reactors, but I've been looking for a way for get more oomph out of my nuclear setup for quite some time. I especially like the look of the plutonium setup, (the one that gives 5440eu/t), but I don't know how many cooling towers i'd need. I don't really mind how many it takes, since they don't degrade or anything, but I don't want to build more than necessary. Also, just thought i'd ask: would using helium cooling cells really be any better than the normal ones? Because they store 6 times more heat, but they also take 6 times longer to cool down. Or am I missing something?
Another small question: what does CASUC stand for? Was just wondering.
The 5440 EU/t reactor has an efficiency of only 5.66, as opposed to several of the later designs with an eff6 rating. It also requires a full compliment of 24 cooling cells and a five-chamber reactor (as opposed to a single-chamber), which means each cooling tower can only handle a single cycle rather than three of them.
In the reactor you are looking at, assuming using the 360k He Cooling Cells, you have 42 micro-cycles per full cycle. Each cooling cycle is somewhere between 500 minutes and 375 minutes, depending on where in the cooling chamber they are. Since both of these times exceed the full cycle time by a good margin, you will want 42 cooling towers, plus a cooldown period of 500 minutes between full cycles.
The smaller reactors are more efficient. For a single chamber reactor with plutonium and the reflectors to make it an eff6 rated reactor, you're looking at 1920 EU/t with the same micro-cycle time of just under eight minutes, but since each cooling tower can handle THREE micro-cycles, you would only need 14 cooling towers.
Having said that, the smaller reactor with good ol' fashioned quad-uranium cells produces 960 EU/t and only needs three of cooling towers, so you are looking at a higher EU/tic/tower ratio (looking at about 320 EU/t per tower average at efficiency 6, which actually isn't too bad a setup)
Rather than going for raw power output, I tried for efficiency. In the Optimal Reactor List, only ONE reactor has an Efficiency higher than 5... and while it does hit an Eff7, it only produces 140 Eu/t and a total EU output of 28m.
I wanted to do better than that...
Now, a simple one-chamber ractor can crank out something like this.
960 Eu/t, Efficiency a whopping 6.0, and a total EU output of 192m.
Only problem is that it has a micro-cycle time of just under three minutes. Not cool. However, there is at least partial compensation here...
Our Turbo V6 Cooling Tower can handle 24 cooling cells. Which means one cooling tower can handle three such cycles. Still, at just under 3m each micro-cycle, I'd STILL need about 8 Cooling Towers to keep up with cooling. And that comes out to only 120/tower. Not good enough.
Let's see if we can do better still...
If we employ GregTech Helium Coolant Cells, worth 360K cooling, we end up with a micro-cycle of just under 18 minutes. Normally, that wouldn't really help us, because the time it takes to cool them back down is also multiplied six times, but now we've managed to get 10% of a full cycle in a micro-cycle. So now we only need 10 micro-cycles per cycle rather than significantly more. And at 3 micro-cycles per cooling chamber, you'll only need 3 chambers to complete a full cycle! This brings our effective power generation up to 240/generator, so we've beaten the 7 Efficiency tower in terms of power per tic output, and we've got -way- more total EU per cycle.
But what if we wanted to do even better?
Thorium is an interesting fissionable material. While it produces less EU/t, it does have the advantage of also producing less heat per tic, in exchange for a longer run time. So lets swap out the Uranium for Thorium and see what we get.
At nearly 12 minute cycle, using standard 60k cooling cells, our cells cool off in roughly 6 and 2/3 a cycle. Which means only two or three cooling towers are needed. Of course, the 192 EU/t is fairly lackluster for such a system, but it's got an efficiency of 6 and a total output of 192m. It's designed more as a workhorse reactor, producing a constant amount over time, with a high efficiency rating one would expect from a long-term reactor.
Helium cells wouldn't change these numbers much, unfortunately. Because Thorium runs 5x longer than Uranium, even the very impressive 71.5 minute micro-cycle time would still only represent about 1/12th of a total cycle. So again, you'd need about three cooling towers, just to be safe, and your cooling cycle would hit before your end cycle would. However, it would cut down the number of micro-cycles by a factor of 6, so that's probably worth it, considering Helium is generally a byproduct of producing other materials.
So, let's see if we can do even better...
Plutonium is a high-energy fissionable material which is a royal pain to produce. Which means you *probably* want a high efficiency rating out of it. Unfortunately, it also produces an insane amount of heat buildup. So lets see if our system works well here...
Using the same setup of 8 quad-cells flanked by 8 cooling cells and a couple of reflector plates to bring up the efficiency to 6, we see a rather disappointing micro-cycle time of 80 seconds. Since Plutonium has twice the lifetime that Uranium has, you're looking at two HUNDRED fifty-ish micro-cycles per cycle... yeesh. However, we're -only- looking at a stunning 62.5 microcycles in a cooling cycle. That means about 20 cooling reactors.
Having said that, you are looking at 1920 EU/t, so comparable to old-school CASUC level power generation, and Efficiency of 6, and a total EU output of some 768m.
Now, Helium cells will reduce the number of micro-cycles per full cycle by a factor of six, meaning suddenly you're only looking at a total of 42ish cycles. Which means only 14 cooling towers needed for a full cycle.
There's another advantage to this system that I wasn't leveraging with previous designs. As i am only utilizing 8 cells in the active reactor, I can use a filter and a retriever with a total of 8 cells, meaning I only need to pulse them once to get all eight to transfer. This means that Bumbster's setup is more than enough, if he just adds a few more cooling towers to his design.
It's probably not the most cost effective method yet, but it's at least quite efficient
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
You might want to look into viability of a true CASUC using cells and just voiding them and making new ones rather than having multiple cooling towers and see how effective it is. I think it's like 3 UUM for 10 Tin or something like that, so each cooling cell is probably something like 15 UUM all told. If the EU output is something like 2700 EU/t, it might be viable, depending on how the numbers work out...
