Posts by ShneekeyTheLost

Your limitation to your regulator's capacity can be bypassed simply:

Filter attached to reactor, set to pull out expended 60k cooling cells (will not pull out full ones)
Regulator attached to Reactor, set to pull full 60k cooling cells (will not pull partially charged or empty ones) into the reactor
They are both on the same redstone wire, so every time the filter pulses, the regulator pulses, replacing cells on a one for one basis

Then you have a State Cell and TImer set to pulse that redstone wire x times, where x is the number of cells in your reactor

The state cell is triggered by a wire with two possible inputs:

1) MFSU set to Emit If Full (if all of your energy storage is full)
2) if Heat Sensor detects 100 heat it will emit redstone signal

If either of these emits a signal to the state cell, it will turn off the reactor and trigger a transfer and will keep it off until the latch is thrown. That way, every time the reactor turns back on, it is full of clean cells. At some point in your MFSU line (wherever you feel it would be appropriate) is a Structure Pipe with a Gate set to emit a redstone signal if energy is empty. This triggers the latch to reset the system. However, it still won't trigger if there is any heat in the system.

You could also use ComputerCraft to control the system, putting both the filter and the retriever on one color and the reactor on a second.

rp.setBundledOutput("back", colors.<nuclear>)
-- turns on the reactor, <reactor> is the color of wire hooked up to the reactor itself
Sleep( # seconds to run for micro-cycle)
rp.setBundledOutput("back", 0)
--turns off reactor
for i=1, 24 do
rp.setBundledOutput("back", colors.<filter/retriever>
-- where <filter/retriever> is the color of wire hooked up to both the filter and retriever
sleep(0.1)
rp.setBundledOutput("back", 0)
sleep(0.5)
-- This pulses a redstone signal for .1 seconds, then waits .5 seconds to pulse again.
-- Basically, a Timer set to .5 Seconds, adjust second sleep number as necessary
end
-- This loop functions as your state cell, telling it how many times to pulse
sleep(2)
-- time buffer to make sure that all of your cells make it into your reactor before pulsing. 
-- feel free to adjust as necessary, you do NOT want your reactor turning on without all
-- cells in the reactor

That is one full micro-cycle. Then just run it on repeat until you want it turned off. You can use a While loop with a redstone wire set as your double-fault to turn off reactor and shuffle cells when it turns on.

I had a reactor able to output 1120 EU/t using the method you proposed with the retriever, however it required 10 cooling towers to function optimally. There was one I had with an output of 2700 EU/t, but it required mid-cycle cooldown periods in addition to all those towers in order to not explode. There was also a 1920 EU/t variant on that which used reflectors on the 'caps' to generate an Efficiency of 6.0.

In other words... this is likely not an economically viable build. Still a lot of fun, though.

Quote from brumster

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

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You are thinking too small, I think. The advantage of this system is only achievable on the macro scale. When you have something like a five-chamber operation producing 2700 EU/t, then it might be worth it to have a dozen or so cooling towers spaced around in tandem.

Anyways, I'm still trying to work a couple of angles to it, but it doesn't seem to really be resource-efficient, even if it is a rather novel idea.

Quote from brumster

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

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Ahh, so any partially-used cooling cell will pull any other partially-used cooling cell? It doesn't require the exact same metadata? Excellent!

Quote

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

I think I may have a reason why, and it is rather disheartening...

In effect, I may have made a miscalculation based on a confusion surrounding the terminology of the word 'tick'. Normally, a 'tick' is 1/20th of a second. However, the reactors apparently consider a tick to be a full second. in other words, the cooling towers are some twenty times less efficient than originally calculated, with a cooling cycle time of some 80 minutes. Nuts.

Another option, I'm not certain how viable it would be, is to simply destroy the used cells and make new ones. It would consume 49 Tin and 8 copper per cell doing so... which would be 1176 tin and 192 Copper per micro-cycle consumed. I don't know what the UUM costs on that would be, if it would be worth it in the long run, but it's at least an option.

UPDATE: According to my calculations, replacing 24 60k cooling cells using UUM to replace tin and copper (assuming consistent scrap supply) is 292,800 per micro-cycle. Using this reactor as a test-bed, each micro-cycle would generate over 9 million EU. Thus estimated energy loss is somewhere around the 3% mark. This would make it very viable indeed.

You can also use ComputerCraft computer to run the whole system. Instead of worrying about all the logic gates, you can run bundled wires. Set the filters attached to the reactors themselves to color A, the filters attached to the chests as color B, and the reactor to color C

The program "transfer" reads:

-- This subprogram will pulse filter 24 times
-- in sequential order. This will transfer cooling
-- cells properly.
-- Bundled Color Code:
--  Orange = Filter on towers
--  Magenta = Filter on holding chests
for i = 1, 24 do
  rs.setBundledOutput("back", color.orange)
  sleep(0.1)
  rs.setBundledOutput("back", 0)
  sleep(0.5)
end
sleep(1)
for i = 1, 24 do
  rs.setBundledOutput("back", color.magenta)
  sleep(0.1)
  rs.setBundledOutput("back", 0)
  sleep(0.5)
end

This will effectively pulse the reactor filters 24 times, emptying them of the cooling cells and putting the cells into the chest. Then it will pulse the chest's filters 24 times, completing the transfer.

From there, the logic is simple:

for i=1, <number of micro-cycles per cycle> do
-- number of micro-cycles per cycle is a pre-defined number rather than a variable, although I could make a local variable to input here
   rs.setBundledOutput("back",  colors.white) 
   -- white is the redstone color that turns on the reactor
   Sleep(<micro-cycle duration>)
   -- micro-cycle duration pre-defined, not a variable, although I could always create a local variable to input here
   rs.setBundledOutput("back", 0)
   -- turns off reactor
   transfer
   -- the previous program I just got done debugging, swaps nearly empty cooling cells with fresh ones from the cooling tower
end

Since a ComputerCraft computer is just a couple of redstone and some smooth stone, it's fairly cheap to run.

This program should also run any number of chambers in serial, as long as all the reactor filters are on one color, all the chest filters on a second, and the power-generating reactor on a third.

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...

Quote from brumster

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?).

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.

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.

Well, hello everyone. I apologize for the delay, apparently those little gremlins from the Twilight Forest somehow got through the portal and into my reactor chambers with... unpleasant consequences. Fortunately, containment protocol did operate to specifications, therefore the only significant loss was the crew at Reactor Stations 1-4, and the materials of the reactors themselves. Unfortunately, it caused a massive energy surge running back through the system which wiped all data on the project, and the electromagnetic pulse from the nuclear detonation wiped all the backups, so we've been trying to reproduce our efforts and document our findings.

Since we had to start over, we also started shopping for new manufacturers for components, and GregTech had some very attractive offers which we have decided to take advantage of.

First off, we have the 360k Helium Coolant Cells, which are six times as efficient as regular cooling cells, which means six times the running speed and that many fewer coolant towers necessary for a full cycle. Fewer coolant exchanges means a higher effective energy output, which is always relevant to our interests.

Next are the Thorium Cells. While it produces significantly fewer Eu/t, it does so over a longer period of time, and has a LOT less heat. In fact, you can get away with a full cycle, even at five times the lifespan, without needing to recharge the coolant cells, and only needing 3 chambers. You can find the design here. Unfortunately, this also means it produces a distinctly lackluster 224 Eu/t.

Increasing the amount of Thorium to a five-chamber process and compressing the Thorium together nets you this reactor design, which can run for 70 minutes before needing to cycle, and produces 544 Eu/t, for a grand whopping total of 544 MILLION Eu out of the total cycle. While only able to run 42% of a cycle before needing to swap out coolant cells, this means you only need a single cooling tower. With an efficiency of 5.67, it's not a bad workhorse reactor which is fairly efficient and runs reliably for an extended period of time.

But what if that isn't enough for you? What if you really want More Power, and to you, that means more EU/t? Well, we've got you covered.

One option is the three-chamber Plutonium Cell Powerhouse (PCP) Reactor. At a whopping 2240 Eu/t, this baby matches the old CASUC's energy output. You'll want 7 cooling towers to keep up with it, and have a comfortable margin of safety. Each micro-cycle can be up to 22 minutes, which is around 13.44% of a total cycle, so breaking it up into 8 micro-cycles of 12.5% each gives you a generous buffer. While Plutonium is the most difficult fissionable material to obtain, 896 Million Eu from a full cycle is nothing to sneeze at.

If you are willing to deal with shorter micro-cycles and can get the Plutonium, Ubermensch dispenses a truly amazing 5440 Eu/t. Micro-cycles are around 7.5 minutes, or less than 5% of the total cycle. If you aren't willing to have 20 cooling towers, you will have to have a power down mid-cycle.

If you want to use bog-standard quad uranium cells, however, that's quite all right with us. This is a great example of our system in action. At 2720 Eu/t, it beats old-school CASUC reactor output, and with a micro-cycle of 17.5 minutes, which is just over 10% of a total cycle, you'll need nine cooling towers to prevent a mid-cycle cooldown period.

More math:

Our cooling tower provides approximately 8-16 cooling per tic per cell, depending on where in the reactor it is. This means, unfortunately, that means that each cooling cell can take up to 36.7 minutes to fully recharge, in worst case scenario, and half that in a better case scenario. Some lucky cells might go even faster, 'corner cases' in the reactor are adjacent to heat-producing cells which are only adjacent to two other cells as opposed to ones in the middle of the reactor which are adjacent to 3, thus would not be fully discharged.

With this in mind, you divide your micro-cycle time by this time to determine how many cooling towers you would need to run this reactor optimally. Thus, the five-chamber Thorium Reactor which produces 544 Eu/t would only need a single cooling tower, since the micro-cycle time is 70 minutes. The bog-standard quad U-cell reactor might be able to get away with two cooling towers, however that would be cutting your margin of error down, and might need a brief cooldown period mid-cycle to accommodate the small additional fraction.

While we are still developing multi-cooling tower setups, our engineers have stamped the blueprints for a single-cooling-tower system, using RedPower circuitry.

Single-Tower Automated Cell Transfer (STACT) System:

You have a Timer attached to a Counter for your countdown mechanism. For example, a Timer of 10 seconds and a Counter set to count down from 5 would net you 50 second interval. This system can be tweaked to meet your reactor's Optimal Micro-Cycle Time Guideline as is set down in your reactor's instruction manual.

Once the Counter hits 0, it emits a redstone signal to start the whole process.

Phase one is to disable the reactor, using a State Cell and a NOT gate to keep it off for a pre-defined amount of time sufficient to handle the transfer of cooling cells.

This also pulses the Filter attached to the reactor to pull all cooling cells out of the reactor, sending them to a Holding Chest. The Filter outputs a specific color tube, which matches the tube attached to the chest, ensuring that they will only go to the chest. While this paint is not necessary for this transaction to take place, it prevents a logjam in the next phase of the cycle.

That same pulse also hits the filter in the cooling tower which pulls all the cooling cells out of the cooling tower and paints them the same color as the tube attached to the Reactor (different than the one attached to the holding chest). This color IS necessary, because otherwise the Holding Chest would end up being the Nearest Inventory.

A Repeater is also pulsed, with sufficient delay to clear the tubes before it pulses the filter attached to the holding chest, sending all of the cells into the cooling tower, which has redstone signal continually applied (because it will never blow up due to never having any fissionable materials contained therein). If you wish to push the Safety Margin, this delay can be reduced significantly, as you only need to grab the cooling cells out of the cooling tower for the cooling tower to be the only available inventory for the cells to go into.

Once the cells have entered the cooling tower, the state cell attached to the NOT gate lapses, and the reactor continues to function with fresh cells.

Please note that it is ALWAYS recommended (though not strictly necessary for this setup) that you install Nuclear Control components with a kill-switch connected to a temperature reader in the event of an uncontrolled reaction. Small temporal fluctuations in the fabric of reality (i.e. server tick lag) could cause significant heat buildup without warning, and your reactor design should take this into consideration.

ShneekeyCraft LLC is not responsible for damages caused by improper maintenance or testing of mechanisms prior to going 'hot', or by insufficient safety kill-switches being installed. Viewer discression is advised. Void where prohibited by law. Women who are or may become pregnant should not subject themselves to radioactive materials for any length of time to avoid certain birth defects (known collectively as 'x-gene factors'). If your micro-cycle time exceeds four hours without explosion, consult your local nuclear physicist immediately (so we can figure out how the hell you did it).

Yea, you need fans to cool the reactor these days. External cooling isn't a *thing* anymore, neither is CASUC (which was little more than an exploit).

On the upside, you can get 450 EU/t out of a Mk. I reactor these days...

If EE is available, then it's easy.

Energy Condenser is used to make Lava Cells to feed into Geothermal Generators. If you have Logistics Pipes, you can fully automate this with Liquid Supplier pipes. You've got any of several types of EMC generation available to you.

Water towers do have a couple of advantages over wind and solar. Primarily 1) cheap, and 2) they can go anywhere, including down at y10.

Solar requires seeing the open sky, Wind requires being out in the open, and do better the higher you go (thus you can make more compact towers the higher you go for more windmills per chunk). Water... doesn't. Sure, they don't produce much in passive mode, but you get thirty or so of them together, and it amounts to enough to run your Advanced Machines on with enough left to keep your Lappack full. Okay, so it won't run a massfab at any speed, for that you'll need geothermal, but for running your base's energy grid... quite sufficient.

If you have FTB, here's my suggestion:

Thermal Expansion has the Magma Crucible, which lets you turn netherrack into lava at a decent rate. You can even power it with a magmatic engine to be self-sustaining. This can then be used to power your battery of geothermal generators.

Now then, if you have some cattle and carrots, then start up a Feed Station cow breeding program. Cull the herd for leather to make books, because we're going Mystcraft Age Surfing! Make your notebook and your desk as well. Keep going through random descriptive book ages until you end up with one that has Crystals. Now we're ready to kick it into high gear.

With Crystals, you can make Myst Portals. And you can send railcraft carts through them. Including the tank cart. Which can carry lava. And there's PLENTY of lava lakes in the Nether. So set up a pump hooked up to a liquid dispenser and some rails. It outputs into a large Iron Tank (5 cube ought to be enough) which then outputs to your geothermal battery. And by battery, we're talking like 20 or so, matching the output of even the most powerful iteration of Mk 1 Reactors.

That ought to hold you until you are ready to gear-shift to Fusion Reactor.

You'd be better off removing GregTech and just using the scrap to make UU.

Quote from inucune

XP---->Vista----->Windows 7
-----------^
we are here with reactors right now.

The fallacy with this is that it assumes that any of the above operating systems are worth installing.

Quite frankly, I like the new reactor designs. You can produce more Eu out of a reactor from a Mk. I, assuming you want to fork over the resources. CASUC needed to die in a fire anyways.

Once RP2 comes out, I will be working on finalizing the DDoS system to see just how practical it really is.

Water mill towers aren't *bad*, although you do need them in bulk to do any good. Fortunately, you get two for the price of a generator. Overall cheaper per 1Eu/tic produced than Solar, but tends to be very large constructions and may require some wiring tricks to prevent energy loss through cabling.

There used to be a trick involving RP2 which would auto-load water buckets for 2 Eu/tic, but that got nerfed to 1 Eu/tic per each, and can be rather annoying with the timer ticking and all. Still, constant 10 Eu/tic isn't too difficult to do (takes up 5 generators and some lumber to make 10 water mills) some tubing, a Relay, a Retriever (and thus also at least one form of RP2 bluetric power and probably also a bluetric battery to keep it going) and a Transposer to fill said buckets.

If you have Thermal Expansion, then once you get to the Nether, your lava problems are over. The Magma Crucible produces Lava from Netherrack, which you can then use to pump directly into geothermal plants. In fact, I have a design for running nine geothermal plants off of one, for a total output of 180 Eu/tic, and running off of netherrack. That should more than suffice for all of your modest energy output needs for quite some time.

Quote from kevindude

The compact solars addon doesnt take into account all the wiring and infrastruture that you saved by putting an entire field of complex wiring and solars into one block.

You do realize that an HV array requires an Energy Crystal (in the required HV transformer)? So that's at least one diamond there that you would otherwise not be spending. That's probably worth all the tin wiring by itself.

If you're talking about blatant cheating and glitches, have they ever fixed the water + Nether Portal dupe glitch?

Thermal Expansion has the Igneous Extruder, which is pretty much a cobblegen-in-a-block. Hook the output directly to the recyclers.

Quote from Aleskander

I am banking on the possibility of her releasing the closed beta at some point, but if it never happens meh, I'll have gotten much out of this world anyway

Elloram has *NEVER* in the production cycle of Redpower, released a Closed Beta. What makes you think she's going to start now? She's got Forgecraft to do her beta-testing so she can release an actual finished and stable project.

The only real thing pushing her production now is the FTB launcher which just released yesterday.

Quote from Rick

I think the running costs shouldnt be rounded. It should be with 2 decimals.

Those are commas, not decimals. You are off scale by a factor of a thousand.

Quote from CrafterOfMines57

Geothermal plants use up a lot of tin quickly, you could always get a geothermal base in the nether.

Depends. You could simply pump it direct-feed and avoid the tin loss.

I'm surprised you didn't use more tin in your nuclear foray, since they're heavily needed in the quad cells and some other components.

I use the most tin in Forestry, personally, or at least I used to. Apiaries used to be 4x Tin gears and a sturdy machine. That was something like 18 tin per. These days, they are a more realistic design with wood.

With RP2, you can convert tin into iron (buckets) if you feel that bad about it.