One note is that you cannot rotate Extractors, so if you build this oriented to the wrong cardinal direction in too confined a space, it might be difficult to use automation (pipes, import bus, etc.) to extract the flakes from one or both extractors.
I'm not sure what the issue is here, extractors are direction-blind. As far as I can tell, RoC machines in general are direction-blind for the purposes of item piping.
For the curious, particularly because I've seen practically nothing about the Rotarycraft extractor posted elsewhere, here are a few notes about mid-to-late-game extractor usage:
- For instant operation (that is, no bar visibly filling, processing dozens of ores per second), stages 1 & 4 require 32,768rad/s @ 512Nm, for a total of 16,777,216 W - applying torque >512 Nm has no effect but to waste power
- For instant operation, stages 2 & 3 require 1,048,576 rad/s @ 1Nm for a total of 1,048,576 W - applying torque >1 Nm has no effect but to waste power
- Stages 2 and 3 require a lot of water to run at this speed; it took about 14 aqueous accumulators with 2 separate fluiduct outputs to run a dedicated stage 2 & 3 extractor continuously.
- The different stages seem to share power, so while stage 1 requires 16MW and stage 4 requires 8MW of power (32768 rad/s @ 512 Nm) for instant operation, there's no good reason to build more than two extractors if you've got a complex piping system
- While the above is true, running a single extractor at 1,048,576 rad/s @ 512 Nm is ridiculously inefficient, so to run a high-efficiency extractor setup either requires a single extractor hooked up to a 16MW power source with a couple of CVTs, or two extractors using factorization routers with one 16MW and one 1MW power souce.
Here's the setup I've got for ore processing:
For the power system, from left to right, there's a tesseract drawing from my primary power source, with a lever to shut the system off. The first four magnetostatics are configured for 2,048 rad/s, at the fixed torque of 2,048 Nm. All four are hooked up to a bevel gear and a few junctions, outputting 2,048 rad/s @ 8,192 Nm to a 16:1 gearbox in speed mode, which is outputting into the first extractor (ExA) at 32,768 rad/s @ 512 Nm. The fifth magnetostatic is configured to 512rad/s, going through two 16:1 gearboxes and one 8:1 gearbox in speed mode for a final output of 1,048,576 rad/s @ 1Nm, powering the second extractor (ExB). The magnetostatics could be replaced with a couple industrial coils instead, with the appropriate changes to gearing.
Getting into the extractors themselves, ExA is being fed with raw ores from the diamond chests on the left with itemducts, stocked via AE export buses. There's a factorization router on top (with a bandwidth and machine upgrade), configured to extract from slot 1; visit near; Extractor. The output of this is being piped into ExB, along with the water output from 16 aqueous accumulators. On top of ExB is a second router, (bandwidth & machine upgrade; extract from slot 3; visit near; Extractor), which is piping its output back into ExA. Finally, the output from ExA is being piped back into the AE system as flakes, which are smelted elsewhere.
This whole setup was able to process the several hundred thousand ores produced by a 256^2 silk touch QuarryPlus quarry in the space of several hours, taking a pretty manageable power draw of 3,171 RF/t, or 17 MW of RoC power. I've seen setups that require such ridiculousness as 4 gas turbines to achieve a lesser effect, which is really entirely unnecessary.
Now,
smelting all the flakes that this beast can produce is a whole other challenge.
