1.5.2 solar farm area

[namiasdf]

I personally find solars boring, but not everybody who plays this game is an engineer or plays FTB to create systems and engineer those, for fun.

Fun is different for everybody. I don't think you multiple double digit numbers in your head for fun. I might as well make use of the time I sit on the crapper.

 

[Jakeb]

They're not really practical.. They're supernatural. They bend the suspension of disbelief and make rational people ask what drugs the designers were on. They may as well be described as "powered by magic".

Given default IC2 configs, a 512EU/t solar panel outpowers any nuclear reactor that doesn't burn lapis/redstone condensators, and even those it continues to outpower on a per-block calculation.

What I meant by them being practical was that they generate tons of power out of thin air, so you don't have to do any automation to run them, or worry about something blowing up in your face if you mess up. I don't really like how they generate tons of power out of thin air, but some people do.

 

[Azzanine]

Well, then those solar-panel egotists need to be jailed and stored in the nether. I honestly don't get the need for competition in a freaking sandbox game like Minecraft. Who gives a rotten flesh what you do in your world or server that you play on?I just do not get it.

To resolve the issue with solars, you just need to increase the output of nuclear reactors and reduce its cost.
I'd also advocate for solar panels producing 1eu/t during the night REGARDLESS of what type of panel you have. It makes no sense that an ultimate panel can produce 64eu/t at night. This essentially means that an ultimate panel would be 256 eu/t throughout when combined with an MFSU (and assuming that no more than 256 eu/t is used during the day). If this happened, I think people would honestly stop whining and Q.Q-ing about solar panels (I personally do not care either way because my math always assumes that I get 0 eu/t during the night when making systems).

No, I don't think tweaking the numbers will do at all. I think the set and forget nature of the generation should be removed, add a consumable or a maintenance cost.
I usually advocate for a system where as you leave them the panels become dirty and slowly become less efficient to the point of not producing anything (This can be dependent on Biome). To remedy this you'd need a microfiber cloth to clean the panels once every 2-4 RL days.

It's the set and forget nature AND the high amount of EU that makes all other power generation just stupid to choose. Also chunk loaders skew this by letting people generate EU 24/7 at least in a SMP setting. If you log off for long enough you could fill an MFSU with basic solars.

But in the end all of that is a moot point. Personally I would not enjoy having to constantly maintain power, I'd want time to actually build stuff.

 

[PoisonWolf]

No, I don't think tweaking the numbers will do at all. I think the set and forget nature of the generation should be removed, add a consumable or a maintenance cost.
I usually advocate for a system where as you leave them the panels become dirty and slowly become less efficient to the point of not producing anything (This can be dependent on Biome). To remedy this you'd need a microfiber cloth to clean the panels once every 2-4 RL days.

It's the set and forget nature AND the high amount of EU that makes all other power generation just stupid to choose. Also chunk loaders skew this by letting people generate EU 24/7 at least in a SMP setting. If you log off for long enough you could fill an MFSU with basic solars.

But in the end all of that is a moot point. Personally I would not enjoy having to constantly maintain power, I'd want time to actually build stuff.

You raise some good points but in real life, how often do people need to do any type of "maintenance" on solar farms as opposed to a nuclear reactor where you have shit tonnes of computers, fail-safe systems, security guards, etc?

See where I am going? I would argue that simply raising the EU/t output of the nuclear reactor (maybe 3x or 4x what it is now?) should make sense if GT is all about making us regret playing Real Life, I mean Minecraft in the first place.

At the end of the day, this is a sandbox game. Greg can do whatever balancing he wants. I realize, however, that there will still be whiners and complainers at the end of the day, regardless of what he does. You just can't please everybody.

 

[namiasdf]

You raise some good points but in real life, how often do people need to do any type of "maintenance" on solar farms as opposed to a nuclear reactor where you have shit tonnes of computers, fail-safe systems, security guards, etc?

See where I am going? I would argue that simply raising the EU/t output of the nuclear reactor (maybe 3x or 4x what it is now?) should make sense if GT is all about making us regret playing Real Life, I mean Minecraft in the first place.

At the end of the day, this is a sandbox game. Greg can do whatever balancing he wants. I realize, however, that there will still be whiners and complainers at the end of the day, regardless of what he does. You just can't please everybody.

Though you are technically right, solar farms still require quite a bit of maintenance, as is with anything that is highly technical and located outdoors. Failsafes and computers mean less manpower is required to maintain the system as electrical systems do everything automatically. Your points actually make it easier to maintain things with less work. i.e. Why my entire FTB career is tended towards those types of automation, simply because I am only one person.

In reality, solar trumps all other methods by such a long shot, for any person who has to compare their achievements to others (say, on a multiplayer server) it makes it hard to justify going the "hard" and less "efficient" path. That's why I play SSP, do what I do.

The attempt to make solar harder by making them more expensive is null. It just makes it take longer to get there, but the exponential growth of the energy gains trumps making any increase to the initial investment moot. Nuclear reactors increase their energy gains linearly, i.e. if you add one more reactor you get x amount of energy. With solar, upgrading one solar to the ultimate provides 512 EU/t which is ridiculous. Going from 1 EU/t to 8, 64 and finally 512 EU/t... I have 160 combustion engines running full time and can only output a max of 980 EU/t (I think right now). Though I myself am not complaining, you can see how two solar cells, attached to two pieces of wire, to two MFSUs beats my system of iron tanks regulating the flow of biomass, biofuel and lava into each of their respective stages, etc.

But that's fun to me. To make things overly complicated because that's what I have to deal with in my profession and playing FTB otherwise is too simple. Not everybody is a problem solver, hence why not everybody is an engineer.

 

[dtech100]

The best thing which should be added to solar panels - especially for advanced solar panels - is some part which must be replaced. This kind of stuff is in Steve's Cart's or in Compact Windmills. In CW you must use rotor to get eu production - the best one is made from iridium but is needed one from alloy's - the best iridium is infinite. In Steve's Carts you have basic, advanced and galgadorian tools (the last one is also infinite). Compact Solars are really honest in cost of materials per EU production rate - for making 512 EU/t solar - HV - you need 512 basic solars - a lot of resources needed, especially iron. But then when you make f.e. 16 HV you can obtain uu matter in matter of seconds.

 

[cynric]

The problem isn't with the basic IC2 solar panels. Those make hardly any energy, and require a massive field of them if you want to generate a significant amount of power. The issue is the solar panels from the various addons, where a single block can generate hundreds of eu per tick without any additional setup or maintenance.

As far as I understand it, those addons where invented to decrease the performance impact those huge solar farms had on servers. They not only require a large amount of space but also a large amount of processing power to calculate all the electricity flow in huge numbers of cables (and joints). So yeah, the basic solar panels already have builtin problems.