1.6 Alternative to RC Boilers for 100MJ+ power ?

[ScorpioOld]

Apparently the best alternative for 100MJ+ power is Rotary Craft Gas Turbine 1000MJ/t. You run it for short period of time charge all what you have and switch it off.

 

[SandGrainOne]

The brokenness of the pwerloss notwithstanding, I refer to machine perdition. People hate BC power because of it. And it makes "Power Requested" gates useless because there's always power requested.

I don't think anyone truly hates BuildCraft power, they simply found something more shiny. No one would have cared about a little bit of perdition if it wasn't for the fact that they can now avoid it more easily by switching power type. If Thermal Expansion had stayed with BuildCraft power, the changes that has been done would have been received differently. I think most players would have seen the changes in BuildCraft as improvements.

The "Power Requested" trigger added to gates by the wooden pipe isn't completely useless. The wooden pipe has a nice energy buffer that it takes from and provides to machines with low demand. Even with only one engine in a system the fuel usage would be lower than if the engine was on all the time. The usefulness increase with the number of engines. Admittedly, I do see the "Power requested" trigger as a poor replacement to the "Has work" and "Work scheduled" triggers provided by machines. Both methods have their merits.

 

[DizzyMiner]

Gas Turbine from RotaryCraft is by far the most powerful single block engine available right now - you'll max out a TE redstone conduit when it's running. It generates ~11k RF/tick (Redstone conduits only accept 10k RF/tick); you can run a fully powered MFR mining laser set off a single turbine.

Fully automating it is possible, but quite difficult.

 

[Mevansuto]

I don't think anyone truly hates BuildCraft power, they simply found something more shiny. No one would have cared about a little bit of perdition if it wasn't for the fact that they can now avoid it more easily by switching power type. If Thermal Expansion had stayed with BuildCraft power, the changes that has been done would have been received differently. I think most players would have seen the changes in BuildCraft as improvements.

The "Power Requested" trigger added to gates by the wooden pipe isn't completely useless. The wooden pipe has a nice energy buffer that it takes from and provides to machines with low demand. Even with only one engine in a system the fuel usage would be lower than if the engine was on all the time. The usefulness increase with the number of engines. Admittedly, I do see the "Power requested" trigger as a poor replacement to the "Has work" and "Work scheduled" triggers provided by machines. Both methods have their merits.

I heard hates hating long before TE announced it was migrating over to RF.

With you on the Power Requested trigger though.

 

[immibis]

Who is talking about other kinds of machines?

And if so, the paradox is, very few "native" MJ machines actually require power for long periods of time.

There is the BC quarry. Strips 16 chunks to the bedrock for hardly anything. Even the quarry (I find) works so fast that the real hassle is just re-locating it to a new site. Or just running it on a single combustion engine to keep it slow.

Buildcraft has: pumps, refineries, quarries, mining wells, various pipes, builders, fillers, assembly tables, and advanced crafting tables.
Out of those, only builders and fillers don't usually run for an extended period of time.
Assembly tables are borderline, since they run on-demand, but run for a while at a time.

Other than the quarry, there are no BC machines that are not going to complete their operation almost immediately.

Pumps, refineries, mining wells, various pipes (if you choose to use non-redstone engines on those), assembly tables, and advanced crafting tables.

In RC - how many tracks do you need to make? I made an always on machine that processed iron into steel, wood into sleeper beds. I had a myriad of RC machines all hooked up, Ran it for 5 minutes and made a stockpile of railway beds I - months later - still havn't burnt through.

Railcraft is not Buildcraft.

Forestry has its multiblock farms. They require a whole 2MJ/t to keep on going.

Forestry is not Buildcraft. But the multiblock farms do not complete their operations almost immediately.

Which leaves us with gencraft / extrabees genetics machines. These are the ONLY native MJ devices I know that are hungry for 50MJ/t - and that 50MJ/t is so that you can get the gene operation completed "now" rather than waiting 5 minutes.

These are the ones that are badly designed for choosing MJ. IC2's power system (since when they were created it was basically a choice of IC2 or BC) would have suited them better, but since Forestry is a Buildcraft addon (well, more than it's an IC2 addon) and ExtraBees is a Forestry addon, they had to choose BC.

However, don't they have a built-in large energy storage, which converts their requirement for lots of power in a short time into a requirement for a small amount of power over a long time, which is exactly what BC is about?

There are no actual buildcraft machines that actually require ongoing power, except for the quarry, and even the quarry at max size finishes in just a few hours and needs to be moved.

When the energy system was designed, a max size quarry took days.

 

[YX33A]

~Snip~
When the energy system was designed, a max size quarry took days.

Wasn't that, uh, late alpha, early beta? I recall they added an energy system before you could change the size of the quarry(might have even been before the fancy "Laser Builder Cube" was added), but my memory is a bit haphazard at best... I likely got the alpha/beta dates more wrong that should be humanly possible(at least for someone my age), but still, I think I may be right on the max size quarry being later then the energy system.

 

[GreenZombie]

hmmm. We seem to have a irreconcilable difference of opinion. In my mind ALL those machines are on-demand. By definition, they are used to make things according to a players demand. i.e. I need an autarchic gate? I go and make it at the assembly table.

This can take a long time (single engine) or a relatively short time (If I can supply the table with 20MJ/t+). But its demand based either way.

 

[Sarda]

While Jet Turbines provide about 12k RF with a single block, they take a lot production lines/engines to automate. I find myself just using larger Big Reactors which are easier to build, makes more RF potentially, with basically just as much space when you factor in all the fuel production lines and their fuel is very simple to make.

 

[immibis]

Wasn't that, uh, late alpha, early beta? I recall they added an energy system before you could change the size of the quarry(might have even been before the fancy "Laser Builder Cube" was added), but my memory is a bit haphazard at best... I likely got the alpha/beta dates more wrong that should be humanly possible(at least for someone my age), but still, I think I may be right on the max size quarry being later then the energy system.

The energy system was added in late beta. 1.7 I think. The first version was shown in Direwolf20's first Let's Play series.

The maximum quarry speed was changed some time after 1.2.5. It was shown on Forgecraft before it was released.

 

[immibis]

hmmm. We seem to have a irreconcilable difference of opinion. In my mind ALL those machines are on-demand. By definition, they are used to make things according to a players demand. i.e. I need an autarchic gate? I go and make it at the assembly table.

This can take a long time (single engine) or a relatively short time (If I can supply the table with 20MJ/t+). But its demand based either way.

By "on-demand" I mean that the machine starts and stops often and is usually off - think of a furnace which is used to manually smelt things, vs a furnace used as part of a high-capacity ore processing line which runs almost constantly.

Assembly tables are borderline because while they are usually off, it's debatable whether they start and stop "often" because each crafting operation takes so long.

A quarry runs for hours at a time (days, when the energy system was designed).
Pumps are likely to run for hours (oil), days (nether lava) or continuously (cooling water).
A refinery take 50 seconds to process a single bucket of oil (unless that's been changed) and you typically have hundreds or thousands of buckets. Or you might run the refinery as needed to provide your engines with fuel, in which case it takes a continuous small amount of power (assuming you don't stop it manually).

The short version is: "if you want to use a redstone energy cell with it, then it's what I mean by on-demand" but that's a circular argument. If you'd rather use a tesseract, then it's what I mean by "continuous power"

 

[GreenZombie]

Ah, I had forgotten about pumps and refineries for some reason. derp. Definitely continuous operation machines.

 

[zorn]

There has been no change to BuildCraft as such. The change is that you can no longer use Thermal Expansion to transport BC power. That is not a nerf to BuildCraft, but a change to Thermal Expansion. If you are unhappy with that you should complain to The CoFH team.



The old conductive pipes had up towards 20% loss. That was broken, so people used Thermal Expansion Conduits instead. That was understandable, but a lot has changed after that. BuildCraft now has a fully functional power network system and Thermal Expansion has its own power type. If you can document anything to be broken with the new kinesis pipes, please report it on the BuildCraft forum or github.


That didn't make much sense. It is true that some machines will require more a dedicated power system, but there is no limit to how large you can make them. I have 16 combustion engines start up when I tell my Assembly Table to make me a new gate.

The fact that BuildCraft power sometimes must be made where you need it when you need it, is part of the design and it is made like that on purpose. We believe it gives more choice and options for the player. It's also a way for BuildCraft to distinguish itself from other power systems.

Kind of a necro on this post, but could you or someone else explain this? I think the nerf the original comment was talking about was the fuel nerf, but I think you are talking about the power? That buildcraft really buffed its conductive pipes, but people still see the loss of TE conduits as a 'nerf'?

Unfortunately people use the best items from each mod. Or if your mod has the best options from most of the popular mods, then your mod will get used the most.

 

[kaovalin]

Kind of a necro on this post, but could you or someone else explain this? I think the nerf the original comment was talking about was the fuel nerf, but I think you are talking about the power? That buildcraft really buffed its conductive pipes, but people still see the loss of TE conduits as a 'nerf'?

Unfortunately people use the best items from each mod. Or if your mod has the best options from most of the popular mods, then your mod will get used the most.

Most failings of a mod to coexist with other mods in the pack is a failing of the mod pack maker for not better choosing and configuring said mods.

That aside, I did like how they improved conductive pipes, but to reduce the effectiveness of the fuel that runs things really puts baby in the corner. Part of what makes fuel great is its high density. They basically said, hey that fuel you used will take up 4 times the amount of storage (I am assuming the 25% was accurate as stated above).