woo, bravo sir
@MajPayne21, wish I had an answer for your question. I think you'll need to try it in a testing world to find out.
Note that you compared against the high pressure coal boiler. I believe the "small" coal boiler is more efficient than the high pressure variant, so you'd be better off just building multiple small ones.
If you create a tank to hold your steam, you can try dumping a stack of coal into both setups and watch how much steam is created in each one.
You might be able to take this a step further and calculate how much steam you lose by cooking a stack of 64somethings.
(btw I have no idea why greg made the high-pressure machines less efficient, it simply encourages to ignore them and spam smaller ones instead)
I believe AlCapella is correct. In my (anecdotal) experience, the high pressure coal boiler is more efficient overall than the small coal boiler. One HP coal boiler produces 15 mb/t of steam according to the GT wiki, and one small coal boiler produces 6 mb/t of steam according to the GT wiki. So, a small coal boiler produces 40% of the steam per tick. One piece of coal/charcoal lasts about 6 minutes in a fully-heated small coal boiler, so if a piece of coal or charcoal lasts longer than 2.4 minutes in a fully heated HP coal boiler, it would produce more total steam per unit of fuel. My suspicion is that one piece of coal lasts 3 minutes in the HP boiler, and is thus slightly more fuel-efficient than a small boiler.
I can say with confidence that the steam consumption per tick of the basic steam turbine is much higher than 15 mb/t, because the steam turbine used up all the steam in my HP coal boiler's buffer and was using steam faster than the boiler could produce it. I may have just enough steel to create a Railcraft tank for a steam buffer, so I may give that a try using a 64 stack of fuel.
Anybody know offhand how long one piece of charcoal lasts in a 1HP boiler from Railcraft?
