[1.7.10][LISTED] InfiTech 2 Modpack v3.2.21 [HQM][GregTech balanced hard-mode modpack]

[Nickolas Wood]

So, I gotta ask and bring this up again since we are talking about power some more... This compared to the 5x5 fluid reactor, does anyone else see a problem. I mean, this potato processing chain producing 1000+ eu/t out classes the fluid reactor by a small margin. There is a VAST, and I mean VAST difference in the logistics required to run the 5x5 fluid reactor then this processing chain. Yes, that multiblock is expensive but that doesn't seam like a good balancing point.

IMHO, it seams that this is yet another example of how weak IC2 nuclear is when compared to anything else.

 

[Blood Asp]

To upgrade the IC2 reactor is certainly on my list of things to upgrade...

About biogas productivity: Most of the values are 1:1 taken from IC2. The only value that does not fit is the energy used while processing. So it seems i have to upgrade the energy usage of the distillation tower. 1000EU/t is fine for such an expensive multiblock, but the EU per plant is too much... Likely 2x or 3x EU/t to run the Tower should make it much more balanced.

 

[Pyure]

Argh. Guys the problem is that the distillation tower needs to respect the amount of biomass you create, period. IC2 biomass chain operates on a different scale of throughput.

1 biomass just needs to create LESS biofuel than it currently does. The distillation tower power costs are fine.

Don't even bring the 5x5 reactor into that discussion. It has nothing to do with the problem. If we do improve the reactor output, its not like we can make it 100x better.

 

[Nickolas Wood]

I realize it has nothing to do with this particular problem. It is still an issue (maybe just for me) that the 5x5 or IC2 nuclear in general is so very weak when compared to many other power sources. Given the complexity of setup and the danger, it should produce much more then it does. Not 100x, but 2 or 3x. I blame this on IC2, not this pack. I don't think it is balanced well in IC2.

If the pollution mechanic is introduced then that at least gives us a reason to use IC2 nuclear at all.

 

[Pyure]

I realize it has nothing to do with this particular problem. It is still an issue (maybe just for me) that the 5x5 or IC2 nuclear in general is so very weak when compared to many other power sources. Given the complexity of setup and the danger, it should produce much more then it does. Not 100x, but 2 or 3x. I blame this on IC2, not this pack. I don't think it is balanced well in IC2.

If the pollution mechanic is introduced then that at least gives us a reason to use IC2 nuclear at all.

I think 2x is sorta reasonable, but honestly when I look at what I can get outta my reactors already, 3x is a big, big weaksauce stretch.

fwiw, reactors shouldn't necessarily be expected to compete with everything in pure burst output. They're just really, really efficient in terms of power-per-fuel. And I don't think its "spamming" to build 5 reactors. That's a common number of reactors at one site in real life.

 

[Nickolas Wood]

I think 2x is sorta reasonable, but honestly when I look at what I can get outta my reactors already, 3x is a big, big weaksauce stretch.

fwiw, reactors shouldn't necessarily be expected to compete with everything in pure burst output. They're just really, really efficient in terms of power-per-fuel. And I don't think its "spamming" to build 5 reactors. That's a common number of reactors at one site in real life.

Just Thinking about IRL, a medium sized nuclear power plant has 2 - 4 reactor chambers in it pushing out between 1000 and 1500 MW each. A medium size coal plant can push out between 250 and 750 MW per unit but the installation in these plants calls for between 100 - 200 units. A 2 fold power increase per reactor seams more then reasonable when comparing it this way. It also illustrates that a 3 fold increase is indeed weaksauce .

Soures:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Existing_U.S._Coal_Plants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations

 

[Joel Falk]

Just a quick mention on the numbers i used in the test. This does not take into acount any cable losses which can be substantial. For instance the turbine uses 34 eu/package rather than 32 (6,25% loss) due to output losses (6,25% loss). Since we know from the config the raw energy content of the biogas should be 32*32000=10240000 EU for 1 bucket of biomass this says a few interesting things about the efficiency. Surprisingly that means my LV turbine+battery buffer has an actual fuel efficiency of 77% rather than 90%. These losses are a lot lower for higher tier machines (relatively) so this shouldnt effect the balance on the turbo gas turbine as much. So if you look at the pure fuel energy content the output should be somewhere around 600000-6250000 which translates to somewhere around 1116 eu/tick.

Thinking about it i dont think its that OP. The difference is not that big that i would not consider using steam, oil or nuclear. Sure those are a bit more cluncy considering the logistics and fuel consumtion but the difference is not that large (okay maybe not nuclear). I Really don't think everyone runs the most easy to use setup all of the time but rather enjoys seting up different systems and in that case the more the merrier. But if you nerf the system to much i don't think to many will use it so be carefull with the nerfbat or we will loose an interesting option. And one of the important things to keep in mind is that the output/tick needs to be roughly the same after nerfing. So if you reduce the amount of biogas make sure to keep the same amount of biogas/time from the distillery.

Comparing it with the steam setups i would say its a bit more realistic in fuel usage but they are just as easy to set up but available from bronze age untill very high tiers with the only downside being the low energy content of steam (bedrockium drum says hello).

So it's more of a case of the other systems needing a bit of a buff rather than nerfing steam/biogas. The oil setup could use a little boost in output per time to be a more compact system compared to biogas while nuclear needs a substantial buff and maybe get moved to a higher tier due to it being A LOT more complicated and dangerous than the other systems (oil, biogas and steam).

On a side notice:
Would be kinda interesting to look at the actuall efficiency for the tiers of turbines when charging a battery buffer, which is a realistic case for most energy systems. I suspect the actuall efficiency for the different tiers of turbines are closer than you would guess than from only the efficiency numbers as the cable losses are much lower for higher tiers. Something for tonight

 

[Joel Falk]

For minecraft balancing purpose you really shouldn't balance around the power output of IRL reactors as this does not take into account how large those installations are. A more realistic number would be the power output per size of the installation as it gives an indication for how large a minecraft nuclear plant should be in comparison with an oil or biogas system. Now the question is where do you find those numbers

quick search but only on renewable fuels

http://www.theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/257481/why-power-density-matters

nuclear is about 1000W/square meter which is A LOT higher than anything else

 

[jogi01]

hey guys!

i have a question regarding railcraft steam oven's:
in our version 3.1.8.1 the steam oven dont accept any wood (tree logs)...
is this a restriction from gregtech, infitech or a bug ?

thanks in advance!

-jogi

 

[Joel Falk]

Think making charcoal from wood logs is restricted to either using railcraft coke ovens or gregtech arc furnace. So i guess its a infitech thing

 

[jogi01]

yes but coke ovens are very slow so i need lots of them to fill up a large steam boiler and we want tu build tps friendly..

 

[Pyure]

yes but coke ovens are very slow so i need lots of them to fill up a large steam boiler and we want tu build tps friendly..

Yes, that's a balancing factor. You can't just easily fuel a large steam boiler in the early game and have awesome amounts of power right away.

Or, rather, you can if you want to. The furnace/charcoal thing is a configuration item in the GT or IC2 config file.

 

[Joel Falk]

I wish GT had a solid fuel generator that didn't involve steam. Something like a stirling generator or a gasifier to produce gaseous or liquid fuels to be used in diesel generators or gas turbines. Stirling could be used directly with solid fuels to produce power or in the case of a gasifier it would require either a combustable fuel to drive the gasifier process or that you use parts of the gasified material to drive the process. Then you could have some other route than always using steam for the early game. OFC bronze age would still be steam but you wouldnt have to invest that heavily into it but only enough to scrape on by untill you transition into LV age

One can always wish

http://forum.industrial-craft.net/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=9122&pageNo=96

 

[Pyure]

I wish GT had a solid fuel generator that didn't involve steam. Something like a stirling generator or a gasifier to produce gaseous or liquid fuels to be used in diesel generators or gas turbines. Stirling could be used directly with solid fuels to produce power or in the case of a gasifier it would require either a combustable fuel to drive the gasifier process or that you use parts of the gasified material to drive the process. Then you could have some other route than always using steam for the early game. OFC bronze age would still be steam but you wouldnt have to invest that heavily into it but only enough to scrape on by untill you transition into LV age

One can always wish

A stirling engine would make some sense for a low-output, high-efficiency alternative to steam.

Gasification probably wouldn't make a lot of sense in the "steam" age as its a higher tech, although it might be cool later on. I'm also not sure w/o doing any research how efficient it would be compared to just outright burning the coal.

 

[asb3pe]

So I made an MV steam turbine and an MV energy hatch for my EBF, however the turbine won't run long enough, it runs out of steam in about 10 seconds.

I'm using regular bronze fluid pipe with a capacity of 2400 L/s, however it's a very long run from my steam tank - 16 blocks. I watched Chloe's video and just installed 10 shutters along the 16 block length, however this didn't help me at all.

Is the regular bronze fluid pipe not adequate steam supply to the MV turbine? I've been researching, trying to find the math on this stuff, without much success. What I do know is that the MV turbine efficiency is 50%, which means it is using 4 liters of steam per EU produced, so that's 128*4=512 liters per tick, or 512*20=10,240 liters per second. So is that my number that I need to match with pipe capacity? The first fluid pipe meeting that requirement is the Huge Steel Fluid Pipe - so do I really need to make 16 Huge Steel Fluid Pipes to run my one little puny MV steam turbine? Wow, if so. What do we do if we're gonna run 4 of these turbines?

Please tell me I have my math wrong, I'm way off base and then tell me what I should be using instead. Thanks! Oh and if you can also point me to a wiki that has accurate info on the GT stuff, I'd appreciate that as well. I've been going here: http://ftb.gamepedia.com/Steam_Turbine_(GregTech)
however there's no units listed for the "steam usage" statistic which is frustrating. How do we convert L/sec into something we're more used to (such as mb/t)?

 

[DarknessShadow]

I wish GT had a solid fuel generator that didn't involve steam. Something like a stirling generator or a gasifier to produce gaseous or liquid fuels to be used in diesel generators or gas turbines. Stirling could be used directly with solid fuels to produce power or in the case of a gasifier it would require either a combustable fuel to drive the gasifier process or that you use parts of the gasified material to drive the process. Then you could have some other route than always using steam for the early game. OFC bronze age would still be steam but you wouldnt have to invest that heavily into it but only enough to scrape on by untill you transition into LV age

One can always wish

http://forum.industrial-craft.net/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=9122&pageNo=96

You can completly switch to biogas in lv AFTER you have a plate bender to make 3 empty cells for the first fermenter.

So I made an MV steam turbine and an MV energy hatch for my EBF, however the turbine won't run long enough, it runs out of steam in about 10 seconds.

I'm using regular bronze fluid pipe with a capacity of 2400 L/s, however it's a very long run from my steam tank - 16 blocks. I watched Chloe's video and just installed 10 shutters along the 16 block length, however this didn't help me at all.

Is the regular bronze fluid pipe not adequate steam supply to the MV turbine? I've been researching, trying to find the math on this stuff, without much success. What I do know is that the MV turbine efficiency is 50%, which means it is using 4 liters of steam per EU produced, so that's 128*4=512 liters per tick, or 512*20=10,240 liters per second. So is that my number that I need to match with pipe capacity? The first fluid pipe meeting that requirement is the Huge Steel Fluid Pipe - so do I really need to make 16 Huge Steel Fluid Pipes to run my one little puny MV steam turbine? Wow, if so. What do we do if we're gonna run 4 of these turbines?

Please tell me I have my math wrong, I'm way off base and then tell me what I should be using instead. Thanks!

I think your math is correct and I would suggest you look into bigger gt pipes, the enderio conduits, ae2 p2p or logisticspipe fluid system for (larger) steam transport.

 

[Pyure]

however there's no units listed for the "steam usage" statistic which is frustrating. How do we convert L/sec into something we're more used to (such as mb/t)?

If you're thinking Greg's L/sec system is completely retarded, you're right. We already had mb/t, adding a new standard was stupid, and I don't care how realistic/unrealistic one is vs the other.

Ok, rant done.

To convert, just divide by 20 and change the L to mb and you're done.

100L/sec = 5 mb/t.

 

[asb3pe]

Im pretty shocked if my math is correct - 10,000 liters per second of steam to run one MV turbine? That's an astounding number, making me wonder how I can possibly generate that much to keep up. And wonder how it's gonna be when I get to the next level. Wow.

Ok so using Pyure's conversion, I need 5120 mb/t to run a single MV turbine, so I don't know what that wiki page says "Steam Usage: 528".

It is all quite confusing, and especially moreso when you cannot find a wiki with good, accurate numbers.

Ah well, the fun is in figuring it out. But I'm truly shocked at how much steam I need here to run this darn thing. that's 5 buckets per TICK!

So, using Gregtech only (which is what I prefer), it would appear you are not thinking straight if you do something like what I did... put your big steam tank way at the back of your base, but put your GT machines way up at the front. Instead, you should crowd all your turbines and machines as close to your steam tank as possible to save on fluid pipe cost. Base layout? Fah-get about it! One chunk build, baby! LOL

 

[Joel Falk]

Gasification is pretty low tech actually, take coal gasification for instance. They have been doing it for ages, think it was invented around 1600 or so. Ofc you can make it very advanced as well but it is very realistic to make it at a fairly low tech level aswell.

I think you could argue that the efficiencies are comparable. It depends a lot if you plan to store the syngas or use it continously as if you store it you can't recover all the heat used to gasify the material. I think the main argument for gasification when you store the syngas (which leads to a total decrease in efficiency) is that you get a much more dense and flexible fuel that can be used in a lot more ways than the solid fuel at higher efficiencies. But you can also get higher efficiencies with gasification than with regular combustion thought it requires you go a bit more high tech.

A realistic power generation cycle for producing power that is more aimed towards high tech would be a combined power cycle (or IGCC to be more precise). That means you gasify the solid materials into a syngas which is then used in a gas turbine to produce electricity directly. The hot flue gases from the turbine is then used in a steam cycle to produce steam which is then run in a regular steam turbine to produce even more electricity. Since the gas turbine operate at a higher temperature at a regular steam cycle the carnot's theorem states you will be able to achieve much higher total efficiencies. Many modern coal power plant work in this way so it is used to quite a large extent.

 

[DarknessShadow]

Im pretty shocked if my math is correct - 10,000 liters per second of steam to run one MV turbine? That's an astounding number, making me wonder how I can possibly generate that much to keep up. And wonder how it's gonna be when I get to the next level. Wow.

Don't forget that the mv steam turbine is only 50% efficency.
You should make the railcraft steam turbine for better efficency

Just so you know
1 sec = 20 ticks
1 L = 1 mb