The way it should be thought is actually that you use steam as an indirect media to turn solid fuels or lava into methane. There is large logistical perks to that. One thing is the energy density as steam contains extremly small amounts of energy per volume but the other thing is moving it around. Moving around any amount of energy in the form of steam is extremly difficult on low tech levels so keeping a small setup that produces methane that you store and move around.
Indeed, one bucket of methane per minute in comparison with loads(more than 120 buckets) of steam for the same period...
Another good thing about solid fuels would also produce ashes that you could use to supply the chemical reactor with carbon dust to produce the methane.
Or use sugar into water, carbon and oxygen... if you don't want to use solid fuels for the steam production... and have already passed by the BBF to make steel.
So basically lava/fuel->steam->methane. Gonna calculate the balance on it now but i think i need to consider all the losses in the system to get more accurate results.
A question regarding transmission losses:
How do you consider transmission losses from generators when you have consumers that does not consume the entire package? The way i understood it a LV steam turbine produces a 32 EU package evert tick by consuming 34 EU worth of fuel at an efficiency of X. So if the reactor requires 30 EU does that mean it should skip one tick every 2/32 ticks? Then the total consumtion of a chemical reactor running on steam directly connected with a LV steam turbine should be (30/32 (active time))*34 (actual consumtion)/efficiency = Fuel EU consumtion per tick. And to get that value in steam you multiply it by 2 since 2 steam=1 eu
from what I can tell the LV steam turbine has an internal buffer, once that buffer has 32 less than maximum stored it uses 102L of steam to make 32EU for the internal buffer.
Im thinking of making a calculation to see how much methane can you produce from 1 piece of charcoal in a high pressure coal boiler, something tells me that would actually be a lot more efficient than centrifuging carrots and potatoes. And if you consider it as a system it does actually produce 64,3 EU/t worth of methane that you could easily scale it up to power a electric blast furnace. Only thing is you could also directly produce about the same amount of power using the steam.
SO maybe not worth it for continous use but for power storage, uneven load and fuel distribution it would work really well.
Thinking about this also makes me wonder of the total efficiency of using 16 LV turbines or 4 MV turbines vs the efficiency of using 1 HV turbines when you consider the total efficiency of the system. While the individual LV turbine has a better efficiency i suspect the actuall efficiency is rather close or better for the higher tier generators when you consider the entire system.
I found something out, Jason and the gang has upgraded the efficiency of all the LV-HV GT generators/turbines... so all the old calculations one made needs to be remade for the new efficiency values.
Like this:
LV Steam Turbine:
Old
34EU generation x 2Liters/EU x 3/2 Efficiency = 102L steam per tick
New
34EU generation x 2Liters/EU x 20/17 Efficiency = 80L steam per tick
Do head from "headcrumbs" mod work as stabilizers in TC Runic Altar?
Afaik yes, they work as stabilizers, but remember you can just make loads of TC candles if you need more stabilizing.
