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Age of Engineering Series!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Closet Gamer
  • Start date Start date
Episode 54 - time to automate some HDPE plastic which is used in the creative vending recipe. Also, a quick update for you guys

1) It took me a while to figure this out, set up and tune so I thought I'd share it to help the community:

Background

The typical way of automating quantum entangled singularities is to set an export bus to export ender dust and singularities once the entangled singularities level drops below a certain level, using a level emitter. The export bus delivers the items to a dropper which triggers TNT to be placed and triggered. This has a few issues:

A) If the level emitter detects thst you have a shortage of Quantum entangled singularities but you have no singularities in stock then the system will indefinately export ender dust only, wasting resources. If you have ender dust on autocraft then this will burn through your ender pearls pretty fast. It continues doing this because the level emitter will not change.

B) vice versa for the singularities - lack of ender dust = wasted singularities.

C) even if you do have both items in stock the way export buses work means that it might eject an unbalanced amount of items (one item first, typically resulting in more ender dust being dropped than required) which is wasteful. Same goes for vice versa.

D) if TNT stock (or the ingredients) is depleted then the export bus exports indefinitely, wasting both items

Solution

I made a system for the next episode of my series to fix this, essentially using 3 level emitters into an RFtools logic gate that checks if all 3 things are true:

i) Do I have ender dust

ii) Do I have singularities

iii) is the quantum entangled singularities stock <10 (fuzzy card required for the level emitter)

If all of these things are true then a redstone signal is emitted into an RFtools sequencer set to pulse for 4 ticks on, 61 off. It is set to only run again if it is still receiving a redstone signal. The sequencer basically slows down the speed of 2 export buses (1 for dust, 1 for singularities) so that 1 set of items is delivered between checking stock levels. This delivers a slow and evenly distributed amount of dust and singularities. and as soon as one of the stock levels depletes the export shuts off.

The chest then distributes the 1 dust and 1 singularitiy to a precision dropper where they are dropped into a pressure plate. This plate activates and does two things: the first is to switch on the heaters to a steam boiler using an IC2 splitter. With 3 heaters it takes 30 seconds to go from ambient (24°C) to 100°C. Once the steam boiler reaches 100°C with the pressure release set to 0bar it starts to explode (non-destructively) which forms the singularities. A ranged collector set to black-list dust and singularities then collects the quantum entangled singularities and sends them into a crate with an AE2 storage bus. Once the pressure plate is released by the absence of items the heaters shut off and the explosions stop.

Issues

I haven't had any imbalance of items yet, but as a belt and braces approach the pressure plate also activates a count down timer linked to another ranged collector that will pick up any stray dust and singularities should an imbalance occur.

Exactly 10 singularities and 10 ender dust are distributed before the boiler has time to heat up and make the first pair of singularities. This is unwanted but I'm working on it ;)

Hope this helps someone who is as fanatical about automation as I am ;)

Hope you guys enjoy the episode


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My Age of Engineering Series: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUZaEaeCvlj6ChY3jks-N8rW74_3qEtmD
 
Doing some homework of 5x Mekanism ore processing, black is T0 (1x) yellow T1 (2x), brown T2 (3x), light blue T3 (4x), pink T4 (5x).

The green is hydrogen chloride production and the dark blue is hydrochloric acid. The crystallisers seem to be the bottle neck and just running a little behind with two T3 voidminers feeding them. 2 gas generators seem pretty capable of powering it all though!
38b3c9a6c8125ae5982a1decd0765d45.jpg


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My Age of Engineering Series: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUZaEaeCvlj6ChY3jks-N8rW74_3qEtmD
 
Closet Gamer said:
Doing some homework of 5x Mekanism ore processing, black is T0 (1x) yellow T1 (2x), brown T2 (3x), light blue T3 (4x), pink T4 (5x).

The green is hydrogen chloride production and the dark blue is hydrochloric acid. The crystallisers seem to be the bottle neck and just running a little behind with two T3 voidminers feeding them. 2 gas generators seem pretty capable of powering it all though!
38b3c9a6c8125ae5982a1decd0765d45.jpg


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My Age of Engineering Series: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUZaEaeCvlj6ChY3jks-N8rW74_3qEtmD
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Dude that’s awesome :D
 
Closet Gamer said:
It's a lotta fun - good thing about it is 4 of the byproducts are needed for the creative gasses anyway - so win win

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My Age of Engineering Series: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUZaEaeCvlj6ChY3jks-N8rW74_3qEtmD
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Oh of course, you generate clean osmium slurry from there before you put it through the crystalliser! Nice :D I never did the full Mek ore processing on Regrowth because I was growing the ores from plants anyway, but on something like AoE its good to make full use of what you get!
 
GamerwithnoGame said:
Oh of course, you generate clean osmium slurry from there before you put it through the crystalliser! Nice :D I never did the full Mek ore processing on Regrowth because I was growing the ores from plants anyway, but on something like AoE its good to make full use of what you get!
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Yep and tons of ethylene from the generators. The sodium is also a by-product from from processing brine in the electrolytic separator and hydrogen chloride is used in the chemical injection chamber for turning crystals into shards. The only thing missing will be D-T fuel :S

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My Age of Engineering Series: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUZaEaeCvlj6ChY3jks-N8rW74_3qEtmD
 
Closet Gamer said:
Yep and tons of ethylene from the generators. The sodium is also a by-product from from processing brine in the electrolytic separator and hydrogen chloride is used in the chemical injection chamber for turning crystals into shards. The only thing missing will be D-T fuel :S

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My Age of Engineering Series: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUZaEaeCvlj6ChY3jks-N8rW74_3qEtmD
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You're already some of the way there with that though - the brine needs to go either back into the Thermal Evap Plant or into a separate one to get your lithium, which needs to be gasified and go into Solar Neutron Activators (which cost no power, and can take speed upgrades hint hint) for tritium; then you just need to make some water pumps with filter upgrades for heavy water and pump that into electrolytic separators for deuterium, and the machine that then combines those into D-T fuel isn't bad either!
 
GamerwithnoGame said:
You're already some of the way there with that though - the brine needs to go either back into the Thermal Evap Plant or into a separate one to get your lithium, which needs to be gasified and go into Solar Neutron Activators (which cost no power, and can take speed upgrades hint hint) for tritium; then you just need to make some water pumps with filter upgrades for heavy water and pump that into electrolytic separators for deuterium, and the machine that then combines those into D-T fuel isn't bad either!
Click to expand...
Wow, sounds fairly simple actually ;) I'm putting a floor plan of the chemical plant together at the moment. I'll share it when it's done - need to make sure I leave room for future expansion and other things that will use the chemicals produced.

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My Age of Engineering Series: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUZaEaeCvlj6ChY3jks-N8rW74_3qEtmD
 
Closet Gamer said:
Wow, sounds fairly simple actually ;) I'm putting a floor plan of the chemical plant together at the moment. I'll share it when it's done - need to make sure I leave room for future expansion and other things that will use the chemicals produced.

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My Age of Engineering Series: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUZaEaeCvlj6ChY3jks-N8rW74_3qEtmD
Click to expand...
Yeah, its not too bad :D Electrolytic separators are pretty thirsty for power, so you'll want Energy upgrades in those as a priority.

Awesome, looking forward to that!

Remind me: does the day/night cycle occur in the mining dimension? If not, that might be a good place for your TEPs. Alternatively, if its mostly daytime in space, that's something you could do.

As another alternative, if you can get a few more gas burning generators together, you can run your TEPs entirely off heat generated by resistive heaters instead of solar panels - I had a chat with someone (might have been Triaxx?) about that - they are pretty power hungry, so it may not be worth your while, but that's always a possibility. To convert them from solar to thermal, you replace each of the solar panels with a Thermal Evaporation Block, and add in an extra valve to pump the heat into. The Thermodynamic Conductor pipes are apparently quite lossy (especially in cold biomes) so if you go that route, make sure you have as short a distance from your heaters to your plant as you can.
 
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