Kirin, I've never looked at boilers and such, but the Ultimate Hybrid Solar Panels are SUPER EXPENSIVE to build... took me quite a while and a lot of resources to build the nine that I have. I'm GUESSING, that they are a LOT more expensive to make than the boilers and steam engines, so I'm not sure about your 'they should be equal to three or four maxed out boilers' comment.
Best MJ generation method?
- Thread starter Cougar281
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I suppose one could uninstall extra bees and then adjust the throughput on power converters, but having 20+ engines (or bandwidth limited power converters) for one machine is silly.
is it even possible to create a power conversion mod, that wont be "broken"?
One maxed boiler == 144 MJ/t
Oh, but boilers require fuel to operate! Actually I dislike those "super-solars" for various reasons, but who cares
One does not make Ulimate Hybrid Solar panels two days into playing... The boilers would be a 'stepping stone' to higher tiers of power generation.
I started with a bunch or Geothermal generators, then moved up to regular solar panels, then made more of them, and woked my way on up through the tiers until I finally had the 9 UHSP's that I have now.. Took me a long time and it was ALL I did for that time.
Those solars don't make sense and making other power sources less useful. And one solar panel that outproduces the most nuclear reactors is stupid.
It depends on how you cost them, but your adv solars are dirt cheap given that they're effectively free, infinite, unmaintained power forever that is just a block you plop down. It represents the very worst aspects of IC2 power system design exemplified in a single block so as to not murder the server. If a field of solars were not so hard on servers, they'd be better a better outcome. That's how bad.
But in terms of the power, I'm not sure you understand quite how much MJ you can put out. If you have four advanced solars that's 2048 eu/t production; quite a bit! But a matter fab can easily eat that much and more, as can a few other GT-based machines. But lots of GT machines take 128eu/t, so you can't build forever this way. But using Power Crystals's math, your eu/t can be converted optimally into 843 mj/t. Most high pressure boiler setups run around 64-80 mj/t (they can do better, I suppose? The ceiling is like 120 some odd, right?) and have big efficiency curves, while your system starts and stops on a dime, so your system is worth about a dozen boilers and engines which each take stacks and stacks of steel to make, and require constant fuel input. Even one 512eu/t power source is worth over two max boilers with engine sets.
Consider for a second how much MJ that is. Only a tiny handfull of machines consume that much power, most notably from extrabees. Even quarries barely eat more than a single boiler's worth. Very few people's operations need more than 6 boilers ever; it's just so much MJ and TE makes MJ so easy to store that it's hardly worth doing.
I am pretty sure at some point you cannot use iridium and UU matter as an argument against this. It's broken because of the way EU scales, not the cost of any block or the specific conversion factor. Until converter mods take scale into account, they will forever mean replicated EU solutions wil outperform everything else.[DOUBLEPOST=1368813285][/DOUBLEPOST]
Yes, but it's hard work. And if you're going to really do it right it's computationally expensive.
advanced solars are not designed to reduce load on server, they are designed to be a maintenance free unlimited energy sources.
compact solars, in fact designed to reduce load on server, which is a compromise has to be made.
i dont think anyone would ever make that, because every energy generator added by a mod, most likely cause scaling change and thus would require changes in power conversion formulas
They are a bad design for such. Spending time at the crafting table is not fun. If you're going to have power mods that do this they should be more like how boilers work: a fair amount of investment for big payouts. It can be made perpetual, but it's hard work.
IC2 has a fundamentally bad design in this. Its power system requires an entire rework.
I would wager that if there were high end MJ production sources and more high end MJ consumers(extra bees is a exception as it stands because it's the only high end energy consumer for BC), the issue would be less noteworthy.
I honestly think it's not that EU is too powerful for what it does, but rather that MJ just doesn't have that many valid uses, and has virtually no high end energy uses.
I honestly think it's not that EU is too powerful for what it does, but rather that MJ just doesn't have that many valid uses, and has virtually no high end energy uses.
In Ultimate's default settings, Solars require significant infrastructure to construct and produce less power than the components they're made of. Advanced solars are worse given that they require uu matter and the infrastructure for all of that and still produce less power than a generator. At this point in the game, one is FAR better off just pumping wood from a tree farm into a generator than turning the generator into a solar or advanced solar panel. Hybrid panels are just awful in that by the time you can actually make iridium plates, you're better off just saving up for 16 of them for the ultimate panel (since you already have a source of uu for the advanced panel anyway).
There are people that turn off their boilers? It's not really fair to include the heatup time given that turning off a boiler is silly. If the ceiling is 120, that's the comparison. So four ultimate solars would be a bit over 7ish boilers (and only during the day). Given that the advanced solars require a ton more infrastructure to build compared to boilers, 2 to 1 is pretty damn fair or 1 to 1 if we're not living in a mystcraft eternal day age.
Ultimately, that's the real problem. I can't think of any single device outside extra bees that can consume as much as 20mj/t (quarries and BC pipes being the exception, but neither require that much for constant albeit slower operation). If their consumption values were divided by 10 or 20, they'd be much more in line with other mj consumers and limiting the bandwidth on the power converter would be a more obvious choice.
i think a perfect solution would be a multi structure with variable size and variable out put like boilers
that`s true, and i cant say anything on that
Comparing just the recipe costs is totally unfair; automating a boiler solution requires player time and design effort. These put the costing about on par, given how silly-easy UU matter is in ultimate.
The problem is that 4mj/t -> 120mj/t is from useful to more than you ever need. Whereas in IC2 land it's 10eu/t -> 512eu/t is from useful to a easily usable by a medium sized factory. This is because IC2's scaling is not linear the way MJ is. I do not know how to explain it more clearly than this and I'm getting bored repeating that linear conversions don't work. It has very little to do with the MJ power ecosystem. In fact it has almost nothing to do with that. The design work is done.[DOUBLEPOST=1368815738][/DOUBLEPOST]
MJ is good. UE is good (internally and interfacing with MJ). Factorization's power system is not bad either.
IC2's power design problems are mostly about really borked decisions on wiring and a lack of good content for middle-tier energy generation. UE and MJ have good wiring (UE stands out here as quite good although inefficient on the server's side, TE stands out with the most efficient for the server but a very simplistic model) and good and well-motivated power generation decisions.
Oh, and nuclear's cost is WAY too high for the output. In general IC2 generator cost and effort is proportional to its output. The problem is that this means that high-end generators are like 4x as expensive in total cost to run (sometimes more) per EU generated compared to just replicating and automating smaller solutions. Automating an IC2 nuclear reactor is genuinely hard for a person to do, and you need help from specific mods to actually manipulate inventories correctly. Even worse, it's not a reusable skill, so it's basically just a copper-hungry timesink compared to the more generally applicable "build a ton of smaller generators" approach.
IC was the first, I think :3 Too bad that they made some balance changes, but those were quite minor... Even doubling the output of all the generators but infinite ones was not that significant... People still use mostly solars and windmills. Later came GeoGens when Nether lava transmission became simple... That's it.
Advanced/Compact solars/windmills make it even worse.
Advanced/Compact solars/windmills make it even worse.
The funny thing is, Geothermal generation is actually pretty good in terms of design and effort when Greg does it. They generators have good output, the automation is not super exciting but it's a long-term investment. It's like... a process. It involves lots of mods and some thought for optimal storage, transmission and maintenance, but it's reliable enough that people are still happy using it. It's a nice beginning-of-middle-tier choice overall if you're using GT's thermals.