Well, I agree, multiblock structures are awesome, as are power-rooms. However, solars do have their place. I had a small tower that housed all of my teleporters, with no room for any power generation besides solars. So I made a pattern of them on my helipad.
Best MJ generation method?
- Thread starter Cougar281
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RC nerfed the output of rods by 1/3 so you can't even power a full size HP boiler on them.
That is the perfect use for them. Your circumstances required a specific type of power generation because of space requirements, and solar panels fit the bill.
I'm using 3 full size HP steam boilers + distilled bees with alveary + GregTech Distillation Tower, and its perfect for me.
Their place is everywhere. Too powerfull. And making SOLARS to be a COMPACT solution - is just a bad design for my taste.
I do suppose that massive solar-farms are a thing in real life, but what else would you have as easy-sustainable compact power? Diesel generators require a refinery, geothermal...well, If I had to say, then I'd say that they are even more powerful than solars. Generators still take up loads of space for anything substantial. Everything about FTB is already wonkily unrealistic, why not throw solars in the mix?
Don't get me wrong, I agree that solars can be too powerful. I think that's why they require iridium. But until a more compact power source is added, we have to stik wit them.
Oh well. I'm pretty neutral on this. Sometimes I play my hardmode GT with the only purpose of exploiting absolutely everything.
Yes, indeed it is. tbh, I think I wrote that for my benefit.
Ah well, it's not as if it's an issue that will get resolved anytime soon. No point in clashing our differing opinions too much.
Well, I installed the power converter and with the ton of EU I have available, it's doing the job very nicely. Granted, it's not often you need TONS of MJ to run things. Most things are relatively low draw. But in the case of the mining well frame quarry machine, 16 mining wells pulling 25MJ/t at full speed is 400MJ/t. Lots of power. Heck, until I built the machine, the 13 electrical engines had NO problem keeping up with my power demands. I think they ran about 25% of the time, with the energy being stored in several Redstone Energy Cells and the engines only turning on when the first cell was depleted, then turning off when it was full.... Although lately the gate that I had set up to control that got wonky and it would set everything into a flashing loop, turning the engines on and off several times a second.
One 'Side Effect' I've noticed from yanking the electrical engines and replacing them with the Power Converter is noticeably less lag/choppiness. That's one thing I noticed with Tekkit and FTB: It doesn't take much to introduce noticeable lag or choppiness. I have several Minecraft/Tekkit/FTB servers running on a server that I have in a local datacenter. Vanilla MC is glass smooth all the time with very high framerates, but in Tekkit and FTB, framerates drop off quick, but the VMs for the different servers show low CPU & memory usage.
One 'Side Effect' I've noticed from yanking the electrical engines and replacing them with the Power Converter is noticeably less lag/choppiness. That's one thing I noticed with Tekkit and FTB: It doesn't take much to introduce noticeable lag or choppiness. I have several Minecraft/Tekkit/FTB servers running on a server that I have in a local datacenter. Vanilla MC is glass smooth all the time with very high framerates, but in Tekkit and FTB, framerates drop off quick, but the VMs for the different servers show low CPU & memory usage.
Greg doesn't hate fuel specifically. He makes it so one bucket of fuel lasts almost 30 minutes. (nitro diesel)
Greg hates almost all forms of energy generation. Multiple step energy production seems to be his thing. Most of his energy creation methods require multiple steps through multiple gregtech machines to make. The only exception to this seems to be lava. He seems to love this generation method. I don't know if he buffed it because he thought it should generate more power, or so you would need less lava. Everything else seems to be rather complex.
Except that fuel is multi-step energy generation and it's really a lot more expensive and less awesome than lava. Who cares how long a bukkit-o-fuel lasts when I have nearly infinite lava at my disposal that has a higher eu/t and requires almost no processing? I don't get it...
Is the Distillation Tower still the stupidest thing to build ever?
I don't understand the lava thing either... But I do think the distillation tower is kinda cool. Hellishly expensive, but cool. It gives you a 1:1 ratio for converting oil into fuel. I'm slowly working on the chrome I'll need to make it. 16 advanced machine casings shouldn't be too bad. *choke* *cough*
Only if you have some sort of objection to using biofuel, as it beats the Still hands-down in both efficiency and speed.
Forestry Still: 80 biomass -> 24 Biofuel in ~1,733 seconds, costing ~206,000 MJ
Distillation Tower: 80 biomass -> 40 Biofuel in 100 seconds, costing 64,000 EU (~25,600 MJ, depending on conversion)
It's expensive, but when you finish it, totally worth it. 1:1 ratio for fuel and 2:1 ratio for biofuel... And seems slow but it's processing 16 bucket at same time.
It's much easier to make once you have Ars magica. You can turn cobble into redstone and then spin that for chrome. You can also make shiny metal and spin that for iridium. So... gg greg.
In terms of base efficiency, both for conversion and for one's CPU, PowerConverters is (unless configured otherwise) tops for turning MJ->EU and vice versa. Hell, early on, its actually more efficient to use the converters to turn power from, say, magmatic engines, into EU instead of pumping thru geothermals. In fact, that's how I handle long-distance energy teleportation of any kind: convert to MJ, send thru tesseract, grid receives boost in power, and it works especially well with high-grade solars; I've got 8 ultimate hybrid solars working now (before people start whinging, that's AFTER magmatics, combustion engines, and even 2 small-scale nuclear reactors), and I hate having cables going thru the roof of my houses, so I'm pumping their power thru a tesseract, which I intend on using to power a few mass fabricators.
However, if you're looking for a non-converted way to generate a ton of MJ to be shot everywhere via tesseract, here's -my- idea... Since you seem to already have a fair bit of MJ production going, make a pump, pair of ender tanks, and 4 redstone engines (with 2 levers), along with some crap to build a platform to place said pump on. Find an oil well, set up your pumping station, go home, and run the oil thru a refinery or two. Don't do anything with the fuel just yet, just let it refine and shoot it off into a XyCraft tank for storage. Let it fill up til about...150,000 mB of fuel, something I managed with just 4 magmatic engines in the space of a scant few hours. Then, build a few combustion engines, water them up, then fuel 'em up, attach them to your MJ energy net (which will also connect them to the refineries), and set 'em loose. This is basically the setup I've got running in my world, and I've only fully drained one oil well. I've got only two refineries, a 7x7x7 XyCraft tank made of freaking gold (because why not?) which is remaining completely full despite fueling 17 combustion engines, which alone give me 102 MJ/t. Again, I'm barely using any fuel and am running a massive surplus with just 2 refineries and one big-ass fuel tank. The beauty of this design is that its, so long as room allows, perfectly scalable. I'd probably have more engines, myself, but the way my room's set up, the liquiducts would become a truly horrendous tangle and even turning the things on would be a chore. But, when done right, combustion engines are 100% safe and produce a great amount of power per unit of fuel; I think 1 bucket of fuel yields some 600,000 MJ total from one engine. Oh! For cooling, I'm just using a small 10x4x3 XyCraft tank being fed by 8 Xychorium water blocks, again, operating at a surplus.
Fuel really isn't the big, bad monster a lotta people seem to think it is.
However, if you're looking for a non-converted way to generate a ton of MJ to be shot everywhere via tesseract, here's -my- idea... Since you seem to already have a fair bit of MJ production going, make a pump, pair of ender tanks, and 4 redstone engines (with 2 levers), along with some crap to build a platform to place said pump on. Find an oil well, set up your pumping station, go home, and run the oil thru a refinery or two. Don't do anything with the fuel just yet, just let it refine and shoot it off into a XyCraft tank for storage. Let it fill up til about...150,000 mB of fuel, something I managed with just 4 magmatic engines in the space of a scant few hours. Then, build a few combustion engines, water them up, then fuel 'em up, attach them to your MJ energy net (which will also connect them to the refineries), and set 'em loose. This is basically the setup I've got running in my world, and I've only fully drained one oil well. I've got only two refineries, a 7x7x7 XyCraft tank made of freaking gold (because why not?) which is remaining completely full despite fueling 17 combustion engines, which alone give me 102 MJ/t. Again, I'm barely using any fuel and am running a massive surplus with just 2 refineries and one big-ass fuel tank. The beauty of this design is that its, so long as room allows, perfectly scalable. I'd probably have more engines, myself, but the way my room's set up, the liquiducts would become a truly horrendous tangle and even turning the things on would be a chore. But, when done right, combustion engines are 100% safe and produce a great amount of power per unit of fuel; I think 1 bucket of fuel yields some 600,000 MJ total from one engine. Oh! For cooling, I'm just using a small 10x4x3 XyCraft tank being fed by 8 Xychorium water blocks, again, operating at a surplus.
Fuel really isn't the big, bad monster a lotta people seem to think it is.
Ah so he did upgrade it. We built one on advancing craft and it wasn't worth it, but that was months ago now.[DOUBLEPOST=1368906157][/DOUBLEPOST]
It's more that Greg's fuel generators are a problem. Not BC. For BC, fuel is great.
Eeh, I've never personally used GT's fuel generators, so I'm not gonna pass judgment on 'em. Though, knowing GT, they're going to be an asston more expensive than a few BC refineries...that seems to be Greg's modus operandae.
The interesting thing is that his fuel generators tend to be significantly better for IC2 fuels than base IC2 (more energy per bucket, at a higher output rate, requiring fewer processing steps), but for BC fuels he seems to have decided that it's best to not step on anyone's toes and just fall in line with the existing (more or less terrible) options for burning them for EU.