Boiler mj to eu
- Thread starter AliasXNeo
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Considering the rotor lasts for an average of 432 million EU, the cost is honestly negligible.
Steam turbines are the most efficient MJ to EU converter, if you define the output of a steam boiler in MJ. You will get 156.25% of your MJ input out as EU. With 144 MJ/t from a 36HP boiler (or two 36LP, which would be more fuel efficient but require more space), you can drive two turbines for 128 MJ/t -> 200 EU/t and have 16 J/t left. If you put that into a third steam turbine, it will give you another 25 EU/t. Therefore, the maximum amount of EU you can create with 144 MJ/t is 225 EU/t. Is it actually sensible to build three turbines? That is something everyone must decide for themselves
Now, if you have actual MJ and not simply steam - for example, from combustion or biogas engines - then you can't use the turbine and you will be getting less EU. If you have GregTech, you will not get much less; the Thermal Generator still allows for a 150% conversion from melting down cobblestone in a magma crucible. The end result will be 216 EU/t, which is 9 less than using steam turbines.
If you do not have GregTech, you're stuck with normal geothermal generators, which give you a 100% conversion. 144 MJ/t will become 144 EU/t via magma crucibles melting cobblestone.
Steam turbines are the most efficient MJ to EU converter, if you define the output of a steam boiler in MJ. You will get 156.25% of your MJ input out as EU. With 144 MJ/t from a 36HP boiler (or two 36LP, which would be more fuel efficient but require more space), you can drive two turbines for 128 MJ/t -> 200 EU/t and have 16 J/t left. If you put that into a third steam turbine, it will give you another 25 EU/t. Therefore, the maximum amount of EU you can create with 144 MJ/t is 225 EU/t. Is it actually sensible to build three turbines? That is something everyone must decide for themselves
Now, if you have actual MJ and not simply steam - for example, from combustion or biogas engines - then you can't use the turbine and you will be getting less EU. If you have GregTech, you will not get much less; the Thermal Generator still allows for a 150% conversion from melting down cobblestone in a magma crucible. The end result will be 216 EU/t, which is 9 less than using steam turbines.
If you do not have GregTech, you're stuck with normal geothermal generators, which give you a 100% conversion. 144 MJ/t will become 144 EU/t via magma crucibles melting cobblestone.
Just a heads up, it's 99 steel for 2 rotors, not one. This means for 99 steel you'll get 864m eu. As for UUM, isn't it 5 uum for 2 ores, making it 5 uum for 4 steel, when not factoring in ways to triple the iron? This would mean each steel would roughly be 20,833,332.5 eu per steel when using Gregtech - without it it's only around 208k eu. With these numbers we can see that two rotors with GT cost 2,083,333,250 eu, or 1,041,666,625 each. With the new output and duration, each rotor can produce 432,000,000 eu (20 ticks a second, 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes an hour, for 60 hours, at 100 eu/t). This value stay the same if it's GT or not. Without GT, the UUM cost of resupplying the rotors is reduced to 20,833,332.5 for two rotors, or 10,416,666.25 per rotor, give or take rounding.
This effectively means with GT, don't bother, without GT, go balls to the wall.
This effectively means with GT, don't bother, without GT, go balls to the wall.
ICountFrom0, the point is not so much arguing semantics over how the price difference ought to be calculated, or even whether the values said calculation are based on are even sensible (I am a big GregTech fan, and I still believe that the default UU-Matter cost is utter bollocks while the Thermal Generator is too strong).
AliasXNeo asked how to get the most EU out of his MJ. The answer is "with steam turbines", and that is the answer I gave him. As I've already written in that answer, it may or may not be worth actually doing in practice, and that's up to each individual person. And I did list all the alternatives as well.
I probably would not build three steam turbines myself, but I did build one and have not really felt the resource impact. Compared to the ridiculous amounts of iridium, rubies, emeralds and plain EU you need for endgame GregTech machinery, coal and iron for a mere few hundred steel is pocket change to me. I have whole stacks of blocks more where that came from, and even after a week's worth of permanent runtime (my world is singleplayer, not on a 24/7 server) at 85%, the rotor is less than a quarter down.
AliasXNeo asked how to get the most EU out of his MJ. The answer is "with steam turbines", and that is the answer I gave him. As I've already written in that answer, it may or may not be worth actually doing in practice, and that's up to each individual person. And I did list all the alternatives as well.
I probably would not build three steam turbines myself, but I did build one and have not really felt the resource impact. Compared to the ridiculous amounts of iridium, rubies, emeralds and plain EU you need for endgame GregTech machinery, coal and iron for a mere few hundred steel is pocket change to me. I have whole stacks of blocks more where that came from, and even after a week's worth of permanent runtime (my world is singleplayer, not on a 24/7 server) at 85%, the rotor is less than a quarter down.
Also, if you are going to assign a cost to his steel from a process that it will never come from (sensibly), then wouldn't it make sense to assign the UUM cost for your lava in order to make a proper comparison?
@noah, you could do that, and there are other methods of producing iron from nothing, it's just that UUM is the one that's most easily calculated as most other methods are luck based. It's not so much the cost of replacing the iron so much as it being the cost to run the system in a closed loop that I look at. For example, you can run a farm > biomass > biofuel > boiler > lava > eu system in a closed loop with itself - the farms would be self-sustaining, thus constantly providing materials for biomass and biofuel which then get fed into the boiler, the boiler then provides mj to any machines within the system, extra MJ is converted into lava, and the lava gets turned into EU. This can all be done automatically without any input from the player after the initial setup.
With the rotors running on steam you have to factor in iron, which will either have to come from the player or from other sources that aren't 100% reliable - that or come from UUM. I do believe someone mentioned in another thread like this a relatively cheap (compared to UUM in GT) method of obtaining iron through processing something, but iirc the energy cost makes it slightly less energy efficient than the lava > eu method and the energy cost isn't guaranteed to be the same consistently.
If you really wanted you could make an iron golem farm and call it a day, but for me personally I don't like doing that particular farm due to it feeling a bit too cheesy since you can get tons of iron which can then be xmuted via TC3.
Basically, different people look at different things when building systems. I look at self-sustainability myself, which is why I'm turned off by the new Forestry farms, while others don't mind if they have to add in a bit of input every now and then. This is one of those cases of "to each their own," we're just giving numbers in how self-sustainable turbines look to us.
With the rotors running on steam you have to factor in iron, which will either have to come from the player or from other sources that aren't 100% reliable - that or come from UUM. I do believe someone mentioned in another thread like this a relatively cheap (compared to UUM in GT) method of obtaining iron through processing something, but iirc the energy cost makes it slightly less energy efficient than the lava > eu method and the energy cost isn't guaranteed to be the same consistently.
If you really wanted you could make an iron golem farm and call it a day, but for me personally I don't like doing that particular farm due to it feeling a bit too cheesy since you can get tons of iron which can then be xmuted via TC3.
Basically, different people look at different things when building systems. I look at self-sustainability myself, which is why I'm turned off by the new Forestry farms, while others don't mind if they have to add in a bit of input every now and then. This is one of those cases of "to each their own," we're just giving numbers in how self-sustainable turbines look to us.
sounds like the issue here is in the balance between rotors and lava EU generation. I'm starting to believe that IC2 geothermals were built around the idea of scarce fuel supply and the lava generation per tick should be halved. They'd still be a useful cheap upgrade from a regular generator, but you'd want a more powerful method for any heavy power situations.
If you want closed-system iron generation, you've got a few options. Villager iron golem farms, zombie pigmen farms (plus EE3 or TC3), and ExtraBees iron-producing bees come to mind. Pick your most legit.
If you want closed-system iron generation, you've got a few options. Villager iron golem farms, zombie pigmen farms (plus EE3 or TC3), and ExtraBees iron-producing bees come to mind. Pick your most legit.
Aside from that geothermals should require something like water as well (just using lava makes no sense at all) their output is 'kinda okay' if you use 'surface' lava. They weren't balanced with pumping lava from the nether in mind because with just IC2 that wasn't even possible. The most sensible solution would be to make it impossible to pump lava in the Nether.
Just IC2 has the Pump, which almost nobody ever uses, which can be attached directly to a geothermal to provide lava (this info is rather old, if it was changed in the last ~year then I'm wrong). Use the geothermal to charge lapatrons, which you can haul to the overworld manually, or soon in vanilla MC 1.5 automatically with hoppers and nether portals. The only issue you run into is chunk loading, which isn't possible in IC2 by itself. So you sit AFK in the nether for a few hours, and get yourself power for weeks.
As much as I support the "play however you like" style, I agree with making Nether lava unusable in machinery. Too many mods (including vanilla to some degree, in furnaces) balance about lava being semi-rare and limited. In the nether it is literally easier to harvest in practically unlimited quantities than dirt.
I would like to mention here that, last I checked, 8 pulverized obsidian can be elctrolyzed with gregtech to produce, among other things, 1 iron.
This means that one could easily set up a TE system which turns lava into iron. Assuming each lava costs 30k eu, that's 240,000 eu per iron, plus whatever that gregtech recipe costs in eu.
Set-up one boiler to generate lava for iron, then use others for EU, and bam. Infinite EU from steam, though unfortunately I don't think there is a way to automate the placing of rotors into turbines. (CovertJaguar probably did that on purpose, to prevent it from being too easy. Or it may be a bug. *shrug*)
This means that one could easily set up a TE system which turns lava into iron. Assuming each lava costs 30k eu, that's 240,000 eu per iron, plus whatever that gregtech recipe costs in eu.
Set-up one boiler to generate lava for iron, then use others for EU, and bam. Infinite EU from steam, though unfortunately I don't think there is a way to automate the placing of rotors into turbines. (CovertJaguar probably did that on purpose, to prevent it from being too easy. Or it may be a bug. *shrug*)
This way you will even get 30k (-200 for the pump per source block) instead of the usual 20k per lava. Because of the existence of this mechanic, greg added his own thermal gen with the 30k, just to avoid the pumping hassle, while still getting max benefit.
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
How the hell did a boiler thread turn into a bitch-fest about nether pumping?
Are you that worked up about this that you can no longer keep it in check and feel the need to constantly vomit opinions over every thread here?
Please don't turn this into a 'bitching about people bitching' thread, because the only way that can go is down.
Back on-topic, I would like to reiterate and stress the above point I made about turning lava into iron. Additionally, if someone could look at the in-game info for me on the numbers and specifics of this method before I get home to do it myself, it would be great.
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
No, because on both servers, the only real cost you have is of Soul Sand, which can used in many different ways in Minecrack...
For DW20, you'll probably be throwing that sand into either Soul Shards or TC3... For the cause of this purpose, you can assume that sand is going to indirectly end up in Crucibles anyway..