I really recommend you do the timer/RS signal thing. Its easy to set up and will save you absolutely tons of power.I've been using high power for the extractor mainly because I didn't want to use a timer and a toggle switch of some sort, it slows things down more than my liking. Is there a way to remove the middle stage products from the extractor, to switch between two different extractors or something? Every time I try I only get the flakes out, but if I can use two extractors for different stages, then I only need 16MW x 2 extractors to run top speed. Otherwise I'm either stuck with a toggle, or huge power usage.
Reika is absolutely adamant that you not dedicate extractors to individual extraction rates. Yes, this is completely insane. No, nobody would ever set it up like this. Yes, Reika has a fancy image of an extraction machine which he simulated to make this sensible. No its still not sensible. And for the most part he has (to my knowledge) cut off any mods which are supposed to be able to manage individual slots in machines, so there's only way to use this machine (critical caveat: my knowledge may be out of date, take with a grain of salt)
512Nm is 512W by itself, which is nothing. Its when you start adding speed that it ramps up, and honestly this thing runs fast enough at low speeds that you won't really care. Also: your talk of slices makes me wonder if you're confusing the bedrock breaker with the borer. (The bedrock breaker cuts a block into visual slices as it operates. But the borer proceeds a cross-sectional "slice" at a time, so your info may be legit.)I thought the borer took quite a bit of power. For torque the book says that it's 512Nm for harder materials, but even when I had one on 4096Nm it kept getting stuck (rather randomly). Looking for an answer I stumbled on a wiki page that said the torque was per block, not per slice, and that seemed to make sense with the bore getting stuck randomly whilst having what would've seemed like loads of torque. I haven't gotten to test much further than that yet, since the next test was going to be supplying TONS of torque to see if it still gets stuck. Could you offer any insights?
In Reika's defense, I don't think the batteries were intended to perform the exact way you were intending to use them. I personally used them the same as you just mentioned: I ran my reactors very briefly, since they had the nasty habit of exploding at the time and I wanted to watch them. Unfortunately a lot of RoC seems to want you to run your power grid is an extremely decentralized manner, but you always have the option of storing your energy in other forms for "burst" output (although not too many mods offer better output than the auroral, and nothing beats it for storage afaik)It still seems a bit odd to me that the top tier battery can't output energy at anywhere near the level that you're producing it, at the stage you'd make one. With a 20GW reactor setup, you'd need 80 batteries, (41k diamonds) to keep up with it if you actually wanted to use it all. The way batteries inputs/storage/outputs are setup it seems that when using batteries and reactors, you'd charge up the batteries every once in a while, then you'd be set for power for days/weeks at a time between reactor runs.