Curious question about engines/conduit/tesseracts/Energy Cells

[b0bst3r]

I was wondering about this so let me ask you what your thoughts/findings are.

If I had a block of 40 biogas engines all running off biomass (40 x 5MJ/t = 200MJ) and connected them all together off 1 single pipeline of redstone energy conduit to a series of redstone energy cells, which were then next to a single tesseract:-

1 - Can redstone energy conduit transfer that much power or does it simply send 40 x 5MJ/t?
2 - Would you be better splitting the 40 engines into say 4 lots of 10 and isolating the conduit sections?
3 - If you had an Energy Tesseract set to send with 6 redstone energy cells surrounding it, would it draw from all of them or just a couple of them or just 1?
4 - Does the power transfer to the closest redstone energy cell if connected to more than one or?

 

[Guswut]

1 - Can redstone energy conduit transfer that much power or does it simply send 40 x 5MJ/t?

I have a block of steam engines running off of two boilers, and I haven't noticed MJ stacking up in the engines so I believe redstone conduit work similar to EU/s packet sending, in that they move the MJ as fast as you send them, and do not end up backing up. Although they may just have a large internal buffer, in which case it might be possible to saturate them and get backed up. Maybe King Lemming will see this and tell us for sure?

2 - Would you be better splitting the 40 engines into say 4 lots of 10 and isolating the conduit sections?

I'd suggest one block, as each time a redstone energy conduit puts power into something (a redstone energy cell, a machine, etc) it takes away 5% of that power.

3 - If you had an Energy Tesseract set to send with 6 redstone energy cells surrounding it, would it draw from all of them or just a couple of them or just 1?

Based on how liquid tesseracts work, I believe it'd draw from all six, but I am not sure. I'd say try it on creative mode and see if you can send and get 600mj/t this way.

4 - Does the power transfer to the closest redstone energy cell if connected to more than one or?

That is a good question, as it could randomly route to any of the redstone energy cells, or it could have a side it always does first, or something like that if it is getting less than 100mj/t (or even for each packet of MJ sent over).

 

[Omicron]

1.) and 2.) are actually some really good questions. I can imagine a few likely answers, but I don't actually know.

EDIT: Guswut, be careful - energy conduits will dissipate a power oversaturation, so you cannot rely on looking into the engines to see whether they build up power or not. They never will. You could still be wasting energy if you burst too much into the conduit at once, depending on how conduits actually work.

Also, it's irrelevant if you lose 4x 5% of a quarter or 1x 5% of the whole. The resulting loss is always the same.

I can answer the other two, though:
3.) All of them, equally
4.) It will be equally split

Note that a single energy tesseract has a maximum energy intake of 125 MJ/t (100 MJ/t transfer plus 25% loss), as well as a maximum output of 100 MJ/t. You can have multiple inputs on the same frequency as well as multiple outputs if you would like to transfer more at once.

 

[King Lemming]

I was wondering about this so let me ask you what your thoughts/findings are.

If I had a block of 40 biogas engines all running off biomass (40 x 5MJ/t = 200MJ) and connected them all together off 1 single pipeline of redstone energy conduit to a series of redstone energy cells, which were then next to a single tesseract:-

1 - Can redstone energy conduit transfer that much power or does it simply send 40 x 5MJ/t?
2 - Would you be better splitting the 40 engines into say 4 lots of 10 and isolating the conduit sections?
3 - If you had an Energy Tesseract set to send with 6 redstone energy cells surrounding it, would it draw from all of them or just a couple of them or just 1?
4 - Does the power transfer to the closest redstone energy cell if connected to more than one or?

1 - It will transfer the energy.
2 - For organizational purposes maybe, but it doesn't actually matter mechanically.
3 - The draw will be lopsided based on tile entity update ordering. Sorry.
4 - Power transfers round-robin style from the receiving Tesseract.

EDIT: And while I remember, that Energy Tesseract caps out at 100 MJ/t. So you'll need a second one.

 

[Guswut]

1 - It will transfer the energy.
2 - For organizational purposes maybe, but it doesn't actually matter mechanically.
3 - The draw will be lopsided based on tile entity update ordering. Sorry.
4 - Power transfers round-robin style from the receiving Tesseract.

Excellent, thanks King Lemming! Now I won't have to go and confirm that Omicron was right by setting up a 600mj/t output cell system.

 

[zemerick]

Also, remember to place those redstone cells in parallel not series. Conduit loses 5% of its power each time it enters any machine ( including redstone cells ), so if you have a string of conduit-cell-conduit-cell-conduit, you are multiplying your power loss. Instead, run a line of conduit with a line of cells connected to that. Then, another line of conduit on the output. This way you only lose 5% in total, instead of possibly quite a lot more.

if - is conduit, and C is a cell, you want it to look like this:

-------
cccccc
-------

Not like this: -c-c-c-c-c-c-

 

[Someone Else 37]

If I had enough engines to generate 200 MJ/t, I would probably use energy conduits to send the energy into at least two energy cells (in parallel), so each one could take up its maximum 100 MJ/t, so all the energy would have somewhere to go. I think energy conduits and tesseracts can transfer any amount of power (at a 5% or 25% loss respectively) (if not, someone probably would've complained to King Lemming by now), so if you cluster 6 energy cells around one tesseract (or connect six energy cells to a tesseract via conduits), you should be able to get around 450 MJ/t out the other side (or 406 MJ/t if you use conduits on both sides).

Testing now...

Huh. I'm not entirely sure if I'm reading my multimeter correctly, but it seems that a single tesseract can only take in 100 MJ/t. My setup was 6 energy cells >> conduits >> single sending tesseract >> single recieving tesseract >> conduits >> 6 energy cells. Each receiving energy cell only picked up 11.875 MJ/t, which means a total of about 71 MJ/t being distributed between all the energy cells.

I then tried connecting six sending tesseracts together, one of them drew 100 MJ/t, one drew 33.33333 MJ/t, and the other four drew nothing. Each receiving energy cell then drew 15.833333333 MJ/t, for a total of 95 MJ/t being received.

Finally, I tried connecting six receiving tesseracts as well as six sending tesseracts. The power received by each receiving energy cell jumped to about 67.68 MJ/t- for a total around 406 MJ/t. (Hmm, where have I seen that number before?)

I thus conclude that no energy tesseract will ever send or receive more than 100 MJ/t, but frequencies are not capped. Thus, in order to send 600 MJ/t through tesseracts, you'll need six separate tesseracts on the sending side and five on the receiving side, for a total of 11 diamonds and some other resources.

To answer OP's questions...
1. Conduits don't seem to be capped. Energy cells and tesseracts are, but not conduits.
2. I'd send all the energy into one central bank of energy cells or tesseracts. Just keep in mind that both blocks cannot individually accept or output more than 100 MJ/t.
3. A tesseract will draw power from a cluster of energy cells unevenly... in my testing, it drew the most power from the cell on its south face, then the on on the west face, then east, north, top, and bottom. A very small amount of bower was drawn from the bottom cell (around 2-3 MJ per second). Two cells, however, would supply all the energy needed by one tesseract, at lower cost.
4. Conduit networks seem to like to pull from the nearest energy source first, but will evenly distribute energy to all available outputs.

(By the way, if you're producing enough biomass to keep 40 biogas engines fueled, you're probably better off throwing it into an array of stills and using the biofuel in a steam boiler. Also, on another unrelated note, is this when someone complains to King Lemming about the energy tesseract cap?)

 

[b0bst3r]

Yeah I don't have this setup, as subject says was simply curious, I have a smaller version of it but can't figure out for the life of me why it's charging and removing power from the energy cells to the tesseract like it is..... well that was until King Lemming replied.

 

[NightKev]

Also, on another unrelated note, is this when someone complains to King Lemming about the energy tesseract cap?

It has a config setting to change it, so hopefully no.

 

[Chesham]

I've heard that conduits cap out at 500 MJ/t, haven't tested it myself though.

 

[TheBlaster123]

I've heard that conduits cap out at 500 MJ/t, haven't tested it myself though.

Nope, cranked it up to 5000 MJ/t with ALOT of redstone energy cells and some redpower control.
Had a lever to enable sending of power from all the cells into empty ones 1:1, 50 full ones into 50 emtpy ones. No problems...

Althought was a really beautiful detonation and a crater when i did the same thing with standard BC wooden/golden conductive pipes :3. Highly recommend in cheat mode for relaxation

 

[Omicron]

The 500 MJ/t limit for conduits is external burst intake per section. In other words, how much an engine (or multiple synced ones) can output in a single burst into a single section of conduit before being capped.

Though the TE changelog might indicate that even this near-impossible-to-reach limit got raised again for 1.5.1...

 

[SmokeLuvr1971]

Sorry if this is old, but it seemed the best place to ask without starting a new thread.

I'm looking for specific numbers/clarification regarding the Energy Tesseract (ET), Redstone Energy Cell (REC), & Redstone Energy Conduit (Conduit) as I've found conflicting infos posted. I've already scanned the Thermal Expansion changelog, posted on TEs wiki, and didn't see what I was looking for there [though lossless conduits and 20% ET loss in Unleashed is nice]. What I read before regarding these 3 things are as follows:
ET: max input 100MJ/t per side, max output 75 MJ/t per side.
REC: max input/output 100 MJ/t per side.
Conduit: loss occurs where power is inserted into Conduit network, if device inserting power is non-TE tech.

Playing in Unleashed 1.1.3, I've got several MJ power plants arrays running, where each array produces ~600MJ/t and each array is eventually inputting into an ET on all 6 sides [each array has its own ET frequency]. I'm setup like this, regarding the ET, because I read that the ETs transfer limits are per face, not per block. However, I'm not seeing full power transfer from any array.
Ex: 6 rows of 10x Milk-throttled force engines, each row inputting into a REC [6 x 100 MJ/t total]
All RECs then outputting into each face of an ET [600MJ/t input, should be 480 MJ/t [Unleashed] output for receiving ET with all output ET's faces wired and wrenched in].
With this setup and enough receiving ETs on same frequency to use up most of the 480 MJ/t [receiving ETs connected to various MJ sinks], I should be seeing a drain on all RECs in the Force engine array and therefore all 6 rows of Force engines should be running.
What I'm actually seeing is, at most, 2 rows running.

This thread suggests that each ET is limited to transmission of 100MJ/t per block, with max input of 125MJ/t also per block. Does this also apply to the REC, the 100MJ/t per block limit? Before I stumbled across this thread, I disabled all the losses in the TE config file, but that changed nothing as far as I could see.

I'll try adding some additional ETs to my setup and see if that improves the transfer. I'm sure the info is out there, and someone besides the mod author knows it.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Edit: I added another 5 Energy Tesseracts to one of my 600MJ/t engine arrays and I seem to be able to draw more power from the array now [using the example above, more rows are turning on] so it would appear that the ET block itself is limited in the amount of MJ/t it will transfer, irregardless of the number of connections the block has. Kind of a bummer that and I suppose it's part of how King Lemming chose to 'balance' this mechanic.

I may not like it but I accept that this is how he chose to implement the feature. What I also wish he'd chosen to do is to document/post this info. And I wish more/all mod authors would do as well. I don't think I'm alone in this either. Figuring out how I can use the blocks [incorporate them into my build] is fun. Figuring out how the blocks work...not so much.

 

[WTFFFS]

In 1.5.2 I had 4 or 6? Redstone energy cells spaghettified with an output from each face other than one input (so 5 "faces" each) to feed my energetic infuser (had no IC2 and that thing was slow enough with the spaghetti mess at charging my MPS let alone with just 4 or 6? 100 mj\t connections, 20 or 30 worked better ) there was an output of 100 mj\t per face on the REC's or at least it seemed to work that the Energetic Infuser definitely had more power available with the extra face connections on the REC's.