Finally...finally...getting somewhere (sortof) with RotaryCraft

[Pyure]

Last night I set up a solar farm. I couldn't find any non-spanish walkthroughs on how to do this, so I just fudged it. Here's my takeaways.

There seems to be some correlation between the height of the solar tower and the distance you can space out your mirrors. Whatever it is, you can make your solar farm pretty big with just a 3- or 4-high tower. Fun.

The output from the farm seemed to fluctuate a bit, flipping from 0 to max. My assumption was that it wasn't being fed water fast enough.

I couldn't find the water-pipe mechanism (specifically the pipe, not the pump) in the manual or NEI, so I cheated and used fluiducts. (Horizon's NEI for Rotarycraft glitches out badly on one of the pages; this testing was in Horizons v1.0.10.0 however, rather than latest version of that modpack)

I found the output would be almost steady if I fed it water from two aqueous accumulators (I imagine a single AA would have sufficed if I could have force-pumped the liquid out, but the fluiducts refused to pull water from AAs in pump mode with a redstone signal)

To preserve some sanity I terminated the solar farm output with an iron flywheel, which steadied the output perfectly (gold flywheel didn't work for some reason...can't find info to explain why. Maybe I didn't wait long enough)

Was able to finally play with the junction shaft and gearboxes to pool separate inputs into one larger one. Fun!

Was able to slowly crisp myself to death by standing at a level with my solar farm. Fun(ish)

Was able to "charge" an industrial coil, and use it to power an Extractor. Much Fun. I was surprised how much extracting I could do with just the 400megawhatevers were on the coil. (I forget the M unit provided)

With regards to the junction shafts: correct me if I'm wrong, but when one of the two sources of input begins to lose power, its output slows down rather than stops, causing sparks at the junction. I'd love to know if there's a gizmo which automatically maintains the speed at the cost of degrading torque, so that it goes instantly/quickly from X rad/s to zero instead of gradually sliding down, which would mitigate damage considerably. (I'm guessing a flywheel might maintain speed for a while but would slow down even more gradually once it realizes its not gonna get more power from me)

I was constantly getting what appeared to be memory leaks during testing. After a while of testing, the game would pause briefly every few seconds. Exiting the game and returning would remove the problem for a while. Seemed to go away after destroying the solar farm. I believe Reika's made performance improvements lately, so hopefully that will magically solve my issues.

tl;dr: thx kindly, @Reika. RotaryCraft is genius.

 

[JoeDolca]

There's Rotarycraft guides in Spanish? Whaaaaaaaa--

Sorry, uhmm... Does the solar farm produce anything other than electricity and speed? I don't see how it makes enough torque for the extractor...

 

[Reika]

To preserve some sanity I terminated the solar farm output with an iron flywheel, which steadied the output perfectly (gold flywheel didn't work for some reason...can't find info to explain why. Maybe I didn't wait long enough)

Chances are, you did not have sufficient torque.

 

[Pyure]

There's Rotarycraft guides in Spanish? Whaaaaaaaa--

May have been portugese?

Sorry, uhmm... Does the solar farm produce anything other than electricity and speed? I don't see how it makes enough torque for the extractor...

If it produces 2 of the three, it produces all three by virtue of the power of math

In my case, I didn't bother trying to power the extractor directly. I "charged" (wound-up) an Industrial Coil for a short while, and then used that coil to power the extractor. The coil has the benefits of being completely configurable: you can adjust it to the 4 settings required by the 4 different processes in the extractor.

Worth mentioning that since the solars are scalable, you can power basically anything with them if you make them big enough and use whatever gearboxes and such are necessary to achieve the specific output.[DOUBLEPOST=1391006355][/DOUBLEPOST]

Chances are, you did not have sufficient torque.

Extremely possible; I didn't realize they had a minimum. I was generating somewhere between 200 and 400 nm at the time I think, at 1024 r/s if I recall right. Thanks kindly.

 

[Reika]

May have been portugese?
Extremely possible; I didn't realize they had a minimum. I was generating somewhere between 200 and 400 nm at the time I think, at 1024 r/s if I recall right. Thanks kindly.

You need 10 or 20 times that for the gold flywheel.

 

[JoeDolca]

Hey Reika, how can I make items inside rotarycraft machines interact with piping? The itemducts didn't do anything, I couldn't find a rotarycraft item transportation pipe and I didn't even try buildcraft.

 

[Pyure]

Hey Reika, how can I make items inside rotarycraft machines interact with piping? The itemducts didn't do anything, I couldn't find a rotarycraft item transportation pipe and I didn't even try buildcraft.

For what its worth, I was able to pull items from an extractor via itemduct by accessing the "correct" side experimentally.

In my case, I was able to pull out the "final" products, but not the intermediary products. (ps, I'd love to know how to pull out those intermediary stage products)

 

[JoeDolca]

Why would you want to pull those out? Do they have any use outside the extractor?

 

[Pyure]

Why would you want to pull those out? Do they have any use outside the extractor?

Possibly...in another extractor.

My thought process was that I could have 4 extractors, each running a specific stage of the process. Theoretically I could have all four stages humming along simultaneously without my having to constantly pull out the old calculator and re-adjust the settings for each stage.

 

[JoeDolca]

You should have enough intrastructure to support all the four stages in one machine if you can support each one of them in four different machines.

 

[Pyure]

Doesn't each require the machine to be running at a specific setting? If Stage1 requires X torque and Y speed, I thought Stages2-4 just stopped running completely.

 

[JoeDolca]

I was informed you could have all the minimal requirements of each stage running into the extractor for continous work. If stage 1 asks for 300MW and Stage 4 asks for 500, you should run 500 constantly at the machine and both stages will be content. Same for torque and speed, just run the highest minimum power of all stages.

 

[Pyure]

That's fantastic then! If I were home I'd go confirm, darn.

 

[Reika]

I was informed you could have all the minimal requirements of each stage running into the extractor for continous work. If stage 1 asks for 300MW and Stage 4 asks for 500, you should run 500 constantly at the machine and both stages will be content. Same for torque and speed, just run the highest minimum power of all stages.

This is correct, but that minimum is 4MW of power, 512Nm of torque, and 8192 rad/s.

Possibly...in another extractor.

My thought process was that I could have 4 extractors, each running a specific stage of the process. Theoretically I could have all four stages humming along simultaneously without my having to constantly pull out the old calculator and re-adjust the settings for each stage.

Something I myself wanted in my world, but it is not practically possible. The only way to make the pipes "know" what slots to pull from is to make it side-dependent. I hate that mechanic, and instead have opted for "you can access all valid slots from any side, and the machine knows what can go in or out".

 

[GreenZombie]

So, Hopper ducts' "grated hopper" could be used to selectively extract each stages output, and inject it into the next stage.

 

[Pyure]

This is correct, but that minimum is 4MW of power, 512Nm of torque, and 8192 rad/s.

Yeah, I tried to do the math to determine if it makes sense to grind 4 piles simultaneously. My brain exploded shortly thereafter.

I thought maybe...maybe phase2/3 could be done at the same time to speed things up w/o loss of efficiency.

Other than that, with my pitiful trickle of energy, it makes far more sense to do them one stage at a time.

So, Hopper ducts' "grated hopper" could be used to selectively extract each stages output, and inject it into the next stage.

Assuming they know how to check the individual export slots, which I dunno. Itemducts completely ignored the other slots.

 

[Wagon153]

In theory, a Factorization router could pull from those other slots if you set it to pull from certain slots. But I would have to test this.

 

[Pyure]

In theory, a Factorization router could pull from those other slots if you set it to pull from certain slots. But I would have to test this.

That's actually really plausible. Sadly I don't think Horizons features factorization, at least not the "recommended" version (1.0.10) for those of us checking out RotaryCraft via that pack.

 

[Reika]

That's actually really plausible. Sadly I don't think Horizons features factorization, at least not the "recommended" version (1.0.10) for those of us checking out RotaryCraft via that pack.

I used to receive endless crashlogs from people trying the router. Take caution.

 

[jokermatt999]

I've been using a setup like that quite successfully. Give me a few minutes, and I'll have an imgur album and description of my setup.