Fusion Reactor (+ base pics in the future)

[imPlayin]

So, I built a fusion reactor (from ReactorCraft). I had wanted to share it for a long time, but I never got around to it - Until now.

The Reactor Complex

Spoiler

The Tokamak Reactor is unstable. Not in the Mystcraft way, but the technical way. It will cripple the FPS if you get too close. Also it will crash (at least for me) when modifying anything (lately I tweaked the VDGs delivering charge to the toroids). So yeah, it was a logical decision for me to do all this in a void age. But man, this age is unstable, again not the mystcraft way, but when I am just out in there for too long it will just about always crash. Probably was a good decision to outsource this to here tbh.

Pics of reactor dimension:

Top building is the Turbine hall, upper right corner is my fission reactor house, left building is the entrance/workshop, center is the tokamak itself and to the right is my preheater room. The entire complex was built in a void age with 8 suns steadily at noon. There is also an underground level which houses a lot of important infrastructure.

It seems that most of the RotaryCraft machines don't render at this distance. You'll see more pics of everything later.

Mark 1: The fission Reactor

Spoiler

Before even attempting to build a tokamak, one must always build a little fission reactor first to get some Tritium going. So let's start by showing the fission reactor.

After a bit of creative testing, I decided to build this reactor:

It is a very simple setup and one of the most popular ReactorCraft designs. Below the transfer pipes you can see 4 sets of 4 Fuel cores each, with steam boilers and Control Rods in between them and more steam boilers around them. Around that is layer of Neutron Irradiation Chambers (important for making tritium). Next is another layer of Control Rods to control the last layer of Neutron Reflectors (black blocks). These significantly heat up the reactor by reflecting most of the escaping neutrons back to the fuel cores. They are again surrounded by some HSLA Steel which will prevent neutrons from exiting the reactor and causing radiation sickness.

As you can see, one such reactor can power 4 Turbines (don't mind the other one right next to it)

Enough of the creative builds, here's what I built in survival:

It is the exact same design, with some decoration added in and a few more transfer pipes. In the back you can see the 3 Turbines I ran off of it. Used the power from them only for setting up the fusion reactor. You can also see some ElectriCraft superconductor wire running down in the upper left corner.

The reactor from down below. Inserting water to the boilers, extracting tritium from the Neutron Irradiation Chambers, and pulling the waste out of the Fuel Cores...

Wait, waste? Yea, that's right reactors produce a lot of nasty waste that can seriously damage you:

Luckily it's harmless when stored on an ME Disk.

Oh, and you might have seen the stone shaft there in the middle of that high-tech reactor:

Don't worry though, it's just that thing supplying power to the Control Rod emergency trigger.

Now to the part that actually makes Tritium:
The Neutron Irradiation Chamber

Deuterium goes in through the top, Neutrons from the Reactor hit from the side, Tritium comes out of the bottom.

But how to get Deuterium? Well first you have to pump some Heavy water from the ground of the Ocean using the Heavy Water Extractor. Unfortunately I have no pics of this as I forgot where I built it.

Then you have to electrolyze the Heavy Water to get Deuterium.

Simply put the Heavy Water into an Electrolyzer (through back side) and give it some static charge by placing a Van de Graaff Generator next to it. In this example I powered them with microturbines, 2MW per set, 8MW in total. Electrolyzing Heavy Water also gets you some pretty useless Oxygen which can go directly to the Nullifier (output on bottom side, the Deuterium exits through the top). This pic only shows my old setup though, I will post my new electrolyzer room later in this thread.

See the next post for Uranium Processing into Nuclear Fuel.

 

[imPlayin]

Uranium Processing

Spoiler

So the uranium ingots come into the system after being auto-mined and quintupled in an extractor. Now contrary to some RF-based reactor mods you actually have to process these further to get usable fuel. First step is to put them into a Uranium Processor, together with some Fluorite and some water.

This will output Uranium Hexafluoride. Shown here are my 8 Uranium Processors. This number is already overkill for the little reactor. I built it after I got annoyed by repeatedly running out of nuclear fuel.

The Uranium Hexafluoride (or HF6) will then need to be pumped into an isotope centrifuge which ideally runs at extremely high speeds. It consumes HF6 and outputs Enriched as well as Depleted Uranium Dust. Depleted Uranium dust is kinda useless but can be converted into plutonium in a special breeder reactor.

These centrifuges are receiving 4MW each. With 16 centrifuges that's about 67MW - exactly as much as a gas turbine produces.

I am using the shaft power bus to split the power up equally. Each Isotope centrifuge is running at the speed of 4 Mrad/s and 1 Nm of Torque.

16 of them. Overkill, I know. But I was frustrated after repeatedly running out of Nuclear Fuel, so I built this contraption. I know I could just have use one really fast centrifuge, but the more you have, the more power-efficient it becomes.

BTW, right now we are just making Enriched Uranium Dust. So how to get these into the shape of fuel cores? Well, I just went simple with this last step and used Buildcraft's Auto Workbench:

It is sitting right next to the reactor and there is a simple lever-controlled Transfer node placing the fuel in the Reactor's Fuel Cores.

 

[Reika]

If you get a crash, report it. Do not just complain about it in some random thread for everyone except the developer to see.

 

[imPlayin]

well, I am not even running the latest version because I was too lazy to update, soo...

 

[Reika]

too lazy to update

 

[imPlayin]

Now to the next part of the build: The Plasma preheaters

Spoiler

The 4 multiblocks you can see are the plasma preheaters which heat up the plasma to 150.000.000°C. To do that, it needs 3 things: Deuterium, Tritium and Heat from a Laser. Deuterium is the yellow liquid you can see on the right side and tritium is the grey liquid you can see on the other sides. These just go into the preheaters through the sides. In the front you can also see the four lasers that are supplying the heat. They are powered by induction motors set to about 2MW each. 2MW seems to be the minimum amount of power needed to get a Laser to 150 Million degrees, I don't know if even hotter lasers make sense though.
The plasma is piped out through the gold-colored magnetic containment pipes above them and goes directly to the Tokamak (keep in mind Magnetic Containment Pipes need a Van de Graaff Generator every few blocks to not explode).

Upgraded Electrolyzers

Spoiler

I wanted to go the safe route and built a large number of electrolyzers. 16 in Total.

The Van de Graaffs charging them are getting about 2MW each, resulting in a sufficiently fast processing speed.

Coolant production

Spoiler

So, the Toroid magnets for the Tokamak reactor ring require some Liquid Nitrogen to keep cool. This how I am making it:

In the back are two Dew Point Aggregators that produce water. Next to them is a Fluid Crystallisation Chamber. It takes the water and cools it down to create ice. The ice then goes to the two Refrigeration Units. These turn it into liquid nitrogen which can then be used for the Toroid magnets. They also produce some useless Dry Ice (junk). I am just trashing it. The machines in this room are set up to use exactly as much as the others are producing. (both DPAs at 2 operations/tick, FCC at 4 operations/tick and both RUs at 2 operations/tick).

The Tokamak

Spoiler

This is the Tokamak reactor itself:

The round thing in the middle is the Solenoid (needs 32678Nm at 256 rad/s). The individual pieces on the ring around it are the Toroid Magnets. These need atleast 1000V of charge (again from a VDG, also they will share there charge with the other ones) and some liquid Nitrogen pumped through the top (I am using an individual buffer tank for each magnet) to function. The four multiblocks intercepting the ring are plasma injectors. They receive the plasma from the Preheaters through the back and will inject into the ring. The outer ring is made up of one layer of neutron absorbers surrounded by steam boilers on either side. The neutron absorbers heat up from the reactor's neutrons, thereby causing the nearby steam boilers to boil water into steam which is then piped through the little black steam lines into the Turbine Hall.
The blue orbs floating around all over the place are the plasma. These will instantly kill you if you hit them (due to being 150 Million degrees hot). They are supposed to only be inside the ring, but due tick lag they also appear outside of it - though these are only visual glitches.
The plasma orbs are also the main source of fps lag around a tokamak reactor (My fps drop to about 15-20 in this age as opposed to the 30-60 at my base).

The Turbine Hall

Spoiler

This is the Turbine Hall:

At the moment it is only housing two HP turbines, because that's already way more than enough. The turbine Hall is however designed to have a capacity of 12 Turbines, 8 which would be directly hooked up to the ElectriCraft power grid of the Complex, and 4 that would be directly fed into some Turbine Generators to make absurd amounts of RF.
I only built two turbines to date, one to supply everything Reactor-related and one for RF. Note: the RF turbine is making about 16 MRF/tick, directly fed into a tesseract with no intermediate storage.

Also worth showing: I used a pipe pump to get all the steam to the turbines more quickly. It looks like this:

A tiny bit of power branched off to have two pipe pumps going.

 

[KingTriaxx]

You're going to make Reika's head explode...

@Reika: I figured that was the problem. Remember, deep breaths. Also, DrRageHard on Youtube has started a Surviving with Rotarycraft series on his channel. So far only one episode, but thought you'd find it interesting.

 

[Inaeo]

@Reika It's unfortunate that your hard work sometimes gets a bad rap because people are too lazy to see if you have already spent your spare time to fix their problem already.

 

[imPlayin]

Last Part of this Showcase:

The Power Room

Spoiler

This room basically distributes power to everything reactor-related.

In the middle of the room is an Auroral battery - serves as a little energy buffer in case I run out off Lubricant for the Turbines. To the right you can see the Uranium Processing showcased earlier and to the left a bunch of batteries and resistors.

These two are for the VDGs. I used the batteries to have a nice and even number going to them, instead of resistors. Their combined output lies at about 16MW.

This one is for the solenoid. I used a resistor in this case.

Everything is controlled by wireless redstone (in the same room)

Also, I updated everything to V13 and while this thing doesn't crash for the same reason anymore, it now crashes for other reason (one of which I already reported).


P. S. No one wanna comment on the build itself?

 

[imPlayin]

Base Pics
These are some pics of my old and new base. Enjoy!

The Bee Tree

Spoiler

This is my Bee Tree where all my Bee- and Treebreeding happens.

The bees reside inside those hexagons, whereas the Tree houses all the machinery. To the right of the tree you can also see another hexagon. In the background there are a couple of buildings from my old base. They are largely put out of use by now.

The update to Forestry 4 also broke all the wood planks which meant I had to replace all of this wood by hand... NOT FUN!!1!1

Anyway, here's a pic of the fixed up Bee Hexagons from a top view. Only the two hexes with Industrial Apiaries are stuffed with bees, the center one is used to kill bees for breeding progress.

I have got Soul Bees and Luminous Bees set up, one to produce Soul Sand, the other for glowstone. The soul bees also produce Memory combs, which produce Intellect drops that can in turn be used to craft Bottles'o'Enchanting (btw, someone please add a recipe to melt down the drops directly).

For automating the bees, I specifically installed Logistics Pipes. These Logistics Chassis are all stuffed with the apiary refiller module. The bee products are then sent over to processing and storage.

Since I switched to Industrial Apiaries I am using the EnderIO conduits for automation. Everything feeds into the yellow enderchest and from there is fed back into the LogiPipes network. Not nearly as cool as Alvearies+LogiPipes, but its just so much better. Also doesn't use frames.

This is another hexagon behind the bee tree. In the back there's a little automated Livingwood/rock machine which has netted me 20k of each since it was created. In the middle of this Hexagon is my node growing setup. 8 Nodes on Stabilizers above 49 Industrial Apiaries with Empowering bees. These have the empowering effect which just continually adds random aspects to the nodes. They have grown pretty large by now - you can see the glow effect from a pretty large distance.

 

[imPlayin]

The Bee Tree, Part 2

Spoiler

Remember the Bee Tree?

This post is about what's inside.

Startting off with this little setup. It is located between the center bee Hexagon (on the right Side) and the Bee Tree's basement. In the center you can see two RotaryCraft machines: The centrifuge on the right and the grinder on the left. The grinder turns netherrack into its dust form, at a speed of two operations per tick. The centrifuge on the right takes the Netherrack dust aswell as all the bee combs (coming in through the little buffer chest in behind it) and centrifuges everything, at a speed of 4 operations per tick. I set this up for two reasons: 1. I needed to centriguge all the soul combs from the Soul Bees and 2. The Luminous bees are so damn slow that I wanted a better source of glowstone.

This setup has produced me more than 50k glowstone dust in just a couple of hours.

This is the basement of the Bee Tree. You can see the logistics pipes coming in from the right side and feeding into the ME System. I have couple of DSUs set up for Honey, Honeydew, Beeswax, etc. The two barrels for Magic Wax have been full for ages now, but due to Upgrades to my ME System I don't even care anymore lol.

This is the ground floor. You can see a I have a lot of Honeydew in my ME System. Also featuring: an Enhanced Portals portal (which I haven't used in ages), a simple Carpenter's Bed, an Apiarist Suit (with Protection 4) and a wireless charger (relic from the time when I used TiC tools with RF modifier).

Now this is where it gets interesting. It's the first floor inside the tree which is a home to everything Gendustry-related. Let's go through everything on this floor one-by-one.

On the Northern side, there are a few ME Terminals for item and pattern access. On the left side you can also see an IC2 personal safe. I keep a copy of my "good bee traits without species trait" Genetic Template in there. The lever below the Me Terminal is connected to some EnderIO conduitry and can be used to enable/disable See Oil Squeezing as well as Redstone to Mutagen conversion. I used this a lot more when I was still a little low on resources but needed a ton of seed oil for Alvearies.

The Eastern side. You can see all the conduits hidden inside the floor and the bark. Below the window is where my Carpenters are located. The left one for seed oil crafting, the center one for water crafting (water comes from a transfer node in the basement) and the right one for honey-crafting. There are two separate Squeezers for Seed Oil and Honey, connected to their respective carpenter with a Drum as a buffer in betwenn. To the left of all this liquid crafting stuff, there's also a Thermionic Fabricator used for the occasional manual crafting.

Also apparently Forestry 4 changed a bunch of things about the wood planks which makes it impossible to paint facades with them. I had to replace all the floors with Redwood.

This is the south side where everything is set up to allow for Bee Mutation, Modification and Duplication. From Left to right: Genetic Imprinter, Genetic Sampler, Genetic Transposer, ME subsystem with all of my gene samples, a Crystal Chest, Advanced Mutatron, Mutagen Producer, Electric Furnace to reclaim useless gene samples, Painting Machine
Next to the Painting Machine outside of the picture there's also an ME Drive that provides storage to the little ME System.

You can also see how the nodes are glowing through the Redwood Bark, next to the ME system.

This setup is also automated using EnderIO conduits hidden in the floor. So, for example, Bees from the Genetic Imprinter are piped directly to the Crystal Chest, Gene Samples from the Genetic Sampler are automatically piped into the ME system and Mutagen is automatically piped from the Mutagen Producer into the Advanced Mutatron.

The second floor. This is where Honey squeezing and automated scented panel production is supposed to happen but for some reason the ME network doesn't work up here, so it's mostly dysfunctional at the moment.

 

[BrodyBrunch]

Show off rotarycraft setups?

 

[123nick]

@Reika It's unfortunate that your hard work sometimes gets a bad rap because people are too lazy to see if you have already spent your spare time to fix their problem already.

but they werent complaining about it being reikas problem, hes using a modpack with many mods, any of which could be the cause of the instability.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Actually the complaint was about the mod being crashy, and those being unreported, for the simple reason he wasn't on the latest version. So it'd be pointless to report the bugs because they may have been fixed already. And if they weren't, updating the mod wouldn't necessarily help.

 

[123nick]

Actually the complaint was about the mod being crashy, and those being unreported, for the simple reason he wasn't on the latest version. So it'd be pointless to report the bugs because they may have been fixed already. And if they weren't, updating the mod wouldn't necessarily help.

was the complaint directed at only rotary/reactor craft in particular, or just the mod pack/world/build in its current state of affairs as is? i dont think it was the former, was it?

 

[KingTriaxx]

Top of the first spoiler in the OP, he specifically calls out the Tokamak.

 

[123nick]

Top of the first spoiler in the OP, he specifically calls out the Tokamak.

well, that couldve just meant that HIS tokamak , in his game, is unstable but not reactorcraft it self, no?

 

[Inaeo]

Either way, it is bad practice to play Reika's mods without being up to date. Especially when complaining about stability of said mods in a public forum. I suppose this goes for any mod, but I happen to think Reika gets the short end of the stick because the mods update quickly (which is somehow veiwed by some as a bad thing).

I'm not engaging in this argument further. I stand by my opinion. If OP wants stability, he should look to see if the updates provided have fixed his issue before calling attention to it further.

On topic, the build looks good, but I'm still just beginning to research what all the components are and what they do. I've played through RoC before, but I've yet to actually delve into ReC. It's on my to-do list. That said, I can only enjoy the thread partially. I'd love to see some shots of your infrastructure that led up to this. It might prepare me to take the plunge.

 

[imPlayin]

RotaryCraft Infrastructure is being moved to a new building at the moment, so it might take a few days

 

[SWC]

Also wanted to ask, if your not using RF charged tools what are you using? I've been out of the loop for a bit now so I may have missed something