If you have Mekanism, you can extract saltpeter from gunpowder. Which makes a bit more sense than to get it from sand. It's way more efficient to make it that way, too.You can get INFINITE amounts of saltpeter with pulverizing sandstone. Which crafted from sand which comes from cobble which is endless.
How do YOU generate power?
- Thread starter Buffalo_Wings_Master
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I've come to the conclusion that MFR Steam Boilers are pretty badass. It takes 7 to power a full scale BR Turbine (I'm using 8 because I'd rather have more steam than not enough), and they are actually more fuel efficient than a RC HP Boiler. Come to think of it, that might not actually be true once the RC Boiler is up to temp, but I didn't have 5 hours and an excess assload of fuel to get it there to test. The MFR Steam Boilers also have a heat up period, but its not long. Once running, they were actually stuttering while I found a way to get water pumped to them faster than they could use it.
I'm currently feeding blaze rods to the MFR Steam Boilers, but I've devised a system with a Fluid Transposer and 2 MFR Lava Fabricators (might not actually need 2, but I had them, so...) to fill buckets of lava for fuel. Since a bucket burns for a good while in the boilers (and they can hold 4 each in queue), there is more than enough time to fill the buckets and restock the boilers. The net gain off the turbine is substantial. Next is to build a new turbine so I can stress test this fuel delivery system and see how it keeps up.
I'm currently feeding blaze rods to the MFR Steam Boilers, but I've devised a system with a Fluid Transposer and 2 MFR Lava Fabricators (might not actually need 2, but I had them, so...) to fill buckets of lava for fuel. Since a bucket burns for a good while in the boilers (and they can hold 4 each in queue), there is more than enough time to fill the buckets and restock the boilers. The net gain off the turbine is substantial. Next is to build a new turbine so I can stress test this fuel delivery system and see how it keeps up.
1) How on earth are you getting enough blaze rods to have a surplus of power from them? What are you using to spawn them? (I'm assuming you are not using Ender IO...)
2) Is it actually possible to get a surplus of energy from a lava fabricator? It takes 200,000 RF for a single bucket... and I don't think you can get that much energy from a single bucket... or can you?!
I now have four blaze spawners on cursed earth being dealt with by MFR Grinders. I've been moving the spawners from the nether via diamond dolly. The cursed earth under the spawner allows it to spawn without a player in the required range, and blaze spawn regardless of light level. If stick on blaze rods drops below 500, an autospawner kicks on to help keep up.
Those rods are currently going into the boilers, which produces steam for a max sized BR turbine putting out a consistent 28kRF/t. I have only to power the grinders (which only draw power when they act) and the autospawner if needed. Everything else is gravy. And that's a lot of fricken gravy.
To be honest, I haven't run the numbers on the lava fabricator setup yet. I've put it together and let it run the turbine for a while, and it does net positive power. That said, I did just cut the supply of rods and introduced the buckets while the boilers were hot. If I had to guess, I would say thengains are due to the length of time a bucket fuels the boiler versus the amount of RF the turbine can kick out in the same span. I'm sure that once I have the numerical data in front of me, I can trim the fat and make it a mean, self-sustaining system. But really, it was more a.proof of concept build than anything else.
Backup power is generated on a separate network (powering just my ME and a new RFTools dimension) with gunpowder and mob essence (from a witch spawner farm) processed in a bank of Reactant Dynamos.
Edit: The one problem in have with the MFR Boilers is supplying water to them fast enough to keep up. Right now I have one Ender Tank (set to export) for every two boilers. It works, but its not visually appealing. Any good pipes to move an assload of water in a hurry?
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1.7.10? Ender Fluid Conduits move a huge amount of fluid. Personally I've always been a fan of the water tower design. Twelve Aqueous Accumulators stacked around one central pipe. It's pretty much guaranteed to max out the ability of a pipe to transfer water.
Extra Utilities fluid transfer nodes can do it as well, but it's pretty expensive in terms of World Interaction upgrades.
Extra Utilities fluid transfer nodes can do it as well, but it's pretty expensive in terms of World Interaction upgrades.
Unfortunately i dont have mekanism in the pack and have close to zero experince with it (i could only made it to the factories). I consider adding it but i already have loaded a lot of chunks and I dont know a way to get osmium other than going thousands of blocks away and mine
Thanks! will try that. How it works btw? Replaces stone with ores?
Personally I've always had a liking of tree farms but you just can't beat big reactors in terms of efficiency. On the server I'm playing on I have one 7x7x6 actively cooled reactor that I converted from passively cooled, now it's pushing out enough steam to power one of those 24k RF/T turbines and that's with control rods inserted 50%. Powering an ender quarry, the single turbine I'm using mines exponentially more yellorium than it consumes, with plenty of power to spare.
That being said on the same world I do still have a tree farm, which I setup more as a fun project than anything else. An iron upgraded mfr setup is planting oak trees on fertilized dirt, which feeds the wood to a sawmill hooked up to 5 x8 furnace generators and the apples to an x8 culinary generator. This setup is a lot more capable than I thought it would be and even if the generators were running 24/7 I think the farm could keep up with demand. It's the setup I'm planning to use as my first serious power gen in my single player, eventually migrating to some sort of ethylene producing setup from mekanism since that sounds more like my kind of thing than giant turbines.
That being said on the same world I do still have a tree farm, which I setup more as a fun project than anything else. An iron upgraded mfr setup is planting oak trees on fertilized dirt, which feeds the wood to a sawmill hooked up to 5 x8 furnace generators and the apples to an x8 culinary generator. This setup is a lot more capable than I thought it would be and even if the generators were running 24/7 I think the farm could keep up with demand. It's the setup I'm planning to use as my first serious power gen in my single player, eventually migrating to some sort of ethylene producing setup from mekanism since that sounds more like my kind of thing than giant turbines.
I have a setup like this feeding into my Ender Tank, but I've not been able to pump water out of the Ender Tank to the boilers fast enough with all the pipes I've tried thus far. Placing the tanks adjacent to the boilers is working, so its a throughput issue (only want to be connecting on a single face for aesthetic reasons). I've not tried XU - I'm sure with enough speed upgrades I can get it to go.
Tesseracts don't have a maximum throughput problem of power, and I believe the same is true of fluids. EnderIO's dimensional transceiver should be able to do the same and potentially be paintable.
I have used Dimensional Transceivers, but I run into the same issue of needing adjacent connection. I'm going to give TD fluiducts another go, as I've learned a bit more about what they can do recently. If that doesn't work, XU. If not that, painted Transceivers it is. Thanks for humoring my derail. I'll stop now. 
It's not technically a derail.
My latest world, I've been experimenting with distributed power. Rather than having one big Railcraft boiler running my base and then having to tesseract power because there's no minecart RF battery, I'm going to be shipping some kind of fluid on my quarry train, and using that to power my quarry. Just not sure if I want to run an actual fluid power such as BC fuel, or if I just want a steam cart. I believe that's possible.
My latest world, I've been experimenting with distributed power. Rather than having one big Railcraft boiler running my base and then having to tesseract power because there's no minecart RF battery, I'm going to be shipping some kind of fluid on my quarry train, and using that to power my quarry. Just not sure if I want to run an actual fluid power such as BC fuel, or if I just want a steam cart. I believe that's possible.
If it were my train, I'd likely ship BC fuel, if only because its another engineering project to make a refinery. The only downside to fuel, IMO, is moving from oil well to oil well because one is never enough.
Might try MFR biofuel to start with.
We play an Infinity server, and with Agricraft and Pam's Harvestcraft working together, you can make a metric shitton of BioFuel. A 9x9 farm with each row a different crop is more than capable of generating enough fuel to keep up with four liquid-fueled RC boilers (which is more than enough steam to run a max BR turbine). I know that's not your intent, but I feel it gives a good scale. It should be a viable solution to power your quarry.
My last world had a small BR turbine powering my quarry and my base, with power to spare. Definitely an interesting idea. Thanks for the idea.
So shortly after writing this I decided to experiment with my tree farm yet again, and the results have been better than expected. I crafted seven mfr boilers based on above comments and hooked them up to a water supply and to the wood planks coming from the sawmill, which I had to upgrade to resonant and throw a flux-time unifier augment in it. Also at this time deactivated two of the boilers since I wasn't sure if the wood supply could keep up. Used ender fluid conduits to hook up the boilers to a tesseract feeding to my max-sized turbine. Then for the lulz since I wasn't sure it would even work, grabbed the autonomous activator and reinforced watering can from the ender lily farm and put it in the middle of my farm. Soon the trees were growing so fast it was an almost constant wall of wood, so much so that I think another harvester or two would be warranted. My boilers weren't fully heated up when I logged out but the turbine was nearly at 1800 rpm and kicking out 24k RF/T. I also grabbed my luminus rod and placed lights all around the farm, which seems to have ensured its working 24/7.
At the risk of sounding like an advertising bot: Mekanism's Ultimate Mechanical Pipes move liquids at a rate of 6400 mB/t. If my knowledge of the numbers of correct, that's the output of 128 Aqueous Accumulators. I'm not sure about how much Mekanism's electrical pump generates, but it requires a far less compact setup than an XU transfer node. What I usually do: I use a transfer node to pump water into a nearby tank, and then use other mods' pipes to move the water where it needs to be. Alternatively, I store water in my ME network. Extra Cells' fluid export buses are really fast if upgraded.