So I've been playing FTB Ultimate for a few weeks now and was having trouble sorting out power systems. I had a tree farm feeding into stuff for biofuel for awhile and that was working out okay, but scaling it up to what I'd need to run the matter fabricator along with everything else was going to be very space intensive. I briefly flirted with a blaze farm feeding tons of generators, but turned out to be fairly power neutral when I set up the monster essence and enchanting fidly bits. So I thought I'd give thermal generators a try with a BC pump in a mystcraft ocean o' lava age. And wow that worked amazingly. I spent the next few days doing very little other than make max size xycraft tanks to hold all the lava this thing was putting out. At that point I started manufacturing thermal generators by the stack. I scaled up the pumping operation by adding 4 more pumps spaced out at the edges of the first pump's operation and was feeding 10 max xycraft tanks through 5 liquid tesseracts. At it's height, it was pushing over 3000 eu/tick. Which was awesome, right?
Well it looked impressive anyway.
But as I scaled it up, I noticed the server getting laggier and laggier. Checking up on it, it was my lava age that was causing it. All that flowing lava area (~300 by 300) was decimating performance. If dim 0 was 5ms/tick, the age was 50ms/tick. But it gets better, I tried breaking the chunk loader to turn the damn thing off for a bit (having exhausted every other possible option for reducing/troubleshooting lag) and that fixed it. So I installed 'off' switches on all the pumps (thinking it was the pumps) and turned them all off and replaced the chunk loader. At which point the server just gives up on chunk loaders, crashes the client and resets the chunk, which obliterates one of the pumping stations. That's fine, they're really easy to make and hey more lava. Try to place the chunk loader again, crash again, chunk reset again. Replace the pumping station for a third time and place the chunk loader elsewhere in the same age, crash again, the same chunk where the chunk loader was originally got reset again.
It was at this point, after much reading on the topic, that I reset the age and started over with GT's advanced pump. Since I don't see a lot of people write about them, I'll explain the differences between them and the BC pump. First, the BC pump is easier to power, lots easier. You only need two magmatic engines and a redstone engine to kick start a BC pump setup, super easy. The advanced pump on the other hand says it can take up to 128 eu/p, which led me to believe I'd need about that much going into it. Yup. In order to do that, you need around 6 thermal generators per pump (and an mfe wouldn't hurt either). This leads to the second point, the BC pump pushes out more lava faster than the advanced pump when accounting for how much is needed to power it. My measurement is based on what was getting through the tesseracts to my tanks and 5 fully powered advanced pumps is barely break-even on my power setup whereas 4 BC pumps were more than I ever needed and kept all my tanks full (one of my pumping stations overloaded its conductive pipe and I didn't even notice for days that it was out of commission). The advanced pump's one saving grace is that it won't obliterate performance because of the way it removes lava compared to the BC pump. Which is great, I can break blocks and do things again.
Okay, so that leads into the thread title.
TL;DR My lava setup generates around 3000 eu/t and isn't horribly laggy with the advanced pumps despite the large amount of thermal generators. What should I be looking at for power generation that's as good or better that isn't slinging around quite so many low current packets? Long term I could build the second IESU and a lightning rod in the lava age (it's also eternal storm because lols), but the output on that tops out at 2048 at the IESU and I was really looking forward to that as additional power rather than replacing what I have now.
Well it looked impressive anyway.
But as I scaled it up, I noticed the server getting laggier and laggier. Checking up on it, it was my lava age that was causing it. All that flowing lava area (~300 by 300) was decimating performance. If dim 0 was 5ms/tick, the age was 50ms/tick. But it gets better, I tried breaking the chunk loader to turn the damn thing off for a bit (having exhausted every other possible option for reducing/troubleshooting lag) and that fixed it. So I installed 'off' switches on all the pumps (thinking it was the pumps) and turned them all off and replaced the chunk loader. At which point the server just gives up on chunk loaders, crashes the client and resets the chunk, which obliterates one of the pumping stations. That's fine, they're really easy to make and hey more lava. Try to place the chunk loader again, crash again, chunk reset again. Replace the pumping station for a third time and place the chunk loader elsewhere in the same age, crash again, the same chunk where the chunk loader was originally got reset again.
It was at this point, after much reading on the topic, that I reset the age and started over with GT's advanced pump. Since I don't see a lot of people write about them, I'll explain the differences between them and the BC pump. First, the BC pump is easier to power, lots easier. You only need two magmatic engines and a redstone engine to kick start a BC pump setup, super easy. The advanced pump on the other hand says it can take up to 128 eu/p, which led me to believe I'd need about that much going into it. Yup. In order to do that, you need around 6 thermal generators per pump (and an mfe wouldn't hurt either). This leads to the second point, the BC pump pushes out more lava faster than the advanced pump when accounting for how much is needed to power it. My measurement is based on what was getting through the tesseracts to my tanks and 5 fully powered advanced pumps is barely break-even on my power setup whereas 4 BC pumps were more than I ever needed and kept all my tanks full (one of my pumping stations overloaded its conductive pipe and I didn't even notice for days that it was out of commission). The advanced pump's one saving grace is that it won't obliterate performance because of the way it removes lava compared to the BC pump. Which is great, I can break blocks and do things again.
Okay, so that leads into the thread title.
TL;DR My lava setup generates around 3000 eu/t and isn't horribly laggy with the advanced pumps despite the large amount of thermal generators. What should I be looking at for power generation that's as good or better that isn't slinging around quite so many low current packets? Long term I could build the second IESU and a lightning rod in the lava age (it's also eternal storm because lols), but the output on that tops out at 2048 at the IESU and I was really looking forward to that as additional power rather than replacing what I have now.