[MC1.10] Best Thermal Expansion Dynamo in your opinion?

[Starfang42]

I'm looking at my early to mid game power, and I'm thinking TE dynamos to supplement my Environmental Tech solar.

Some of my thoughts:
The process of turning Liquifacted Coal into Refined Fuel for the Compression Dynamo yelds a pretty good amount of sulfur, useful for keeping a stock of pyrotheum.

I'm guessing an Extreme Reactors reactor could feed a good number of Steam Generators with the turbine conversion. Anyone have the numbers for this?

There's the Magmatic Dynamo and lava pumped from the nether. kinda standard, really.

The other dynamos don't have a power/efficiency conversion, which might be a point against them.

 

[SevenMass]

The best dynamo depends on the availability of fuel.

For example; If you have some automated farm for unrelated reasons, that has some kind of byproduct you need to void, but you can burn the byproduct in a reactant dynamo, then even though it is normally not worth bothering with it, in this situation, it is free energy.
Or even; Redstone is normally rare and it would be wasteful to use as fuel, but if your modpack makes redstone over abundant, then an enervation dynamo becomes as go to as a boring burner generator would be in other modpacks.

On the other hand, if you are going for complex or interesting set-ups, ... then it STILL depends on the modpack. If you have some mod that can create lava, then you can use a magmatic dynamo and still have a set up as complex as if you'd use liquefied coal.
Or you could use multiple different dynamo's in a single set-up. For example; Use a coke oven (Immersive engineering or railcraft) to turn coal into coke, use the coke to fuel a steam engine and use the creosote oil in a reactant dynamo, or a compression dynamo.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I feel that 'best' is something of a misnomer in this context, and will largely depend on what sort of fuels you have ready access to.

If you have a way of pumping lava from the nether, then magmatic becomes a go-to staple, particularly with the upgrades available to it. One to let it also have coolant to significantly increase yield and one to recycle coolant. Then give it a bucket of Cryotheum and let it run indefinitely.

Reactant was great for running mob farms because the gunpowder from the creepers and the xp juice from the grinder would keep it running indefinitely. I haven't worked with it lately to see what other resources it can run on.

The one that runs on coins essentially burns metals, so unless the power output is stupidly high, I can't really see it being viable for most packs, unless you're playing with a post-resource-scarcity sort of setup.

The new fuel refinement system is a novel one. I haven't tried it yet to see how interesting it is, I've never really been one for liquefacted coal as a foundation for power supply, but if it works out well then the old fashioned Combustion Engine Compression Dynamo with the closed loop cooling addon might be worth investigating. Of course, it seems like there's a lot of energy built into the system. You've got to pulverize twenty coal to get a bucket of fuel, not sure if it is power positive.

 

[Starfang42]

I actually tested the power reterns for the compression dynamo, which was partly what prompted this topic.

I don't have the wold in front of me, but from what I remember processing a full stack of coal into refined fuel takes around 800k rf. A ender tier dynamo with spark plugs and three transmission coil augments turns that fuel into over 7 million rf. And of course, that's with the lower fuel efficiency that the augments hav as a trade off.

Update: After looking at the recipe for dynamos, I realized that, at least to a degree, they're supposed to be spammed. Granted, upgrading to resonant tier is a little expensive, but when a compression dynamo with spark plugs and three transmission coils produces 760rf/t while one without the transmission coils produces 400, it seems to make more sense to use two dynamos and put in catalyzers (improved efficiency).

With that in mind, I ran my test again, and here are the numbers:
To process 1 stack of coal into refined fuel requires 640,000 RF.
Two compression dynamos, each resonant tier and upgraded with 1 ignition plugs and 3 fuel catalyzer augments, produces 11,520,000 RF

I also decided to see how a magmatic dynamo holds up. 4 buckets into a magmatic dynamo (resonant tier, isotropic reservoir, 3 catalyzers) produced 1,080,000 RF

On a semi-related note, 2000mb a tick is a lot of water to produce. Short of spamming the ever-loving heck out of liquid transfer nodes with full speed/stack upgrades and the world interaction upgrade, I'm not sure if FTB Beyond has an option, which places my idea of steam dynamos fed by a Extreme Reactors reactor in the "I don't want to bother" category.

 

[ChemE]

I was using tree oil fed into a bank of resonant compression dynamos each with 3 fuel efficiency upgrades and one overclock upgrade for the early/mid part of my current world. 12 arboreal extractors and one refinery block could keep 3 resonant dynamos fueled and making 600 RF/t. That worked fine for me until I was able to get my Woot/XU2 power system setup. 84,000RF/t from one 20x netherstar generator is pretty OP; thanks Woot!