Measure MJ/Conductive Pipes
- Thread starter Frink14
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The correct answer is "not yet, but soon".
If you go to Thermal Expansion's wiki, they mention that their testing version has an MJ reader (I don't think that's the correct term, though) which uses, among other things, the Redstone Conductance Coil, and it has a few nifty capabilities - or rather, it will, when they release it.
Edit: although I'm not sure whether that only works on conduits, or if it'll work on conductive pipes, too. Oops.
If you go to Thermal Expansion's wiki, they mention that their testing version has an MJ reader (I don't think that's the correct term, though) which uses, among other things, the Redstone Conductance Coil, and it has a few nifty capabilities - or rather, it will, when they release it.
Edit: although I'm not sure whether that only works on conduits, or if it'll work on conductive pipes, too. Oops.
Its sorta like a weather rock currently...
If they blow up, its too much... if your machines won't run its not enough
If they blow up, its too much... if your machines won't run its not enough
Yay! I've been hoping for an MJ equivalent of the EU-reader for a while now. I've had to resort to setting up redstone energy cells in a creative world and crunching the numbers on how much/how quickly they charge to figure stuff out.
Thermal Expansion is quickly becoming one of my favorite mods. It just does so many things right.
Really? That was one of the things I was specifically testing for. I didn't save the exact numbers, but gold conductive pipe was only more efficient than redstone energy conduits for extremely short runs (like, 3 blocks or so). The redstone energy conduit lost less MJ for a 10-block run than the gold pipe did. Given how gold conductive pipes are supposed to work, I agree that this doesn't make much sense, so I think the actual loss is much higher than the 0.01% quoted on the wiki.
If I want to know how much MJ a device is using, I put a redstone energy cell with output to max, and restrict the input until the charge starts depleting. For example, my cactus & reed farms will take a combined over 50 easily, but if I throttle down to one for both harversters- they still run just fine.
Hmm, there's an interesting observation.
Personally, my thoughts on the matter are that any benefits of a slightly higher efficiency given by conductive pipes are outweighed by explosion risk. Unless you manage things very, very carefully, your pipes WILL explode, and ruin a perfectly good machine setup.
I wonder, though - is there a way to dump power, analogous to a void pipe? You could in theory set up several magmatic crucibles and wire them with BC gates to a redstone cell to manage overflow, but there has got to be a more compact way.
That is not actually true. Try making a test world and sending power from a magmatic engine through 50 conductive pipes to a redstone energy cell. One bucket of lava should give 18,000 MJ at 0% loss... when you see the final number in the redstone cell, better be prepared to rub your eyes and look again, because you won't believe it at first glance!
And then go test the same thing with conduits.
I have just run the test with 49 gold pipes and 1 wooden pipe vs 50 conduits
results are: 5% energy loss with conduits and 22% energy loss with pipes. Energy transfer of 1 full cell to 1 empty empty cell was done at 100 MJ/t in the conduit and done at around 20 MJ/t in the conductive pipes (judging by percent completion of the conductive pipes when the conduit had finished relative to the final charge amount of the pipe's cell)
conclusion, more energy is lost with conductive pipes over 50 blocks than with conduit. Also there is significant power throttling when you use pipes instead of conduit.
Keep in mind that Magmatic engines have a warmup stage.
Having conduits store all excess energy will almost always outway the near neglectible gain you'll get in short distance piping if using conductive piping instead.
As for measuring the power running trough a conduit i tend to have redstone cells placed around in my test setups.
Then i can just lower the output of the cell until it starts recieving a charge, wait for a set amount of time and then look how much have been charged up.
(Time*output + charge) / time and you have the troughput while only slowing your machines a little (only work propperly when transfering a decent amount of power)
I was just in chat with king lemming, and this same question was raised. There is a 5% energy loss when energy enters a conduit system. There is no penalty for the length of run. So once the energy is in the system, there is 0% loss.
So if you have an engine that will output 1000MJ total, only 950MJ will enter the conduit, but of that 950MJ, none of it gets lost.
So if you have an engine that will output 1000MJ total, only 950MJ will enter the conduit, but of that 950MJ, none of it gets lost.
Yes, but that warmup stage actually doesn't effect energy output in any meaningful way. It affects power output, i.e. the rate of MJ per tick; but the fuel consumption is also slower during the heatup.
Go ahead and try it - magmatic engine, 1 bucket of lava, redstone energy cell. It will be within ~150 MJ of the expected 18,000.
Yes there is a "void pipe" for power only thing is the creator of the mod it is in called it a Thermionic Fabricator for some reason...........
Just did a quick test had 11 Redstone Energy Cells hooked up to Wooden\Golden Conductive pipes with a Thermionic at the end, I set all cells to output 100 and accept nil, nothing blew up so it happily accepted 1100ish MJ so yeah should probably be renamed to Energy Void Pipe lol
I think one of the biggest advantages of conduits over pipes is that you can make a large mesh of conduits covering your whole base, with loops and all and they wont break, or get energy stuck in loops, or anything like that.
Distance becomes very relevant when laying the power grid for several areas in a medium-large base.
Distance becomes very relevant when laying the power grid for several areas in a medium-large base.
The BC wiki is crazy wrong now - Golden pipes lose 0.5% per length; conduits become better after 10 blocks. Of course, there are other reasons to use it even for shorter runs.
I'm looking at redoing conduit a bit, we'll see.
THIS.
Conductive pipes are broken right now. They explode if there's chunk loading issues (power won't be consumed and will build up just before the broken chunk). The author hastily got jealous of ThermalExpansion and added the storage feature without thought to SMP ramifications.
That and there's word Conductive Pipes aren't operating at the 0.1% efficiency right now. More like 1%.
Just save yourself the headache and use Redstone Energy Conduit.
I just want to quickly step in here and point out that the current state of BC pipes actually began when CPW pulled in MY fix for BC machines and then adjusted the pipes to have the new storage and explosion mechanic.
It was a very deliberate and intentional change; the chunk-loading problem is unfortunate. However, there absolutely is no jealousy - CPW and the rest of the BuildCraft guys are some of the best people in the community.
It's also worth pointing out that BC power may be getting a complete overhaul at some point here.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be libelous. I like the BuildCraft guys, they do good, unique things. They add a lot of non-duplicated functionality to make things work seamlessly.
However, a big change like that introduced on a minor version is kind of out of place, so that's just how it seems to come across.
As someone who started with IndustrialCraft, I've grown to appreciate the more connected functionality of BuildCraft.
BTW.... I really, really love your mod. It makes for some nice, clean machinery. Work of art.