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Someone Else 37

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11 In other news,
2016-04-10_17.49.28.png

(the smoke and fire are placeholders until I get fancier particles working)
 

Someone Else 37

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15 New particle code working... kind of. They spawn, as evidenced by the particle count on the F3 screen increasing whenever I place an octahedron, but are not actually visible.
 

Someone Else 37

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18 They will be nodes in the power system that I'll most likely start writing tomorrow. I'm kind of unsatisfied with the power systems that I've encountered in modded MC (particularly Electricraft), so I'm trying to build a system in which the components' behaviors match the behaviors of real-life electrical components as closely as possible. The octahedra are capacitors, and air spaces between them will play the role of inductors and resistors.

All of the generators and power-using machines, once I create them, will only function when directly connected to an octahedron. Most will act upon the energy stored within the capacitor in one way or another, not the more easily grokked voltage or charge. Some interesting consequences of this:
  • Charge and voltage are worth more the more charge/voltage is already in the capacitor. But charge is conserved when being transferred between octahedra, so a single octahedron with two coulombs in it stores more energy (twice as much, I think) as two octahedra of the same capacitance with one coulomb each.
    • Dividing energy between octahedra thus wastes energy, at least if that energy had been concentrated within a smaller number of octahedra.
  • A generator that produces a constant amount of power will increase the energy stored in its capacitor at a constant rate. However, since it takes more energy to push the voltage higher the higher the voltage already is, the capacitor's voltage will increase rapidly at first, then more slowly as it fills (until it exceeds its maximum rated voltage and explodes).
  • Lossless transfer of energy between octahedra is still possible, due to the fact that the connections act as inductors and inductors store energy while there's current passing through them. If an empty octahedron is placed within range of one with some charge in it, current will start to flow into the empty octahedron at an increasing rate, until their voltages are equal, at which point the current begins to decrease until it reaches zero. If there's no resistance, all of the first octahedron's charge will have been moved into the second, and the process begins again, sloshing charge back into the first octahedron. Resistance will dampen this sloshing, eventually causing all octahedra in the network to have the same voltage and a share of the charge proportional to their capacitance (and wasting a good deal of energy in the process).
  • If something consuming a large amount of power from an octahedron (i.e. a power-hungry machine) suddenly stops doing so, the inductor feeding that octahedron could induce a large enough voltage in the octahedron to overvolt it. I do not yet know how much of an issue this will be.
  • Conversely, if a generator runs out of fuel, it's possible that the inductors drawing charge and energy away from its attached octahedron could draw excess charge from the octahedron and make its voltage negative. This could have some strange effects.