Nuclear vs Solar... dafuq?
- Thread starter FullMetalFox
- Start date
Im basicaly one of these type of players, risk something but get a reward for it, or fail and pay for it.
Sad thing, in terms of energy, there isnt anything for us. Just plain old "build it and forgett it" stuff except medium risk, low output nuclear reactors.
Kinda sad that the people who are willing to risk something, get the least reward for doing so, basicaly cutting your own flesh.
Im looking at this objectively, related to reality, and viewing it from that point one can consider such blocks op or gamebreakers.
By implementing such kind of blocks, your basicaly penalize all other type of players while working against any logical basis.
On pure singelplayer that doesnt matter, but on multiplayer several different type of players can be present at the same.
A nice example:
A high risk/high reward player goes on, builds a huge nuclear base with complex systems, puts in lot of research and work, after two week hes finished, gets 8000eu/t from 4 reactors needing constant coolant exchange etc.
His Buddy on the other hand, just puts 16 top tier panels on the roof of his house, while smiling at him while his nuclear complex blows up thanks to a tiny error.
That doesnt sound fair, does it? On fair a logical basis the high risk player should have gotten more (at least in the time his reactors were running) than the low risk one.
And now i know im only one person and im not one of the guys in charge of any related mod, but discussing, writing pro/cons and even personal opinions can have an impact, as the modders themselfs might read it, sparking a thought about this, maybe even gets them to work together for balance reason. (or gregtech going haywire on it)
You keep forgetting that one is an add-on (and not an intentional part of core IC2) and the other is...
Adv./Compact Solars are additions to the pre-existing mod of IC2. Those 16 top tier panels would, in space comparison, take 8192 blocks of space. There's no way you can cable/keep that many chunks loaded in order to match the power of a nuclear reactor under vanilla IC2...
And if SMP is your concerned, what mods are allowed on said server is a discussion between you and the server owner. If that's not enough to sate your needs, then start your own server under your own terms. There's no need to 'nerf other mods' just because a server decides that it allows their usage.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. The thing I don't like is that people form opinions (Opinions based off fact sometimes, but opinions none the less) And then they expect every single person who plays with the FTB mod pack (Which seems to me is thousands of people if not more) to conform to what they feel is the way the game should play. I really like solars, advanced solars is my favorite as far as solars go. But the reason why I like solar is because it makes it easy to make a good amount of energy in a very small space, making aesthetic builds much easy to make functional as well. My personal opinion is that Nuclear reactors should be buffed, I think for the time and energy they should give more, but hey they are unstable nuclear reactors now, not the best fuel source TBH, unlike say a cold fusion reactor.
Hint hint (we need better reactors).from all of this though there is only 1 thing that is for sure
Its impossible to make everyone happy.
I must admin compact solars and advanced solars are a bit overpowered but then again even without them it is fairly easy to produce huge amounts of power with simple tools. Solar flowers being one thing and addings geothermal generators and even magma crucibles it is not hard to produce a thousand EU per thick.
It is also something that depends on player and play taste, and in the end it is us players whom can add or remove mods to your SMPs and it is us again who can choose a server suiting our play style.
In the end we are here because not only we choose to play minecraft but also we choose to play modded minecraft.
It is also something that depends on player and play taste, and in the end it is us players whom can add or remove mods to your SMPs and it is us again who can choose a server suiting our play style.
In the end we are here because not only we choose to play minecraft but also we choose to play modded minecraft.
@Randomsteve why do you have to have solars when you could just have a quantum generator spawned in for "no hassle building purposes"?
If solars are intended to be balanced around their cost, which the vanilla ones appear to be - and we have an alternative for those who want creative survival - why should they also be out of line with other methods?
They can be set and forget without the huge amounts of power. As someone mentioned halving the output would still give you 256 eu/t HV solars, they are still set and forget, they just cost a lot more to make and will take a lot longer to bring back their profit. More like solars generally are.
If solars are intended to be balanced around their cost, which the vanilla ones appear to be - and we have an alternative for those who want creative survival - why should they also be out of line with other methods?
They can be set and forget without the huge amounts of power. As someone mentioned halving the output would still give you 256 eu/t HV solars, they are still set and forget, they just cost a lot more to make and will take a lot longer to bring back their profit. More like solars generally are.
Well it totally depends. With Gregs the Nuclear Generators is a nice option, next to some supportive Advanced Solars. Due to the insane costs of UUM. And well the reactor also isn't that cost-intensive if you compare it to 448 or even 100 UUM. The Problem with the solars is that UUM is too cheap in vanilla IC2 so solars build with them are too cheap too. And well Reactors are mostly maintenance-free they produce a rather large amount energy before you have to switch out the cells.
If it comes to renewable energy I actually like the redpower-approach. Having a turbine with sails that wear of makes the wind-turbine so much less of a concern as IC2-Windmills.
But I agree on the concept. Although the propably most OP energy-generation is pumping dry the nether it is a method that actually involves the player. There are a lot of methods to do it and you can create your own design, which might be even a bit modified for your own liking.
And actually nuclear reactors aren't that expensive. All they need is copper. Although they really require tons of it, it is a renewable ressource, which creation also has the benefit of producing Tin, Electrum and tungsten-dust (which is a nice amplifier for the mass-fab).
Propably the bottleneck in building a nuclear-power generator is... well intelligence or planning. If you want to solve your energy-needs that way you need to plan in a certain direction. You propably want some centrifuges for copper early. A 100 EU/t nuclear reactor needs about 240 Copper, 100 Iron and some minor amounts of rubber, tin and gold. No diamonds, no UUM, just basic metals. So you can have access to the Reactor pretty early and at this point it is a very powerful reactor and a bit more interesting than solars.
Well, im not talking creative building. Im talking full blown survival. I like the set and forget of solars when Im just using that power as a means to get to and end. But for my main power at my base I tend to not like to just do the easiest thing possible. In fact this world Im going for a 1 of everything deal. Got a steam turbine, some geothermals running off of cobble-lava with magmacrucibles. Got a few vanilla solars for the time being. Plan to get a nuke down there soon. I also would like a few automated manned watermills and a few windmills.
Honesty I don't see anything wrong with compact solars. It makes you make that amount of solar panels for the amount of EU you want. Quite frankly back in 1.0 before compact solars I had a few dozen solar flowers around my base giving me around 156 EU a tick or so. And the only thing extra it cost me was some tin cable, a dozen bat boxes and some copper copper cable. And a crap ton of uglyness. But if compact solars died and didn't come back, well I would probably go back to good old solar flowers. So the argument of "Well I took a week to set up my highly planned out reactor system, and that guy just took a few hours and made a bunch of solar panels and is still getting more EU then me" is still pretty busted because if that person wanted cheap and quick energy, then he could just set some solar flowers up, or a few dozen manned watermills (Which would take me about 10mins to setup using RP2). If that guy wants the quickest and easiest method of generating copious amounts of EU hes going to find it if he has Compact solars or not.
How in anyway does what he have or build effect you? Oh right it doesn't. Unless you're on a server purely about PvP, minecraft will always be PvE and a game you're playing by yourself or in conjunction with others which still does not effect you. If you want to "win" by getting all the end game stuff first on your server that's up to you to take the most effective route rather than whining that the way you choose wasn't as good. If you're playing to build extremely complicated methods of doing everything that's on you too. If you can't choose to do the later because the former exists, I hate to break it to you but that's your fault too. There is no flaw in design in this area it's a flaw in the human.
Hoff, youve missed the point of that example. The point is purly the risk=reward factor, which is a core element of minecraft itself.
Easiest example is mining, you risk your characters life and items (the dangers of mobs and lava), and your getting rewarded for doing so by getting more resources available to you.
Easiest example is mining, you risk your characters life and items (the dangers of mobs and lava), and your getting rewarded for doing so by getting more resources available to you.
It is a potential reason to play minecraft. It is not a necessity. Peaceful exists for a reason. You can cheat items back in/save your items/switch to creative for a reason. Not everyone enjoys risk at any varying level. All parts of minecraft are subject to change because it is a true sandbox. All things are variables that can be made to suit almost any interest.
The lapis ones are MUCH more efficient than the Redstone ones.
I'm still working on my Decentralized Distribution of Steam which has a number of 0-chamber reactors hooked up to relieve heat from 60k coolant cells, and a method of automatically rotating them out. Certain engineering problems continue to plague the design, however., so it is still a work in progress. The biggest problem is that it isn't notably cheaper than building a second Mk. I reactor.
I believe if you UUM Lapis, it comes out ahead in energy production
Well, the original design intent was to shuffle around the coolant cells so you don't actually consume anything but the uranium cells, as opposed to consuming a diamond chest full of lapis/redstone every cycle. However, I'm having matching EU output without costing more than simply building multiple 450 EU/t Mk I reactors.
If you are interested here is my thread in the nuclear engineering forum with some of the theorycrafting on the setup.
With GregTech, this might be significantly more viable with (He) Cooling Cells to store six times as much heat meaning fewer coolant cycles per uranium cycle.
Ahh the days when you could get a safe 2048 eu/t reactors going with just some nice cold ices from the Grapical Preicpators and when the heat would actually decays overtime like in RL. I don't get why they "nerfs" CASUCs when the Preicpators now requires MJ to produces ices so ice isn't "free" anymore and heat doesn't decays at all. That's how it's is in RL heat will Eventually escapes so why don't they at least makes the decaying slower? So making a turn and off cooling reactor is less profitable? Reactors are not worth it unless your's after cheaper start up costs simply because they don't have their own mod like solar does. It's would be cool if there was a mod that have upgraded reactors and chambers like liquid cooling reactors that you could pipes in water and other coolants to cools them down like in RL and even ones with heat vents on it so it's could cools itself over time. Another cool idea is be able to makes Huge reactors so like a 3 by 3 by 3 reactor or larger.
Probably because it was so OP an energy production method that no one ever wanted to use anything else?
Seriously, CASUC was an exploit, nothing more. I'm glad it was fixed, particularly with the current setups... you could get over 10k EU/t from generators now if CASUC was still in place.
You can still net around 450 EU/t from a MK I reactor now, which is significantly better than the 140 EU/t or so that was the old cap. So there was a significant boost in power generation from non-cheaty methods. It's just the ridiculously OP CASUC methodology that was nerfed.
If you're wanting that kind of output, I'm working on developing a system by which I can shuffle around cooling cells and shunt them into cooling towers (reactors with a bunch of component heat vents). It's similar in concept to a CASUC, only it's reusing the cooling cells. I have run into a couple of SNAFU's with the design, but once I have something fully functional, I'll publish my results. It will require a significant initial resource investment, but it should at least match the old CASUC's power generation output.
EDIT: I may have stumbled onto something similar to CASUC, an intermediary option between Condensators and regular use. 60k Cooling Cells can suck up 60k worth of heating before doing Bad Things. So if it is allowed to do so, then simply voided and new ones crafted, it would be a similar setup. Would be very copper and tin hungry, but it might be worth it in the long run. I'm running the numbers now.
The problem I see with the (new) reactor system is that efficiency per brick of uranium (ignoring breeding) is limited, and the limit is easily achieved or at least easy to get very close to, in a MK1. I find that no matter what I do, I always eventually use up all of my uranium in reactors. So no matter the EU/t, it's the efficiency that dictates how much power I will have available over long periods of time. And while more advanced and riskier designs can increase EU/t, giving a temporary boost, there is very little you can do to increase your efficiency and therefore overall energy production.
Ummm... my reactor's efficiency sits at around 5.67 in general, but can hit 6 if you replace the top and bottom rows of quad-cells with reflector plates.
It's not a particularly risky setup if you use a CC computer to regulate micro-cycles. Basically, you have a number of 'cooling towers' which are six-chamber reactors that have component heat vents checker-boarded (plus something in each of the bottom corners like reactor plates to keep them blocked) running in serial and filters set up to transfer them around. Then you have a plethora of 60k Cooling Cells (several sets of 24) and something like this reactor. At 5.67 efficiency, it's more efficient than most of the Mk I reactors out there. A variant would be [yrl=[url]http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/v3/reactorplanner.html?1bnqhsytnui9j8hzq3xpw44gyf8l6jykr9rkgrff08puf6y1sr5thh8u2tmcgzqgs2bcj3tvqkg9hc]this[/url][/url] with an efficiency of 6, but slightly lower EU output per tic.
Run bundled cable out, and each of the filters on one color, the reactor on a different color. use rs.setBundledOutput("<side>", colors.<color of reactor>) to turn it on. then sleep it for 150 (2m30s to give you nearly a 30s safety margin), then set to 0 to turn it off, then pulse filter color 24 times, give it a second to finish transfering everything, then repeat the cycle for as many cooling towers as you have. Then you'll need a mid-cycle cooldown, as it will take roughly 80 minutes to fully cool all of the 60k cooling cells, and start all over again!