Project: Fusion Reactor - a chronicle (WIP)

[Pyure]

Love it, awesome stuff.

Call me crazy, but I think bedrock shears worked like fortune3 on sheep. Autonomous activators + sheep = lots of wool, especially if you do one sheep per 1x1 pen, and one activator per pen.

 

[Ieldra]

just put a fence instead of covers ;P

The covers fully covered all the blocks behind the turbine, two blocks high, and there was solid wall above that. There was no gap whatsoever, else I wouldn't have complained.

 

[Ieldra]

Love it, awesome stuff.

Call me crazy, but I think bedrock shears worked like fortune3 on sheep. Autonomous activators + sheep = lots of wool, especially if you do one sheep per 1x1 pen, and one activator per pen.

Thanks. And I do have 10K wool for the simple reason that I usually don't bother to shut down my farms unless my storage can't keep up. That usually happens only at 32k (the capacity of a 4k storage module).

 

[Kirameki]

The Cyclic Assemblers are for the items that come out of the smelting and need to be crafting into their final shapes, such as Thaumcraft shards, calcite, fluorite, magnetite, Magical Crops essence and one or two more. I've found that cyclic assemblers are significantly faster than using ME buses for unconditional autocrafting (you can't use ME Interfaces because their export function doesn't have an "always craft" option). Also note the two unifiers. I dislike having different versions of metals around.

Just a suggestion since I ran into this myself: Rather than needing a bank of assemblers, you can use a Mariculture automatic dictionary converter on all the RoC gems/shards/etc. to turn them into the desired product without needing to craft them. Useful for saving space and power since you only need one ADC for I think 32 item types.

 

[joshie]

32 item types.

24.
216 if you use Item Filters.

 

[Kirameki]

24.
216 if you use Item Filters.

Thank you, I wasn't sure since I didn't have the game open to check. What do you mean by item filters specifically? I get the feeling there's some functionality I may have missed out on.

 

[joshie]

Thank you, I wasn't sure since I didn't have the game open to check. What do you mean by item filters specifically? I get the feeling there's some functionality I may have missed out on.

I have an item called 'Item Filter'. Right clicking it opens a gui and let's you set 9 items inside of it. These can then be placed in the slots in the ADC. And it will still filter them correctly as if you had put those 9 items in themselves. Allowing you to have 9 x more items in the machine.

 

[Ieldra]

I....am in a building frenzy, and all my machines and processing setups have been running at full power for a while. Believe it or not, I am still not done with the supporting infrastructure. Having watched one or the other video and some pictures, I decided to build another Big Reactor right under the fusion reactor, so that I won't have any problem with the fusion reactor's startup. I also built a 5 GRF power storage facility using EnderIO capacitor banks, 8 large multiblocks of 128 blocks each. Oh, for the fusion power you think? Well no, that's just for the startup, for intermediate storage and generally because I like to build big and tend to overkill. The fusion reactor would fill this in less than a minute, and I'll make an Auroral Battery (Electricraft) or two, or three, for its output. This facility will, however, be excellent as an intermediate storage since I can input RF from the auroral batteries at their fixed output rate, and output as RF with all the adaptability of an RF power network. As a whole, it can input and output 1 MRF/t, which is about 5.5 GW. Things still look a bit raw and unpolished and there' no power connected yet, but here's an impression.

I also thought about a style choice. I want this facility to look futuristic, and that means avoiding the classic industrial style I was aiming for in my lower factory from the earlier screenshots. That limits my building material options considerably (I'm taking suggestions). For now, I decided to go with Chisel marble variations for the walls and floors, in tune with a "crystal towers and togas" aesthetic.

Building this was fun, but waiting for EnderIO's frustratingly slow machines was not. Making the 8192 Electrical Steel for the 4096 double-layer capacitors, I used three fully upgraded alloy smelters and it still took FOUR HOURS! CrazyPants, you need to adjust your default settings, in this and the power limit of the Dimensional Transceiver. This also used up a five-digit figure of redstone dust.
After that, I'm *still* not done with supporting infrastructure since I need an AE quantum link bridge and two more Celestial Pearls. Off to my infusion room, where I've fortunately stored a sh*tload of essence for exactly this purpose. If this goes on, I might have to make more ichor...

I didn't build the quantum link. Instead, I decided I really wanted to work on some reactor components, so I made and placed the toroid magnets. Easy to do with the MAC doing most of the work, but the depth of the crafting recipes shows in how long it took to make them. Also, I needed to increase my steelmaking automation threshold. Now it starts making new steel once the stock goes below 2048. Oh, and just to illustrate the dimenions in which I need to think here: I checked my iron ingot stores and noticed a 2000 or so figure. My reaction: "Eek! I'm out of iron!". Well, I had 17k iron ore stored and cooked up a few k of them for now 25k iron. I wonder if this will be enough for this project. Anyway, here's how the construction site looks now. The blueprint helps immensely in aligning the toroid magnets.

 

[Pyure]

using EnderIO capacitor banks, 8 large multiblocks of 128 blocks each.

I'm a bit surprised. If you're already familiar with Auroral batteries, why build mountains of capacitor banks? For one thing, you hate large pointless infrastructure. For another, Auroral's, expensive as they are, are cheaper (when comparing storage-watts). Also, and this is just me being paranoid probably, I saw some performance problems when trying to use a mountain of cap. banks.

 

[Ieldra]

I'm a bit surprised. If you're already familiar with Auroral batteries, why build mountains of capacitor banks? For one thing, you hate large pointless infrastructure. For another, Auroral's, expensive as they are, are cheaper (when comparing storage-watts). Also, and this is just me being paranoid probably, I saw some performance problems when trying to use a mountain of cap. banks.

I could probably do with a smaller facility, but I really need something that can store lots of power as RF and output more than a Resonant Energy Cell. Also, I find storing TeraJoules of power in just one block unrealistic to the point of making me uncomfortable. So while the auroral batteries will actually store most of the power, from an aesthetic viewpoint and considering this as semi-hard SF I'm tempted to pretend it all goes into the capacitor banks. You're right about the performance though. There is a significant effect. I'll have to wait and see how this affects the reactor. Maybe I'll have to tear it down.

Also, I've caught more sheep. I found I will need almost double the amount of wool I had calculated before. Why the hell do I find tons of sheep when I'm hunting cows, and then, when I actually need sheep, I find only chicken?

 

[Pyure]

Awesome

I could probably do with a smaller facility, but I really need something that can store lots of power as RF and output more than a Resonant Energy Cell. Also, I find storing TeraJoules of power in just one block unrealistic to the point of making me uncomfortable.

I didn't realize you actually needed the RF for anything, I thought it was just for the fusion generator infrastructure. (And converting to RF would limit you to a bank of dynamos for > 11k RF/t output)

Regarding the auroral space/realism concern, you could always just build a "multi block" structure around it to spice it up a bit

 

[Ieldra]

Awesome
I didn't realize you actually needed the RF for anything, I thought it was just for the fusion generator infrastructure. (And converting to RF would limit you to a bank of dynamos for > 11k RF/t output)

Regarding the auroral space/realism concern, you could always just build a "multi block" structure around it to spice it up a bit

Regarding needing the RF, eventually this will maintain the considerable power needed to keep the reactor running, and power fusion fuel production, where using excessive amounts of power for the electrolyzing cuts down on the number of machines I need there.

As for the battery, I might end up doing that. I don't know if my current fps lag is the result of the capacitor banks, but it does not look good in my base. As opposed to the earlier problems, this appears to be a global effect, unrelated to graphics. Things are ok around the reactor site, but there isn't much going on there yet.

 

[Pyure]

Yeah I'm pretty worried about how bad things can be if you're already noticing issues before the fusion starts.

 

[Ieldra]

As much as it pains me, I will likely revert to lower-res or default textures before I change anything in my builds.

 

[Ieldra]

Another day, another step towards completion of the project.

Today I engaged in a rather undignified activity. Undignified for a nuclear engineer anyway. I was out catching sheep because I need more wool. For about five minutes. Then I considered I had an autospawner mobtrap and about a kilobucket of mob essence, and killing sheep gets you wool just as well as ranching them. Up to my End Base (there was the autospawner from the time I needed Ender Shards for TTKami), in with the filled safari net. Problem solved.

Now....I wanted to work on the solenoid, but I had forgotten that I had to put about 25000 lodestones through a compactor for the magnets, and repeatedly, all in all about 40000 items put through a compactor. So... I had to build yet another production facility - two compactors powered by both of my Big Reactors to get an acceptable speed. This still takes several hours, but it's time I can spend to build something else. Here's the compactor facility:

Meanwhile, I taught my ME network to make the components for the hydrogen preheater and the plasma injector. This is straightforward crafting with quite a bit of iron, some lodestone and absolute sh*tloads of wool for the thermal insulation. Below you'll find a few pictures from the building process in order to illustrate how this is built. The injector is a 9x3 structure with a slope rising from height 3 to 5 towards the center. You build it from 9 "top" blocks, 9 "base" blocks, 9 "lower corner" blocks, 9 "upper corner" blocks, 32 side panels, 9 "column" blocks for the edges, 11 "hysteresis core" blocks that fill the remaining spaces in the structure, 3 induction coils towards the toroid, all around the center plasma injector block that must be oriented so that the active side (similar to an Autonomous Activator's active side) points tangentially to the toroid ring. Placement of the blocks is actually rather intuitive. After having built it once, you won't need a guide for the next ones.

Figure 1: The base

Figure 2: The structure

Figure 3: The induction coils (this is what I have in my hands. The hysteresis core block is the one I'm looking at). These must be placed last or the multiblock won't form.

Figure 4: finished

I also built my first hydrogen preheater. This is also a very intuitive structure, basically a 5x5x5 multiblock with a 3x3 layer added to the top. At the center there is the hydrogen preheater block, which is fed from two opposing sides by pipes going out of the structure. These pipes are where the deuterium and tritium goes in, one from each side, to be mixed and superheated into a plasma. The ingoing pipes are not part of the multiblock and I think you can use other mods' pipes, but sometimes the multiblock doesn't form if there aren't RotaryCraft liquid pipes in it. The outgoing pipes can be broken without breaking the multiblock. To one side - it doesn't matter which side since the structure is symmetrical - you put in the two lens blocks at which you will later aim a heat ray, and a magnetic pipe goes out through the top. This is where the plasma comes out and these must be ReactorCraft magnetic pipes. No other pipes can transport the superheated plasma and the pipes must be powered, but we'll get to that later. Other than these functional blocks, this is built similar to Applied Energistic's Molecular Assembler Chamber, with 12 "corner" blocks (8 for the 5-cube and 4 for the top 3x3 layer), 40 "edge" blocks and 42 "face" blocks, and the remaining 30 spaces within are filled with thermal insulation cores. The following picture shows the preheater and some hallways under the toroid where I'll put piping and power lines, and possibly also a control chamber. I'm not sure yet how the final layout will look. You are looking at the lens. This is also not the final position. The room looks cramped, and I don't like that. I've been lowering the floor but haven't move the preheater yet.

That was pretty much it for today. I also finished my fusion fuel production for now. I hope that 16 kilobuckets of deuterium and tritium will last a while and hope that my recent information of "100 buckets or so per ten minutes" is more correct than the "several buckets per second" I've heard elsewhere.

 

[trajing]

if you don't end up using ElC and resistors to supply power to make the Fusion Reactor go when it's set up, I will cry.

 

[Ieldra]

if you don't end up using ElC and resistors to supply power to make the Fusion Reactor go when it's set up, I will cry.

I am undecided at this point, the problem being that I've spent so much time learning mods instead of using them to build stuff lately, I'm a little burned out there and would really rather avoid having to learn YET another one right now. If others share your sentiment and nobody minds the inevitable delay this will cause, I will consider this request favorably. A link to some documentation would also be *really* helpful, but don't point me towards Danilus' videos. He may be competent, but his voice is like a sleeping pill for me.

 

[Kirameki]

if you don't end up using ElC and resistors to supply power to make the Fusion Reactor go when it's set up, I will cry.

That's what I plan to do with mine now that I've figured out some of ElC's lesser-known mechanics. If I knew how to make videos I could try to make a tutorial this weekend, hmm.
I'm also really curious about the plasma generation/consumption rates, myself. Consumption-wise, looking at the code (I could be horribly mistaken, haven't done java in a while), each plasma entity consumes 2 mB. Assuming one plasma per tick that'd be 160mB/s (2mB*20ticks*4injectors), 96 buckets in 10 mins, so that sounds like it meets your "100 buckets or so per ten minutes".

Addendum:
@Pyure posted this great ElC tutorial: http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/electricraft-briefer-on-resistors.48068/
Only two other things to keep in mind, really:
1. Variable input causes TPS drop proportional to the network size, so try to stabilize input somehow.
2. Reika pointed out in another thread that power runs in 'paths' from generator>motor, so a resistor in effect gets treated as a parallel resistor (each path is calculated separately through the resistor rather than a combined value.) I need to do some more testing with this concept to see how it behaves in practice.

 

[Pyure]

2. Reika pointed out in another thread that power runs in 'paths' from generator>motor, so a resistor in effect gets treated as a parallel resistor (each path is calculated separately through the resistor rather than a combined value.) I need to do some more testing with this concept to see how it behaves in practice.

FYI I was unable to get resistors to operate in parallel or in series. I wanted to fine-tune the amperage in a network at some point and ultimately gave up. Your mileage may vary.

 

[Kirameki]

FYI I was unable to get resistors to operate in parallel or in series. I wanted to fine-tune the amperage in a network at some point and ultimately gave up. Your mileage may vary.

I don't think they really mimic real-life resistors in that regard, I'll play with them tonight and see what I come up with. Out of curiosity, what input/output values were you trying to achieve?