It spins! An important stepping stone towards a functional fusion reactor is completed.
But first things first. I debugged the power input into the Auroral battery. The problem was that all inputs must be either active and outputting the same torque/current, or disconnected - and I had two inactive engines that were connected but unpowere because this was to be a test run.
After that, I went mining in the Nether again - because I had decided to make more batteries, albeit one class smaller than the big one. The reason? The auroral battery has only one output, and if I connect several subsystems to it the power level of the whole system changes if I add a new component. Resistors can help with that, but the calculations can get rather involved. Imagine, for instance, that I have 7 different outputs. Depending on how many subsystems are in the system, I might have to adjust my gearboxes every time I add something. A battery has the advantage of taking power in at whichever voltage and current comes its way and outputting it at a fixed voltage, and with a resistor I can adjust the current. That way I have control over both parameters. I suspect I don't really need to do this - I'm still new enough to ElectriCraft that I mix up the relation between voltage/current and torque/speed in my head - but this also has the advantage that I have backup power in case of having to break something temporarily, and a convenient switch location as well. Thus, the batteries are expensive, but they fill several important roles. For now I made one Graphene Battery for the Solenoid power, and one for the preheaters' heat rays. Both subsystems need 8 MW power and the batteries output 16. I can tell them to output less with resistors.
Then I started working on the solenoid. I've described crafting the components in an earlier post, this is about building it. I'll post several pictures to illustrate how this is built. It is actually not hard at all, if several conditions are fulfilled: you know how many of each element you need and have built them, you have a vague recollection of Reika's tutorial video, and you're using the blueprint highlighter. I didn't need to consult Reika's video again while I was building it. For the solenoid, you need: 1 Solenoid Magnet, 17 Solenoid Hub, 40 Hysteresis Rod, 20 Central Permanent Magnet, 28 Auxiliary Magnet, 40 Ferromagnetic Base and 56 Magnetic Linkage. You start with placing the Solenoid Magnet block right on top of the blueprint highlighter. The 17 blocks of the solenoid hub are placed around it (8) and above that platform (9). The hysteresis rods are placed - intuitively - on the same height as the solenoid magnet block and follow this pattern:
You have 40 hysteresis rod blocks, and there isn't any pattern that suggests itself except the one shown. Then you have 20 Central Permanent Magnet blocks, which intuitively go 5 each at the end of each hysteresis rod pointing in a cardinal direction. You may recall the structure is 3 high, and from there you can conclude that the 40 Ferromagnetic base blocks go above and below the central magnet blocks. Considering the blueprint layout, yet again a pattern suggests itself for the 28 auxiliary magnets:
And you have 56 magnetic Linkage blocks, so again there isn't any pattern that suggests itself rather than above and below the auxiliary magnet blocks. Taken that way, building the solenoid isn't difficult at all. Only crafting the magnets has taken a few hours of Compactor time. After that, I also finished the remaining three plasma injectors, so that the central components of the fusion reactor are now built and ready to be powered and connected. I just hope I didn't make a mistake when having to replace and reorient one toroid magnet I accidentally broke. I can only say be careful where you point your pickaxe. The defining block space of a toroid magnet is transparent, and if you break one neighbouring a plasma injector you have to tear down one side of the injector to place it again. Anyway, here's the finished main structure.
The next step was to power the main systems. I was going to build the power systems for the preheater and the solenoid before getting to the many Van De Graafs - which I'll be doing last. Less probability of getting shocked that way. I also built the start of my control chamber and made the quantum link to my base as well as another wireless access point, so that I can now access my ME network from everywhere on the fusion reactor construction site. There isn't much else in that room yet and I'll show it later.
Now for an inconvenient and unexpectedly frustrating delay. I was testing the Electricraft resistors when I noticed that I didn't have any brown dye (or cocoa beans). Brown codes for a rather important number: the 1. I hadn't been out exploring for a while so I didn't mind, and anyway exploring the overworld - as opposed to the Nether and the underground - is fun, so I went out to find myself some dye trees (there is no jungle biome in the area I have explored so no cocoa beans). As the RNG would have it, it didn't take long to find 14 of the 16 colors. Ironically given that the world is covered in forest and grass, the missing colors were - you knew this was coming, right? - green and.....brown. An hour and a used-up ruby sickle later I was about to give up and cheat when I found a single brown dye tree, which dropped one cocoa bean and several tree dyes and saplings. Good. That was the inconvenient part. The frustrating part - that was when I discovered that coloring the resistor was only possible with vanilla dyes. In this case, you need cocoa beans but tree dyes or other oredicted dyes won't work. I suspect that this is a bug.
With that out of the way at last, I could start building the power supply system for the solenoid. I'd need a resistor, an induction motor, an 1:8 bedrock gearbox and some bevel gears and bedrock shafts. No problem, I already have all that, but several of the components can't be placed vertically, so how will I make this symmetric? What I came up with is this:
Except for two of the cable blocks, all components are part of a symmetric 3x3 structure centered on the solenoid magnet above and the auroral battery below. The unfinished corridors are to be maintenance corridors which will contain power lines and fuel and plasma pipes. I opened up the ceiling for a close-up of the power supply system:
Note the color coding on the resistor "520 amps". 520 amps go into the system are converted into 4160 Nm torque. The gearbox takes that up and converts into slightly more than the necessary 32678 torque, thereby wasting small amount of power because I can't code the resistor for 512. Meanwhile, the 16384 V output by the graphene battery get converted to 2048 rad/s speed by the induction motor and down to 256 rad/s by the gearbox. Exactly what I need.
I should say that it is satisfying to see the solenoid spinning after that much work. That finishes today's work. The next update will probably have to wait for a few days since I do have a life outside of Minecraft....
