Puzzled by MFR drill + big reactors

[Juanitierno]

Heya!

I built a test setup with a single big reactor (2500 RF/t) + MFR drill with lime focuses.

It produced roughly enough uranium to feed the reactor plus spare uranium to fuel a second reactor.

I saw this and considered this a viable way to get self-sustaining power, so i went ahead and built another 7 reactors (8 total).

The thing is, now the production of uranium/yellorium does not cope with demand, even tho the MFR drill is not maxed out on energy (i even added a second drill with its 4 prechargers, but no luck) and i am not using the energy for almost anything else.

The only explanation i can find is that MFR drills have diminishing returns, but i've found no documentation about this being the case.

Do they have diminishing return?

If not, why does 2500 RF/t yield enough fuel for 2 reactors (1250 RF/reactor), while 20.000 RF/t cant feed 8 reactors (2500RF/reactor)?

Pics: (each reactor has 2 output blocks, since the conduits accept 2kRF but each reactor produce 2.5kRF)
The green RECs where added later for testing purposes, with no effect.

Any help is appreciated!

 

[midi_sec]

interesting. try splitting up a couple of your reactors, one feeding their own drill. if there are diminishing returns (not sure why there would be, you would think it would be the opposite) you should see similar efficiency as you did in your first test.

looking at it a second time, are your conduits maxing out? i haven't played with them very much this iteration so i'm honestly not sure their capacity these days.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

I think the drills have a limit to how much power they can take.
Construct additional drills and spawn more ores.

 

[Juanitierno]

interesting. try splitting up a couple of your reactors, one feeding their own drill. if there are diminishing returns (not sure why there would be, you would think it would be the opposite) you should see similar efficiency as you did in your first test.

As a test right now, I disabled 4 of the 8 reactors, and set the green RECs to output 3kRF each. 2 reactors are running full time, 1 is turning on and off as its buffer depletes and another one sleeping constantly (makes sense, as im using a little over 6KRF, so its 2 reactors and a half worth of nuclear reaction).

With this setup im seeing positive gains on the yellorium.

As this processes are quite slow and random they are evry hard to measure, but I think there is either a diminishing return on the MFR lasers (makes no real sense) or there is a bug in the MFR stuff producing less than they should at high power levels.

ATM im also skimming through the MFR source code to see if I understand better whats happening, so far i've seen no obvious references to diminishing returns, but have noticed a couple strange energy operations im trying to understand (I can code, but not java)[DOUBLEPOST=1393445169][/DOUBLEPOST]

I think the drills have a limit to how much power they can take.
Construct additional drills and spawn more ores.

If thats the case they should stop accepting power, instead of draining it all, i think.

Also, if thats the case i need to find out what amount of energy is the best to provide each drill for maximum returns.

 

[rhn]

I base this on my experience from 1.5, but doesn't each precharger still cap at 100MJ(1000RF)? Or something like that. Was it the drill it self that had a limit to 500MJ or something?

The prechargers should change colour when the drill is capped(atleast 3 out of 4 should change colour) and the prechargers internal buffers are filled.

 

[midi_sec]

yep, there ya go. forgot about that. max of 4 prechargers per drill if i remember correct.

 

[Juanitierno]

Yeah, they do that if you give them enough power, but they wont stop accepting power past that. From what i've seen the conduits will pour as much as they can on the prechargers, their buffer wont ever go past about 30%, so they may be wasting the power...


I think i've found another bug too, looking at the code, but the bug reports on the source code page has over 100 open bug reports, so im not sure if its the corretc place to report them...

 

[rhn]

yep, there ya go. forgot about that. max of 4 prechargers per drill if i remember correct.

Yeah, I think you can cap the drill with 2 prechargers, as long as you dont bottleneck the power supply to the prechargers. Not sure why you would want more than 2 if so. But I always make them cause it looks better.

 

[rhn]

One slightly offtopic question, why not make larger more effecient reactors instead of so many small ones?

 

[PierceSG]

So you can cap out the power input using only 2 prechargers? Interesting...
It will certainly help with making compact arrays of laser drills.

Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk

 

[Juanitierno]

One slightly offtopic question, why not make larger more effecient reactors instead of so many small ones?

I tried, but, from what i understood, the most efficient is the 7x7x7. From my understanding the amount of external reactor casings determine the heat dissipation for the entire reactor (which makes sense).
I tried making a 13x13x13, but it overheated very quickly, so i had to lower the control rods and ended up with poor performance.
(since the shape is a cube, the proportion of fuel rods/casing blocks is very favorable towards fuel rods for bigger reactors, with a 7x7x7 containing 25 fuel rods, and a 13x13x13 containing 451 (yeah, over 7 stacks)).

Im very new to the mod so there may be reactor building techniques im not aware of, of course!

Going back to the drills, I've now set a REC on each precharger, capped at 1kRF. and its probably gonna give me surplus yellorium, BUT when i connect the prechargers directly i did notice the work on the drill increasing at a very accelerated rate (i would say its proportional to power provided), so they dont seem to be "really" capped at 1000RF. I dont know what to think anymore

 

[BanzaiBlitz]

Try breaking it down further and see what you can do via a single precharger, two, three, four. You can see if it's linear or not. Same with power. Cycle power inputs from 1k through 10k and study the results. You might consider just running this in creative and isolate the laser drill performance. Also try Mj with BC pipes to see if it compares. Should be able to dump into the BC power pipes from a conduit or cell unless I am remembering wrong.

Of course, there is always the chance you're just going completely crazy and reality really is out to get you.

 

[Darkone84]

You can check/change it in MFR config how the power the prechargers need to run the drill at 100%. (I think it's 500MJ each) The best way I found was to put a storgae cell on each precharger than you can limit the power going in. I really like your idea Juanitierno, I had no idea you could get a posstive gain by doing this. When I get home I'm going to do some testing but I think how I would set it up is to have one reactor powering the MFR drill and the second reactor (free power) powing my base.

There is a speadsheet I saw that had all different sizes of Big Reactors and the 7x7x7 is the best overall but the 7x7x3 is the most efficient.

Edit.
Also you may need to have a look and see how affective the lime focuses are. Check to see how routhly the % of uranium comparied to other ores. Say if you run it for 1 hour and see how much uranium you are getting than do it again. If your not get a constant amount of uranium each time that could explain why you were running out of uranium.

 

[Juanitierno]

You can check/change it in MFR config how the power the prechargers need to run the drill at 100%. (I think it's 500MJ each) The best way I found was to put a storgae cell on each precharger than you can limit the power going in. I really like your idea Juanitierno, I had no idea you could get a posstive gain by doing this. When I get home I'm going to do some testing but I think how I would set it up is to have one reactor powering the MFR drill and the second reactor (free power) powing my base.

There is a speadsheet I saw that had all different sizes of Big Reactors and the 7x7x7 is the best overall but the 7x7x3 is the most efficient.

Edit.
Also you may need to have a look and see how affective the lime focuses are. Check to see how routhly the % of uranium comparied to other ores. Say if you run it for 1 hour and see how much uranium you are getting than do it again. If your not get a constant amount of uranium each time that could explain why you were running out of uranium.

The difference between "enough uranium" and "not enough" is very noticeable, almost within 20 minutes you can tell pretty clearly. I have not been able to find proper documentation on the laser focuses tho, so i could be very wrong.

Im also using RECs to graduate the power that goes into the prechargers, but i cannot figure out whats the best amount to give them, they do weird stuff, like absorb enormous amounts of power but still not do much work.

ATM i have 4 of them per drill, on a strict diet of 1000RF/tick each.

 

[MoosyDoosy]

There is a speadsheet I saw that had all different sizes of Big Reactors

I believe that you are referring to this excellent compilation. There honestly should be a link to this in the wiki or from somewhere official-ish.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0An54qOfSiXfJdEcyaHAxWURaZTR2eEpEWEFaU0xydXc#gid=0
As you can see, 7x7x3 is the most efficient in fuel usage, so a couple of these spammed would be more efficient.

 

[Tristam Izumi]

As a side note with the MFR laser drill, isn't it the most efficient when placed at y-level 128? Could this somehow affect what you're seeing?

 

[Juanitierno]

From what i've seen in the source code the difference in efficiency is minimal.

Also, both the first test setupa nd the current one where at the same Y, so they should behave the same.

 

[Grydian2]

Each redstone energy conduit cannot send more then 10,000RF per tick. From the screen shots my guess is that the second energy cell cant get power because you are running them in a linear chain instead of a parallel system.

 

[YX33A]

Each redstone energy conduit cannot send more then 10,000RF per tick. From the screen shots my guess is that the second energy cell cant get power because you are running them in a linear chain instead of a parallel system.

This. Just remember that running your condiuts in parallel doesn't prevent you from draining power from just one energy cell, just means you have to use multiple connections, as they limit per connection, not per line. You could have one cell outputting power into 4 different conduit lines, that all connect to one after a short bit, and so long as they split again at the end, you can run 4 times the "cap" on one line, IIRC.

 

[DriftinFool]

Yeah, they do that if you give them enough power, but they wont stop accepting power past that. From what i've seen the conduits will pour as much as they can on the prechargers, their buffer wont ever go past about 30%, so they may be wasting the power...


I think i've found another bug too, looking at the code, but the bug reports on the source code page has over 100 open bug reports, so im not sure if its the corretc place to report them...

When I used EU for a mining laser, it took 512 eu/t per precharger and it just kept the buffer full. I'm not sure what the conversion ratio is, but you may be maxing out your connection with the energy conduit. They are 10k RF/t per connection.

Each redstone energy conduit cannot send more then 10,000RF per tick. From the screen shots my guess is that the second energy cell cant get power because you are running them in a linear chain instead of a parallel system.

It is only 10k per connection. The conduit itself is not limited to that on throughput. I thought KL said they were basically unlimited throughput.

After some testing, this is what I found. The MFR laser takes 5k RF/t per precharger to run at max power. That is a total of 20k RF/t. A single conduit can feed it with one connection per precharger since they are only 5k each. The conduit can carry the 20k with no problem. You have to attach the conduit to 2 faces of an energy cell to get enough power to run it full speed. You cannot use anything but a Resonant energy cell. Even if you used 5 faces as output from a redstone energy cell, you would only be running the laser at half power. With just 2 connections, the prechargers hold steady but won't fill their buffers since it is using the full 20k RF/t. If you make a 3rd connection the the energy cell, the precharger buffers fill and the tops of the pre charger turn red. The laser itself will never fill its buffer. It will also never draw more than 20k RF/t no matter how many connections you give it.

After rereading the original post, the answer is simple. You aren't making enough power to run 2 lasers. You will need all 8 2500 RF/t reactors just to run a single laser at max speed. I would guess they are less efficient when not fully powered, so splitting your already insufficient power in half would have less output.