Hmm, Reika already has limits on the radiation in most cases. It's possible he simply missed doing that for the Flowing Corium. ( I didn't see any limits in the code anyways, and a quick test did result in slightly over 6,000 radiation within like 10 seconds of a meltdown. )
[ReactorCraft] ReC Mechanics Thread
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Yes, that is the problem. I don't really like the concep of putting the reactor in another dimension, that kind of kills the thrill. But if a meltdown results in the world becoming unplayable for everyone, that sucks.
This was the newest thread I could find for ReC, without cluttering up the "main" thread for Reika's mods.
Does anyone have any concrete data/experience with how the calculations work for running Turbines? Low and Hi-Pressure ones, with regard to how much steam it takes to have the code say "okay, I can run another one"?
I'm trying to determine if a reactor design can run 6 turbines, or if it can run 7, but running into a fairly icky bug that makes testing in creative... challenging. To wit, there is steam in the lines (roughly 2k and appears to be rising slowly), but I'm unsure of the requirement to successfully attach another turbine. The only thing I can find in the code to my laymen's eyes is:
protected final int getConsumedSteam() {
return steam/32+1;
But that doesn't make any sense to me from a math standpoint, if there's multiple thousands of units of steam showing in the line before any turbine is hooked up. Information is in short supply for turbines in general, minus some basic "you need to produce enough steam to power 10 LP turbines before it can power an HP turbine" type stuff. Nothing really floating around about the LP turbines. Anyways, thanks for any info or a point in the right direction!
Does anyone have any concrete data/experience with how the calculations work for running Turbines? Low and Hi-Pressure ones, with regard to how much steam it takes to have the code say "okay, I can run another one"?
I'm trying to determine if a reactor design can run 6 turbines, or if it can run 7, but running into a fairly icky bug that makes testing in creative... challenging. To wit, there is steam in the lines (roughly 2k and appears to be rising slowly), but I'm unsure of the requirement to successfully attach another turbine. The only thing I can find in the code to my laymen's eyes is:
protected final int getConsumedSteam() {
return steam/32+1;
But that doesn't make any sense to me from a math standpoint, if there's multiple thousands of units of steam showing in the line before any turbine is hooked up. Information is in short supply for turbines in general, minus some basic "you need to produce enough steam to power 10 LP turbines before it can power an HP turbine" type stuff. Nothing really floating around about the LP turbines. Anyways, thanks for any info or a point in the right direction!
It's difficult to get hard numbers, but my general rules of thumb are that one, you need around 6-10,000 m^3 of steam in your lines to start off with an HP turbine and, two, you'll need a somewhat beefy reactor design to even get one turning steadily. My advice is to let steam build up, then attach another HP to test and monitor for a couple of minutes.
Does that mean that the turbines are checking the steam lines for a "total" amount before they will spool up? That would make a lot of sense, considering I've got a 13-core reactor that I just turned on a bit ago that was able to get 7ish turbines (didn't try more) going full bore. In my actual game, that same design would only barely get one going to start. As more steam has built up, a second one has turned all the way on, and I'm waiting on the rest. If the steam has to be at certain "thresholds" for whatever check the turbines do, that would explain the descrepancy.
I don't think it so much checks for a certain amount of steam as it takes more steam to get going than it does to keep the thing running.
I'm straight up confused, because I've got 5 turbines hooked to a 13-core reactor and only 2 of them are getting spun up completely. I've disconnected all but the 2 two that are functioning to let the steam build up, then reconnected, and no change. I've hooked up all 5 to check if steam dwindles, and it STILL goes up, but the 3 that won't spin up refuse to do so. There is almost 30k steam and rising in the lines, even with 5 turbines hooked up. Taking off the 3 non-functional turbines make it go up even faster. I've even shut down and reloaded the game to check if something was buggy, but to no avail. I'm completely lost, since the design was capable of pushing at least the 6 turbines I hooked to it to start in a test world.
Edit: Seems like something wasn't happy with the steam lines/grates. Slowly breaking and replacing them and re-positioning them has got 3 turbines going now. Going to do the rest and chalk this up to a weird bug I 'spose.
Yeah, got 'em all up and running. I knew I wasn't crazy!
Edit: Seems like something wasn't happy with the steam lines/grates. Slowly breaking and replacing them and re-positioning them has got 3 turbines going now. Going to do the rest and chalk this up to a weird bug I 'spose.
Yeah, got 'em all up and running. I knew I wasn't crazy!
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Maybe a chunk loading issue? I dunno how steam lines behave across the boundaries between loaded and unloaded chunks, but such things have been a source of weird bugs in other mods in times past.
Eh, the entire structure is within a 3x3 segment of chunks to allow a single World Anchor to cover it, so I know that wasn't the issue. My thinking is that there was an icky crash at some point that made sections of the steam line and grates get weird. After letting the steam build and replacing the blocks, it's all rock solid now. Been running since figuring it out with no issues.
Are Neutrons created by a Fusion Reactor capable of escaping from the Plasma Injectors? I've noticed blocks being irradiated from time to time, but only directly in line with the back of the Injectors. I was under the impression that Fusion events were only taking place within certain sections of the Toroid magnet, and Fusion Neutrons weren't going to get out.
It looks like they come out right where the magnetic containment pipe enters the Injector. I wasn't aware that was a thing. Is it supposed to be a thing?
It looks like they come out right where the magnetic containment pipe enters the Injector. I wasn't aware that was a thing. Is it supposed to be a thing?
I'm not sure which bits produce the neutrons, but I -think- the plasma deathbeam is what does it, so it'd make sense for the injectors to get a little irradiated.
It'd be cool if it were actually the injectors getting irradiated. Problem is, it's fired a couple off into the wild blue. I've found one in an HP Turbine (! had to spin it down and break the multi-block to get at it), and a few in random areas, but always directly in line with the injectors. I think I've sorted it by lining that 3-block section with Bedrock, but 1 block has to be behind the magnetic pipe, since it plugs into the injector there. Looks tacky as all hell, and I cannot believe that it's intended behavior.
So for posterity's sake, here's what I've learned through trial/error, sleuthing online, and some chats w/Reika:
- 98% of Fusion Reactor builds will only require 1 Preheater building. A single Preheater can now handle something like 50 Plasma Injectors.
- Deuterium/Tritium usage is front-loaded. IE: until you cap out all of your Magnetic Containment Pipe, the Preheater internal tank, and wherever else Plasma may reside, it's going to chew through those two. After everything has topped off, the maintain cost goes way down. I currently have an 11-core "Tritium" Fission reactor that produces no steam, but creates the required amount of Tritium to see a _very_ slight increase in my total amount. It's effectively equilibrium, given the size of the tank I'm putting it into.
- Toroid Magnets require GOBS of Liquid Nitrogen. However, the solution here is not increasing the amount of machines producing it. The solution is to increase the amount of Liquid Nitrogen produced by a single Refrigeration unit. A single one of those producing at 1-2 operations a tick is enough to keep 36 Toroids topped off.
- The water requirements to keep an effective amount of boilers filled has been reduced. Significantly. I don't have solid math on it, but my 4 Dewpoints churning out ~100 buckets each per operation is more than sufficient.
- Fusion Reactor Neutrons are not 100% absorbed by absorbers anymore. I don't know when this was changed, but it is within the last year, and there is no changelog record that I can see for it, unless it went hand-in-hand with the reflector change. If you do not want the area surrounding your Fusion Reactor irradiated like a poorly-shielded Fission Reactor, you'd better take the same precautions.
- Fusion Events CAN happen inside a Plasma Injector, and along that area. You will need to shield around the magnetic containment pipes. This does not seem intuitive, but it is what it is.
I may add more to this as I remember/encounter other things.
- 98% of Fusion Reactor builds will only require 1 Preheater building. A single Preheater can now handle something like 50 Plasma Injectors.
- Deuterium/Tritium usage is front-loaded. IE: until you cap out all of your Magnetic Containment Pipe, the Preheater internal tank, and wherever else Plasma may reside, it's going to chew through those two. After everything has topped off, the maintain cost goes way down. I currently have an 11-core "Tritium" Fission reactor that produces no steam, but creates the required amount of Tritium to see a _very_ slight increase in my total amount. It's effectively equilibrium, given the size of the tank I'm putting it into.
- Toroid Magnets require GOBS of Liquid Nitrogen. However, the solution here is not increasing the amount of machines producing it. The solution is to increase the amount of Liquid Nitrogen produced by a single Refrigeration unit. A single one of those producing at 1-2 operations a tick is enough to keep 36 Toroids topped off.
- The water requirements to keep an effective amount of boilers filled has been reduced. Significantly. I don't have solid math on it, but my 4 Dewpoints churning out ~100 buckets each per operation is more than sufficient.
- Fusion Reactor Neutrons are not 100% absorbed by absorbers anymore. I don't know when this was changed, but it is within the last year, and there is no changelog record that I can see for it, unless it went hand-in-hand with the reflector change. If you do not want the area surrounding your Fusion Reactor irradiated like a poorly-shielded Fission Reactor, you'd better take the same precautions.
- Fusion Events CAN happen inside a Plasma Injector, and along that area. You will need to shield around the magnetic containment pipes. This does not seem intuitive, but it is what it is.
I may add more to this as I remember/encounter other things.
Neutrons will appear in the cardinal directions of anywhere fusion occurs. Fusion can occur whenever non-escaped plasma exceeds a minimum density. This means that yes, fusion can occur inside the injectors.
Essentially correct, as I noted above.
That just means the neutron came out of the injector, then got absorbed later, causing the radiation.
Also, you can just place 3 absorbers there. It is pretty rare for fusion to occur inside the injector, so they keep themselves naturally cooled.
1: 100% of working designs actually. You can not build a fusion reactor anywhere near large enough to be able to handle 51+ injectors. 20 is hard enough. I've been trying to tell people for something like a year now to never build more than 1 preheater. I use a single preheater for multiple various designs of my Terrawatt reactor test.
2: Indeed. Same thing here. I used to know the exact amount consumed...it's something like 1mb/t each per injector. Which is immensely tiny. ( And one of the main reasons we are trying so hard to make fusion reactors in the real world. )
3: This SHOULD be the obvious solution to anyone playing Reikas mods, but unfortunately it gets missed a lot. I don't remember if Reika has done it yet, and I'll need to check, but this has/will go up a little as well. Basically, a couple of toroids due to a trivial bug did not need LN2.
4: 4 DPAs has always been enough for me, even on quite large reactors. I don't think the consumption has been changed. It might be some design change you made was more efficient at getting the water to the boilers.
5: Pretty sure this is not true. I glanced at the code, and will double check asap, but I am pretty sure Neutron Absorbers will absorb 100% of Fusion Neutrons.
6: Indeed, and I would argue it is entirely intuitive that they would have fusion and neutrons occur there as well, since there is concentrated fusion plasma.
zemerick said:
I believe it was one of your posts I saw that helped reinforce that and led me to trying it! It's hard to break through that, when every video on the internet + the most recent base tour (year old) of the mod dev himself shows 4-5 Preheaters for 4 injectors.
zemerick said:
This reference was again the base tour video showing something like 8 DPAs that were getting drained pretty heavily. The 4 that I have producing are getting fed into the boilers by EnderIO pipes that I config-modified to deliver 5,000mB, instead of their normal 800, because I didn't want to deal with the horrible mess and render bugs of all those Bedrock pipes.
zemerick said:
You'd want to speak w/Reika on this one then. I just talked with him on Reddit about this, so that's a direct quote from him, unless he misread and thought I meant Reflectors. He's not prone to doing that, so yeah. It's currently giving me hell on my build, as I've got neutrons escaping on various vectors around the reactor, even though the entire neutron plane is surrounded by a boiler/absorber/boiler setup, and then a Bedrock layer before the Containment pipes that circle(square?) the reactor.
zemerick said:
From a real-life standpoint, yes. From a gameplay standpoint, I don't agree. There is a containment pipe poking directly out of the Injector in-line with the neutron escape. Attempting to shield right there creates a "bulge" that's unsightly and flies in the face of the otherwise elegant design that is the Fusion Reactor. Reika is many things, and one of those is having a good eye for design and aesthetics in his constructs. Having to stack Bedrock and HSLA steel or concrete in the 3 spaces of the Injector multiblock's rear-end, with one of those poking out 1 block further looks tacky.
Attachments
I'm glad to hear my efforts haven't gone to waste then. I wish I remember who it was, but it was actually someone else that first pointed it out to me as well. I then went on a bit of a crusade to tell others
Ah, those DPAs were probably under powered then. I started out that way as well. Actually....I started with Aqueous Accumulators. Do NOT try that, lol. I then moved on to various pumps, until finally hitting the DPA. I then started with minimum power and building multiple...then tried out increasing power. Next thing I know, I went from like 50 to 4
Do you have a link to that reddit discussion? I did indeed test it out last night on v16d, and with a 22 injector reactor running for hours, never found a single neutron that got out.
When you say you have them escaping, do you mean actual neutrons, or the blue dots you see? Those blue dots are just a client side visual representation...and notoriously prone to issues when there is any lag or latency. They can appear to be above the actual line, skip outside of confinement, etc. However, this is just a visual glitch: The real neutrons behave as intended.
A good test is what I did: add in a set of absorbers after your neutron wall, in a checkerboard pattern ( So they aren't touching and cooling each other. ) Additionally, have some open spaces, and surround behind everything with something that would become irradiated, like stone. This way, if a neutron gets past the core absorbers, it heats up the secondary, or it creates radiation in the stone. Note: I never had either of those happen.
That really depends entirely on how you design it all. If you just make a minimal square, it'll be on odd spot sticking out. With some effort, you can make a much more interesting design ( that also performs better, with lower risk of meltdown ), that fully incorporates that extra bit behind the injectors. It should also be noted, I use a single absorber there, not multiple BI / Steel blocks.
Edit: Just noticed the image ( it's early.. ), and you should have it be 3 wide. Neutrons can escape any part of the injector, not just the center.
This was a discussion between Reika and I via PMs on Reddit. The conversation was pretty simple. I asked if Fusion Reactor neutrons get absorbed 100% of the time by Absorbers. He said no. Again, if he skimmed and thought I meant Reflectors, that's one thing. You're talking about having zero neutron escape, but I'm over here literally watching new green dots appear in places they shouldn't be. Even had one spawn in mid-air, not even touching a block. At this point, I'm about to write the whole thing off as a modpack problem, rather than a Reactorcraft problem, because it's getting rather silly. I'll box the entire thing in bedrock if I have to.
zemerick said:
I turned client-side representation off a looong time ago. I'm talking about the fact that I have irradiated blocks showing up, which indicate neutron escape.
zemerick said:
This requires VERY detailed knowledge of the code behind the reactor, and requires the player to go "off the map". The "intended" design of the reactor is represented through the blueprint. My conversation stems from that. And with more power than can reasonably be spent, there's no reason other than personal to push for more out of the reactor. I don't have that desire.
zemerick said:
That's my issue. Why would a neutron get past the core absorbers? They only come out of the reactor at certain angles on a certain y-level.
zemerick said:
There is a line of bedrock behind those Containment pipes that goes the entire way around the reactor. The particular spot in the picture is where the pipe goes into the Injector, so a block cannot be placed there. This results in the "bulgy eyesore" I'm talking about.
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It definitely sounds like he was thinking of something else, or maybe it's an upcoming change. I'll try asking him for clarification.
Radiation can spawn a bit away from the actual spot the neutron struck, and as such can be a bit of a poor check for the actual location of neutrons.
Can you provide some images that include the full Absorber ring, and where the radiation is spawning?
This requires VERY detailed knowledge of the code behind the reactor, and requires the player to go "off the map". The "intended" design of the reactor is represented through the blueprint. My conversation stems from that. And with more power than can reasonably be spent, there's no reason other than personal to push for more out of the reactor. I don't have that desire.
I was talking about the Absorbers and Boilers, which you can completely freely design. The absolute most basic design is to do a complete square all the way around the entire thing. Despite being the simplest design, this would completely remove the ugly bulge part. A little more work, and you can make a design that has much lower temperatures, and looks much better. ( Unfortunately I can not find any images of my various designs. A basic one though is a 4 pointed star, with each point at the injectors. )
Bedrock is not sufficient when it comes to the fusion reactor though. There should not be any point in line with the ring that does not have a Neutron Absorber. Directly behind the injectors shouldn't need any boilers, there are few enough neutrons that the passive cooling should be enough.
Also, radiation inside the Tokamak itself is normal ATT. The Injectors get irradiated. I need to check with Reika if this is intended as well.
I wouldn't write the entire thing off either. I can't think of what another mod could do to change this, so I'm pretty confident it is a problem that can be solved.
And again, try the checkerboard absorber trick I mentioned to see where exactly any neutrons are hitting. That large hallway around the reactor should be easy to fill with them real quick.
I turned the neutrons back on client-side so you can see that they are in-line with the absorbers.
The radiation picture shows dots in various areas, but always inside the inner ring.
Changing up the style of the boilers/absorbers isn't going to solve the issue of the magnetic containment pipes and shielding around the injectors. I thought your comment was regarding changing up the style of the toroids and injectors, since you mentioned have 22 on one reactor, which is nuts. My reactor looks like it will easily turn 10+ HP turbines, which is a ludicrous amount of power, so that's a non-issue.
I believe plugging up the rear-ends on the injectors has solved the issue of neutrons getting out at those points, so the only thing that remains is these inner-ring irradiated points. If you've seen in the code that Fusion Neutrons behave differently than Fission Neutrons when it comes to absorption behavior (doesn't recognize bedrock, hlsa, etc) that's good to know. I was under the impression that they worked the same, as that doesn't seem like something Reika would've coded differently.
If randomly-irradiated interior blocks is something that's just going to happen, that's fine, but it really shouldn't and causes lag if they're allowed to slowly stack up without regular cleaning. I have no intention of continuously going in there to clean up radiation dots.
The radiation picture shows dots in various areas, but always inside the inner ring.
Changing up the style of the boilers/absorbers isn't going to solve the issue of the magnetic containment pipes and shielding around the injectors. I thought your comment was regarding changing up the style of the toroids and injectors, since you mentioned have 22 on one reactor, which is nuts. My reactor looks like it will easily turn 10+ HP turbines, which is a ludicrous amount of power, so that's a non-issue.
I believe plugging up the rear-ends on the injectors has solved the issue of neutrons getting out at those points, so the only thing that remains is these inner-ring irradiated points. If you've seen in the code that Fusion Neutrons behave differently than Fission Neutrons when it comes to absorption behavior (doesn't recognize bedrock, hlsa, etc) that's good to know. I was under the impression that they worked the same, as that doesn't seem like something Reika would've coded differently.
If randomly-irradiated interior blocks is something that's just going to happen, that's fine, but it really shouldn't and causes lag if they're allowed to slowly stack up without regular cleaning. I have no intention of continuously going in there to clean up radiation dots.
Changing that stuff can blend it all in perfectly, it would just take an extreme re-working in your case since you have the structure built already. Yea, I only mentioned the 22 injectors to give you an idea as to the number of neutrons I tested with. Your best bet is really just stick a wall there, and bonus points if you have any sort of hazard stuff or radiation warning stuff in the modpack.
4 injectors should easily power 16 HPTs actually btw. In fact, 17 is actually possible.
It's kind of hard to see clearly, but if there is any normal block between the absorbers and the ring, that can spawn radiation. Pipes and such are fine, Boilers should be fine, but something like concrete would be bad. Liquids can be bad too.
There are actually 6 types of neutrons: Decay, Waste, Fission, Fusion, Breeder, Thorium. Most of their differences are just sort of what they work with, but this isn't an area I know too well.
As it stands, yes, you will have a certain amount of radiation in the area of the injectors. There are limiters that should keep the radiation under control, so it doesn't cause lag. ( There's a bug with flowing corium, but I haven't heard of anything else having that bug. )