Steam Boiler vs Stirling Generators

[Tatsuran]

Version 1.7.10

Long story short:
36 HP Steam Boiler consume ~31 charcoal per minute | 1863 per hour (http://calculator.towerofawesome.org/)
36 HP Steam Boiler can supply up to 18 Industrial Steam Engines | 1440 RF\t

Ender IO Stirling Generator with Ocatadic Capacitor uses 0.75 charcoal per minute (1 per 80 sec) | 45 per hour
18 Stirling Generators consume ~14 charcoal per minute | 810 per hour
18 Stirling Generators produce 1440 RF\t
41 Stirling Generators consume ~31 charcoal per minute | 1845 per hour
41 Stirling Generators produce 3280 RF\t

Did i miss something or Railcraft Steam boilers are totaly not efficient anymore?

 

[SevenMass]

It is called power-creep

The Railcraft energy system is as powerful as it has always been, but other modders then create power generators that give more power, and then yet other modders create generators that give even more power, and so on and so on.

The maintainer of Railcraft could change the default power/fuel conversion ratio, but that would only make the problem worse as the other mods authors would soon follow suit and speed up the power-creep.

For what it is worth, you can change both the heat/fuel and the fuel/steam ratio in the Railcraft configs, within certain limits.

While I'm unfamiliar with Ender IO, I'd be surprised if you couldn't also change the fuel and power values in its configs.

So change them to suite your preferred balance, either configure Railcraft to be a bit more powerful or configure Ender IO to be a bit less so. Alternatively, you may be able to configure your energy consumers to require less power.

If you are playing a modpack created by someone else. And the creator had a certain vision in mind, then you can assume that the authors of the pack probably wanted Railcraft to be less powerful in their pack.
In an other pack, Railcraft could be the ultimate endgame. It depends on what mods are in the pack and how they are configured.

 

[Azzanine]

What if you pair boilers with BigReactors turbines? You actually can drive a turbine with RC steam.
Of course your findings are correct if you assume insular mod useage.
Also are those numbers for the fuel consumption of the boiler the 500º? Of course the heat up is still quite wasteful. Also have you considered that Firestone item too? Either as full use or just to heat up the boiler to 500º?

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

What if you pair boilers with BigReactors turbines? You actually can drive a turbine with RC steam.
Of course your findings are correct if you assume insular mod useage.
Also are those numbers for the fuel consumption of the boiler the 500º? Of course the heat up is still quite wasteful. Also have you considered that Firestone item too? Either as full use or just to heat up the boiler to 500º?

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

You can, in fact I'm currently running a turbine with a series of MFR steam boilers. Five Steam Turbines producing 400 mb/t steam = 2B/t which is needed for a max-size turbine at optimal capacity. Currently generating ~24k rf/t.

 

[KingTriaxx]

I like the single connection requirement from Railcraft over MFR's Steam things, but that's beside the point.

An alternative is Advanced generators, which can run on Steam and produce upto 500RF/t from each turbine in the multiblock. Of which you can have up to 50 per generator structure. Not sure the exact math off the top of my head.