Steam Power?

[netmc]

I see where GT now has steam upgrades to run machines directly off steam instead of EU. The steam is converted at a rate of 2mB per EU. With the amount of steam produced by a railcraft boiler, this seems like a good way to power GT machines.

I'm thinking about powering my whole base off of steam. Running the GT machines where I can and using steam engines where I need MJ. I'm already up to a 12HP boiler running off of charcoal. I have steam feeding a factorization turbine powering a couple heating blocks attached to vanilla furnaces to make the charcoal needed in addition to the several coke ovens I have.

Has anyone already done this? Any gotchas I might run into? For the GT machines, steam seems pretty viable for the LV machines that normally take 32eu/tick. One liquiduct connection can supply the 64mB of steam needed just fine.

I tried doing this with the industrial blast furnace, but found that it needs quite a bit of steam to match the 128EU needed to power it. That comes out to 256mB of steam. One HP boiler block will output only 20mB of steam. With the 12 HP boiler I have now, I max out at 240mB. Even with 2 steam tank upgrades, I ran out of stored steam just before my second steel ingot finished processing, and it took about 4k EU to complete the operation. With a second liquiduct connected, I was able to process a stack of about a dozen steel without touching one bit of EU. (I have the blast furnace hooked up to 2 steam connections and an MFE now.)

Is it possible to supply enough steam to an industrial blast furnace (128EU/tick) and still leave enough faces for automation? with standard eu cable, I can run 128eu directly with 1 cable. When using steam, it takes at least 2 connections.

According the the FTB wiki -- One liquiduct can transfer infinite amounts of liquid, but it can only output or input at connections at a limited rate (~160 mB/tick).

With two connections to the 128EU machines, I can supply the equivalent of 160EU/tick. Liquiducts are definitely cheaper than running glass fiber cable all over the base.

Is there a limit to how many steam tank upgrades can be added? I know I will have varying loads of steam usage with the intermittent nature of most GT machines, and will need to account for several systems running at once. The steam tanks seem like a good way to smooth out the swings in supply and demand.

Does this sound like a viable option, or am I just crazy to try this on a large scale?

Any other comments or ideas I could try to make all this work?

 

[Vovk]

gonna test this later, just at work right now - but I was pretty sure the output of any 1 face of a liquiduct was also close to unlimited. for example, 2 gigantic Xycraft tanks, one with 16 valves with liquiduct powered output leading into 1 valve of the second xycraft tank would work just as fast as 16:16, and that 17:1 would actually be faster than 16:1.

must test tho.

 

[Siro]

I'm playing 152wgt .8. I did get a steam upgrade working reliably in an industrial grinder. But I don't have specific information on what minimum threshold is needed to achieve this. Basically it was an afterthought. I had built 3 rows of 5 HP boilers power converting steam to EU to supply everything in my base. Which was overkill. So I had a lot of extra steam I could be putting to use, so I figured on solving the problem of getting water power and items to an industrial grinder through the same block.

The only block I could do this with is the GT tesseract generator because it can transfer liquids (such as steam and water) and items through the same block (conceivably one could use an item and liquid tesseract if the conveyor module actually works on the industrial blast furnace in the way one would hope). I did have to feed more than one face of the tesseract remote terminal with steam liquiducts before it would operate without tank upgrades. From there, I could use a router or buffer or any other item transferring block on the terminal to feed/extract the grinder items remotely because it basically treats the remote terminal as if it were the same thing as the grinder attached to the tesseract generator. I've yet to try putting more than one remote terminal on the same frequency (you right click the - or + on the face of the block to increment/decrement, right click with a screwdriver to increment/decrement by 512 at a time).