Steam through Tesseracts

[AlanEsh]

Normally I build my base's power system so that everything is physically connected.
MFR Tree Farm >> Boilers >> Steam Engines >> Conduits to my machines.
I'll toss in an Energy Tessearact for my Quarry of course.

But I'm considering changing this up a bit for my current base. Contiguous space is kind of an issue in the area I chose to set up, and so I am looking at breaking my typical physical connection between my boilers and my machines at base. So my first thought was "I'll just use energy tessearacts to send power to my base", but my slow old brain itches when I think about that -25% premium on energy via tesseract.

Would I be significantly ahead if I did this instead?
MFR Tree Farm >> Boilers >> Liquid (steam) Tesseracts
and
Liquid (Steam) Tesseract >> Steam Engine Cluster >> Conduit to my machines

I know I'm adding a bit of complexity and losing some compactness at the base in exchange for splitting off the steam production, but are there any pitfalls I'm not considering here?

 

[draeath]

We used steam engines on our quarries for a while using tesseracts to send the steam out. Worked well.

 

[loboca]

I'm currently using liquid tesseracts to move biomass to biofuel engines sited near my quarry. Thinking of moving to steam once I get some boilers. No reason it shouldn't work.

 

[AlanEsh]

I will still send power to my quarry via Energy Tessearact, simply because 3 blocks is all I need for my entire quarry setup when i go that route.

Now I just need to figure out how many Steam Tesseracts I need to pull 100% of the available steam from one LP36 boiler.

 

[Democretes]

I will still send power to my quarry via Energy Tessearact, simply because 3 blocks is all I need for my entire quarry setup when i go that route.

Now I just need to figure out how many Steam Tesseracts I need to pull 100% of the available steam from one LP36 boiler.

It's not a matter of tesseracts, it's a matter of conduits. One Tesserect can transfer infinite amount of liquids over any amount of time, the problem is even liquiducts can't move the steam that fast.

Liquiducts, on the other hand, have a limit of 120 mB/t (I think. It was 160 mb/t but I believe it was reduced.). So you need more liquiducts in order to get the perfect ratio. I can't find the thread, but optimally, 4 boilers used 2 tesseracts. You might just have to get creative with this.

 

[draeath]

easy way to figure it out - fill a large tank, and have a large empty tank. Pipe up tesseracts, play with send/receive, and use redstone to turn em all on at once. Play with that and you'll figure out the capacity easy enough

I don't think tesseracts have a limit, themselves - but they only have 6 faces for you to attach things. The bandwidth of the attachments will be the bottleneck.

EDIT: you beat me to it. But still there's a method for determining it experimentally. Basically send the steam back and forth until you get the quickest transfer.

 

[DriftinFool]

A LP36 boiler makes 360 mb/t of steam. Liquiducts have somewhere around 100 mb/t. I have seen it listed from 100-160 and not sure which is true. That is just their output, their throughput is almost unlimited. So 4 connections on the boiler and 4 connections to a single tesseract should be fine. If not, just add the 5th connection

 

[AlanEsh]

Yeah... was looking at a thread where Saxed has 3xHP36 boilers each with 9 unpowered liquiduct connections all feeding into one liquiduct. This pipe then powers 54 steam engines all in series along the pipe. Seems there is no -real- bandiwidth worry aside from the 80/160 limit where the liquiduct interfaces with other blocks, like boiler blocks.

 

[Pyure]

The only time I ever ran into a liquiduct/bandwidth problem was when trying to feed that steam into an energy bridge from PowerCrystals. In terms of getting around the issue I had the most luck with multiple outputs on a tank (6+ liquiducts coming out of one tank) feeding into the multiple sides of a tesseract which fed the energy bridge directly.

I was getting 100 mb/t per liquiduct (easy to see this on energy bridge GUI), but someone pointed out that the output of the tank itself might have been throttling me. So, more or less ditto.

PS: I typically do energy tesseract for my quarries too, but its so tempting sometimes to send steam instead and save the 25% tax you incur on energy transportation. But you can't beat the compactness of the energy tesseract darnit.

 

[Staxed]

Yup, the only real thing you need to be worried about is the actual connection for the liquiduct, the pipe itself can carry a very, very large amount of steam. As for the tesseract, I've used just one for the input...into two different faces though, I didn't really calculate much though and didn't check to see if all the steam was getting through.

However, yes...going the tesseract route for geographically separating the engines form the boilers is the best method as there would be 0% energy loss doing it like that.