Steam, to power engines or convert?

Herrozerro

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Jul 29, 2019
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what is the best use of steam? should i be using industrial engines? or would using steam consumers to convert it to MJ be best?
 

Sam6555

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Jul 29, 2019
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From what I understand Power Converters is hugely overpowered in that it gives you much more output than it should. One conversion gives 4x what it should. Also who doesn't want loads of ind steam engines pumping away.
 

Yusunoha

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Jul 29, 2019
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From what I understand Power Converters is hugely overpowered in that it gives you much more output than it should. One conversion gives 4x what it should. Also who doesn't want loads of ind steam engines pumping away.

copy and pasted from the PowerConverts topic

PowerConverters 2.x exchange rate is based on the cost to smelt a single item in a furnace. This cost is 70KW (or KJ depending on how you look at it) for UE, 390 EU for IC2, and 160MJ for ThermalExpansion (which I'm counting for BC because BC has no furnace, and ignoring TE's special furnace recipes that are cheaper than normal). There's no such thing as a steam furnace, but the Railcraft wiki says it's 5 steam per 1 MJ, so we'll assume a theoretical steam furnace would consume 800mB.

So, inverting those (and adding a x10 to get rid of most of the decimals), we get the ratios as follows:
  • UE: 10
  • IC2: 1800
  • BC/TE: 4375
  • Steam: 875
  • FZ: 875
Note that Factorization was assigned based on its steam being equivalent with Railcraft's.

Now, it's entirely possible to find another mod with different ratios that when combined with PowerConverters will cause a positive feedback loop (i.e. infinite energy). UE in particular has some rather weird default ratios that basically guarantee this can happen. I will not treat this as a bug - if you don't want it to happen, change the numbers (see below). If you manage to cause an infinite energy scenario using just my stuff though that's definitely a bug, tell me.

If you think they're too good, or you think one of the power systems is too weak compared to the others, or you want to add a deliberate loss during conversion, just go to the config. You can change the input and output multipliers for all four power systems individually.

These values are applied as such:
outputQuantity = inputQuantity * inputScale / outputScale

So if you had 100 MJ to convert to EU, you'd get 100 * 4375 / 1800 = 243.05 (or probably 224 in reality, due to EU pulse rules).
 

Sam6555

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Jul 29, 2019
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So it is somewhat balanced all compared to one thing (smelting an object), It'll never be perfect. Though in my honest opinion, I would never use these converters. I'd rather overengineer something to do the conversion. Also the converters seem to be dirt cheap to craft. Also, while I'm sure this has probably been suggested a few times I reckon they (PC authors) should add some kind of global penalty to converters so you ALWAYS end up with slightly less power. Kinda like how TE has it's penalties with conduits and energy cells.
 

Harvest88

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Jul 29, 2019
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Another thing each steam consumer setup with your conversion of your choice can only suck up 800MB of steam. Doing ~27 buckets of steam into IC2 power will be a pain in the rear to setup. Steam Turbines are so crappy that if Powerconverters didn't exists I would go the Magma Curibles burning cobble instead of chewing an ingot of steel every ~2.5 hours and can't even be automated too.