Tower of Power: CRCS Edition

ShneekeyTheLost

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Dec 8, 2012
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This design was made in 1.5.2 before the IC2-EX branch was made
This design no longer works. Use at your own risk, no support will be provided.



Okay, so we remember my Tower of Power which has lots of little reactors that can produce a lot of power in a relatively compact footprint. But what if you aren't satisfied with that? What if you have HAYOish dreams of banks of Matter Fabricators, all of them demanding extreme power? What if you dream of combining high efficiency with rediculous EU/t output, and to Herobrine with the cost?

I had that dream. This, my friends, is the result.

l3uqyp3.png


You will notice a lot of ME Network devices. These are courtesy of Applied Energistics v12b, which is available for both MC 1.5.2 and for 1.6.2. Fuzzy import buses and Fuzzy export buses. Because you can now tell them what percentage of health they can apply to. Meaning you can automatically pull out cooling cells when they hit 25% or below, you can insert cells which are greater than 99% full, you can even automatically pull out depleted cells automatically!

The beast in the center uses this design:
mBKNcnx.png
Efficiency 5, and 1600 EU/t and it fits in a 9 x 9 (Internal Diameter) snugly. But wait, I can already hear you say, that thing will blow up in just over 250 seconds! Not to worry, I've got you covered. You see those sixteen little one-chamber wonders surrounding it? Yea, those look like this:
Smowc4j.png

Design of cooling tower by Someone Else 37.

Each one of those reactors can cool two cells down in 500 seconds. So, we need four per cycle, and we need two cycles because each micro-cycle is 250 seconds, so that's a total of eight cooling towers.

What is happening here is the cells are removed from the primary reactor when they hit below 25%, and then go into the cooling towers, where all the Vents and Exchangers suck the heat out of them and vent it properly. Fully cooled cells automatically fill in the empty slots as they become available, generally on the same tick. However, in the event the reactor ticks before the fresh cooling cell can get inserted, you have some OC vents willing and able to deal with it.

But I wanted more... so I came up with this:

RoWaliG.png


Right, so we cut the Double Stacker reactor in half, and we end up with this one-chamber wonder:
aeytMF3.png
At 800 EU/t and only needing 8 cooling towers, it's not particularly impressive. However, Stack four of them around like my old Tower of Power, and you end up with 3,200 EU/t per segment, vertically scalable.

Note the gap in the middle? Yea, you're going to have to do something there to scale things. Either have each block around it an MV Transformer or something so all those glass fibre cables don't stack up quite so readily. I mean, you're looking at a good 20 or so fibre cable per segment. You're also looking at a gap between segments, so they won't connect vertically.

Of course, with great power comes great cost. None of these setups are cheap, the HV Transformers are expensive by themselves, and so many nuclear reactors and chambers won't be cheap either.
However, you are looking at Efficiency 5 reactors with a truly enormous EU output, vertically scalable.

I had a dream, and now my dream is fulfilled.

The only fly in the ointment is automatically refilling of nuclear materials. It will try to flood it with cooling cells rather than nuclear material, unfortunately. So once every couple of hours, you will need to refill the nuclear material. However, it will at least automatically pull all of the depleted cells out for you. Meaning you can hook up a breeder reactor on the other side of the ME Network.

My friends, I have only one thing to say: Mission Accomplished.

Oh, as a minor note... this is an IC2 build which translates very easily over to GregTech. In fact, it is easier in GregTech because you don't need as many Dense Copper Plates for the quad uranium cells. You can also likely modify this build to use Plutonium instead of Uranium as well, although you'll need more Cooling Towers to offset the additional heat generation.
 
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Bellaabzug21

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You must have had a very detailed dream. Were you recording a let's play or something?

All jokes aside this is a very nice design and appears to be very efficient other than the cost. But like you said. "To Herobrine with it."
 

ShneekeyTheLost

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You must have had a very detailed dream. Were you recording a let's play or something?
Nah, I am following the scientific method. First, observe a phenomenon. Second, develop a hypothesis based on this observation. Third, experiment to prove or disprove the hypothesis (repeat as necessary). Once you can't break your hypothesis anymore, you have a theory. Release theory to peer review, along with documentation on how you got your results.

This is the scientific method which should be used. Not to be confused with the one that seems to be used these days which is as follows:

Pull something out of your arse, call it a 'theory' to gain funding. Write up something that vaguely seems to support it. Massage data until it looks right, throw out any data which contradicts your 'theory' as 'irrelevant' or 'non-typical'. Attack and attempt to discredit anyone who tries to disprove your 'theory'.

All jokes aside this is a very nice design and appears to be very efficient other than the cost. But like you said. "To Herobrine with it."
Yea, it's expensive. If you are using vanilla IC2, you can break up uranium into eight re-enriched cells, and proceed from there. This will greatly increase your available fissionable materials. The Dense Copper Plates required for the quad cells means an ongoing copper cost, though.

Oddly enough, this cost is obviated in GregTech, making this design cheaper to run than in vanilla. I think I broke one of the Laws of Thermodynamics by doing that somehow.
 

Saice

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I do like the whole idea of AE moving cells to and from cooling towers. Seems like a real world solution like that.
 

ShneekeyTheLost

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I do like the whole idea of AE moving cells to and from cooling towers. Seems like a real world solution like that.
Well, this is my whole 'decentralized distribution of steam' (DDoS) reactor style, which pioneered the CRCS design type. It decentralizes your cooling ability over a larger area so you can cool more things faster at the same time, rather than having to depend exclusively on the cooling ability you can cram into a single reactor.

It is quite expensive in resources, of course, but it is certainly productive, and is so far the only EU generation system I've come up with which runs cheaper in GregTech. Heck, it might even beat out the Fusion Reactor in terms of initial and ongoing costs for the same EU output.
 

Saice

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I'm suprised that IC2/GT has not added a low cost cooling tower block/multiblock to go with their reactors. After all that is basicly how it is done in the real world. Coolent it pumped into the reactor then out into a cooling towers and returned once cooled.
 

ShneekeyTheLost

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Just wonderin', how do you get the uranium to keep up with that?
Quarrying and Breeding are the easiest ways. I suppose if you have Extra Bees you can use the Uranium Bee. Mystcraft + Dense Ores for a mining age and you've got plenty.

This isn't designed as an early-game problem. It's assumed that you've got a few stacks of Uranium burning a hole in your storage space somewhere. Which is probably a gross understatement considering how much copper, tin, iron, and gold you need to build the monstrosity in the first place.

tl;dr: if you can afford to build it, you can afford to fuel it.
 

Bananabell

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Jul 29, 2019
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I seem to have a problem trying to use the Fuzzy Import and Fuzzy Export buses when recreating this reactor. I'm playing on FTB Monster with MC 1.6.4 and it seems as though the buses are ignoring durability and pulling my coolant cells out of the reactor and sending them to the coolant towers before the reactor is even turned on. If anyone has any idea what I'm doing wrong please help by replying.
 

ShneekeyTheLost

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I seem to have a problem trying to use the Fuzzy Import and Fuzzy Export buses when recreating this reactor. I'm playing on FTB Monster with MC 1.6.4 and it seems as though the buses are ignoring durability and pulling my coolant cells out of the reactor and sending them to the coolant towers before the reactor is even turned on. If anyone has any idea what I'm doing wrong please help by replying.
This system no longer works as of the exp branch to IC2 due to cabling nerf. You no longer have a cable capable of handling the energy output.

As far as the fuzzy buses, you need to configure them. First off, you need a cell that is LESS than 25% full. Then you put it in the fuzzy bus as the comparison. Then you put a FULL cell in the fuzzy bus that pulls cells out of the coolant towers and configure to 99%.

The trick is getting at least one coolant cell with less than 25% durability left so you can use it to compare to pull out of the central reactor.
 

Bananabell

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Jul 29, 2019
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This system no longer works as of the exp branch to IC2 due to cabling nerf. You no longer have a cable capable of handling the energy output.

As far as the fuzzy buses, you need to configure them. First off, you need a cell that is LESS than 25% full. Then you put it in the fuzzy bus as the comparison. Then you put a FULL cell in the fuzzy bus that pulls cells out of the coolant towers and configure to 99%.

The trick is getting at least one coolant cell with less than 25% durability left so you can use it to compare to pull out of the central reactor.
Ah that's my problem then, but I don't understand why this setup won't work. The glass fiber cable is capable of carrying 8192 EU/t so 1600 EU/t from the reactor should still be doable with glass fiber or even the insulated HV cable. Thank you so much for the bus help though, it was really bugging me.
 

ShneekeyTheLost

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Ah that's my problem then, but I don't understand why this setup won't work. The glass fiber cable is capable of carrying 8192 EU/t so 1600 EU/t from the reactor should still be doable with glass fiber or even the insulated HV cable. Thank you so much for the bus help though, it was really bugging me.
Because it produces 3,200 EU/t per segment. You can only have two segments at most. This was originally designed to produce a minimum of TEN segments for an EU output of 32,000 running through a single cable down the middle.
 

Bananabell

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Because it produces 3,200 EU/t per segment. You can only have two segments at most. This was originally designed to produce a minimum of TEN segments for an EU output of 32,000 running through a single cable down the middle.
Ah, well I was only re-creating your first, smaller reactor with a single main producing 1600 EU/t and the 16 cooling reactors around it as I don't have the resources for something that large.
 

Bananabell

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Jul 29, 2019
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I seem to be having a new problem where the cooled cells won't import to the ME system through the import bus... I have it set to 99% and the filter is set with a new coolant cell but the cells get to around 30099:23 or so and then they just sit there and won't import.