UE Question

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Hah never say never to power overdraw when you have a growing AE network Voltage issues can also be a pain.

That reminds me... how does voltage carry over when converting to MJ? For example, I have a series of Hydrogen Generators feeding to an Advanced Power Cube which in turn is plugged directly into TE Energy Conduit. Is the voltage going to cause a problem?

 

[KirinDave]

is voltage even a thing with universal cable?

No, but universal cable brings its own problems. The way it works is that it takes the power in the system and traverses it in order of what things were added. At each consumer it tries to meet the consumer's entire demand that tick. It then takes the rest and keeps going. This means that a heavy demand in a linear set of machines is often not well met even by sufficient power when you use factories. I actually prefer to use wire because it has a saner power division rule.

Ucable is awesome and useful. It's actually not the epic magicsauce people want it to be in all cases, though.

 

[Golrith]

Nice discussion guys. UE needs more attention, although if they don't update their wiki it's going to sit in a backwater of obscurity.

From watching your early LP's Dave, I always felt that the power gen was too high (the speed the basic energy cube was filling up from a passive system was crazy), but since Mek machines need more power then other mods counterparts, that makes sense.
I'll definitely check out your configs you linked, since you guys have done the experimenting.

OT: Gah, sodding hell, just noticed a load of overwritten ID conflicts in my log. Thought I had sorted out all the configs in my pack, oh well, tally oh!

 

[KirinDave]

Nice discussion guys. UE needs more attention, although if they don't update their wiki it's going to sit in a backwater of obscurity.

From watching your early LP's Dave, I always felt that the power gen was too high (the speed the basic energy cube was filling up from a passive system was crazy), but since Mek machines need more power then other mods counterparts, that makes sense.

Oh also: Mek cubes are very small storage compared to their counterparts in other mods. A basic mek cube isn't even quite as good as a battery box. So it's not a huge deal.

I'll definitely check out your configs you linked, since you guys have done the experimenting.

You can do experiments yourself too, pretty easily. Just fire up an RR instance (see my sig for the link) and tweak the values by hand. You can then carry those values back into your FTB world. The "General" section is devoid of IDs.

 

[Syrinori]

So this is something near and dear to me. My advice is to reconfigure it, and we're preparing a set of compat recommendations with Calclavia. You can see the current values we're working with here, and this will remain updated with our experiments. This will be refined further over time, but this is a good start.

We've tuned nuclear reactors to be substantially better than boilers, but also more obnoxious to automate. I humbly recommend you do the same. Turbines will probably always have an edge over steam engines, but any pack with Mekanism finds the cost of industrial steam engines somewhat trivialized so I am not sure it matters.

To summarize, this requires 60% more steam (observed, the exact curve varies by usage) to spin up the turbine, 10x more steam to maintain it, and cuts the output of the turbine itself to around 15mj/t (I think... the turbine behavior is not a linear function so it can be difficult to summarize our findings without rendering out a graph for you). You also need to make sure that if you use Mekanism, you sync up those values as well. Euius, Poppycocks and recently Velo did a nice job slowly refining this for us on that as well, but of course it's subject to refinement.

Is there any actual number on the difference of power output between a boiler and a fission reactor? Personally I feel as such that the reactor should be much more powerful if only because automating it is a total pain compared to the build a tree farm and forget boilers. The fission reactor requires that I consistently be aiming for uranium or I risk running out of power. Boilers have no such risk. (Though I must say Turbines + Steam boilers sound hilarious, it had occurred to me earlier today but I never tested to see if they used the same steam.) The nerf to the power out put makes me sad though. Just set that up in 0.9.3, check patch notes /sadface. How it goes I guess. XD

 

[KirinDave]

Is there any actual number on the difference of power output between a boiler and a fission reactor? Personally I feel as such that the reactor should be much more powerful if only because automating it is a total pain compared to the build a tree farm and forget boilers. The fission reactor requires that I consistently be aiming for uranium or I risk running out of power. Boilers have no such risk. (Though I must say Turbines + Steam boilers sound hilarious, it had occurred to me earlier today but I never tested to see if they used the same steam.) The nerf to the power out put makes me sad though. Just set that up in 0.9.3, check patch notes /sadface. How it goes I guess. XD

Trust me when I say reactors are still insanely powerful. It's actually turbines we're nerfing. They have a sliding scale of fuel consumption which ends in '1 steam per tick to maintain max RPM'. This ends up meaning that if you add turbines piecewise to the system and never turn off the reactor (rapidly move fuel in and out) you can power MANY more turbines than you thought possible. We've seen over 100 turbines off 1 reactor with the default and no end in site. Obviously bad.

 

[Daemonblue]

What version of Atomic Science are you running in RR? I'm currently using v0.6.1.80 and there are some differences in config options.

 

[Syrinori]

Trust me when I say reactors are still insanely powerful. It's actually turbines we're nerfing. They have a sliding scale of fuel consumption which ends in '1 steam per tick to maintain max RPM'. This ends up meaning that if you add turbines piecewise to the system and never turn off the reactor (rapidly move fuel in and out) you can power MANY more turbines than you thought possible. We've seen over 100 turbines off 1 reactor with the default and no end in site. Obviously bad.

I appreciate the quick reply.

Damn those sound far more powerful than I realized. So is it still more beneficial to run a steam boilers off turbines over the engines? How many turbines can a boiler power? So much stuff to learn for this pack.

 

[KirinDave]

What version of Atomic Science are you running in RR? I'm currently using v0.6.1.80 and there are some differences in config options.

0.6.1.80.[DOUBLEPOST=1374522825][/DOUBLEPOST]

I appreciate the quick reply.

Damn those sound far more powerful than I realized. So is it still more beneficial to run a steam boilers off turbines over the engines? How many turbines can a boiler power? So much stuff to learn for this pack.

We're trying to get to the point where industrial steam engines are not a silly option. They are easier to build, so that's something in their favor. Until you have AE.

 

[Daemonblue]

Looking at the configs it looks like the hydrogen gen is set to produce about 12mj/t, so it's pretty powerful considering, but it is configurable.

Anyway, that's kinda odd because my config is missing these two lines compared to the one you linked.
B:"Disable IC2 Uranium Compression (Recommended)"=true
B:"Radioactive Ores"=true

 

[Jakeb]

I don't get why people think the hydrogen generator is hard to use/setup. I have 3, each with its own electrolytic separator, each of which is powered by two heat gens with all five sides surrounded by lava. It's more power than I need for my mekanism ore tripling, AE system, and occasional powersuit charging, and it never shuts down or stops working. I'm planning on moving the setup a bit, and the heat gens will be replaced by two advanced solar gens feeding into an ultimate energy cube which powers the separators.
BTW, what does the steam ratio line in the atomic science config do? I changed the output ratio of the turbines to 10, which should them more fair, but still a lot more powerful than industrial steam engines. I don't want to nerf them into pointlessness, so trying to find a way to tweak them without making them pointless.

 

[Golrith]

Now, to me, that setup sounds like it generates too much power, but that maybe due to me comparing those blocks to other mod blocks of a similar type that don't generate much power (watermills & thermopiles). Still trying to grasp the scale of UE power.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Now, to me, that setup sounds like it generates too much power, but that maybe due to me comparing those blocks to other mod blocks of a similar type that don't generate much power (watermills & thermopiles). Still trying to grasp the scale of UE power.

There is a way to change the ratio of EU energy to MJ energy in the config files to be more in line with what you would consider to be reasonable.

 

[Jakeb]

Now, to me, that setup sounds like it generates too much power, but that maybe due to me comparing those blocks to other mod blocks of a similar type that don't generate much power (watermills & thermopiles). Still trying to grasp the scale of UE power.

I do agree, it is a little bit to powerful. But the real problem is the power conversion that mekanism has. Let's put it this way: what in mekanism and other UE mods are you going to use that much power for? Well, there's ore processing, some atomic science stuff, and... maybe something other automation stuff. Not much else. It is when you bring in the power conversion to mj and eu that problems arise. The power conversion is so efficient that you can easily power a quarry and as many ic2 machines as you want, as long as you have enough hydro gens or adv solar gens. In my opinion, it is the power conversion that needs tweaked, and there should be around a 10-20% tax each time you convert energy.
And I looked at the configs that resonant rise is using, and it looks like all that is tweaked is the EU conversion, am I right?

 

[KirinDave]

The reason energy conversion taxes are tricky to implement is that different power systems use different scaling curves
So it can be very difficult to avoid creating weird effects like power loops.

 

[Daemonblue]

Another thing to mention might be the Universal electricity config which gets added by some of the mods (and multiple instances of it as well). Here's the configs listed:
compatiblity {
D:"BuildCraft Conversion Ratio"=100.0
D:"IndustrialCraft Conversion Ratio"=40.0
B:"Is Network Active"=false
B:"Is Voltage Sensitive"=false
}

I believe that one is added by Mekanism - there's another that gets added by Electric Expansion that doesn't have the Network line. My guess is if you wanted a 10% loss you would lower the conversion ratio on BC to 90. Of course the opposite may also be true, as I haven't tried it out.

Edit: Yea, it seems like those don't work. Also, is anyone else getting a major case of Deja vu from this thread?

 

[Daemonblue]

Hmm, small question. Can you set up Mekanism automation to be like TE? For example, I want a purification chamber to feed into a pulverizer, and that feed into an enrichment factory.

 

[Loufmier]

Hmm, small question. Can you set up Mekanism automation to be like TE? For example, I want a purification chamber to feed into a pulverizer, and that feed into an enrichment factory.

makanism`s automation is like IC2 machinery.e. its side sensitive with no way of configuration

 

[Jakeb]

makanism`s automation is like IC2 machinery.e. its side sensitive with no way of configuration

Wrong. It's more like Thermal Expansions, except that you need the configurator to set it up. I'm not sure if it automatically outputs though.

 

[Daemonblue]

Yea, I have the configurator and all it does is change what side allows input or output. One major flaw with my plan though seems to be that factories like to fill one slot at a time rather than distribute items inserted into them evenly. There is probably a way to set it up so it doesn't do that, but I'm unsure of how to do it without adding assembly line *not sure if that would even work) or a large number of routers (unless you can set them to a specific machine and fill all input slots only while spreading the items evenly).