Would you build this?

[MUSE_iC]

So two questions about the van de graaff.

Now I know the color of the current going around the toroids represents its strength. Does the strength have any effect in the end product? Or does the current only need to reach all the way around all the toroids?

My other question is there a way to protect yourself from the van de graaff? Or is it left for you to figure out how to access things from a distance? At this moment if I were to do this setup in survival the current would kill me instantly.


EDIT:

Actually sorry I came up with two more things.

Since you said 5m RF/t and beyond.
What is the maximum amount of power it can produce?

Is there a way to shut the reactor down? Right now I do this by destroying part of the injector multiblocks and the solenoid.

 

[EyeDeck]

So two questions about the van de graaff.

Now I know the color of the current going around the toroids represents its strength. Does the strength have any effect in the end product? Or does the current only need to reach all the way around all the toroids?

Nope, there's either enough current or uncontained plasma is going to be flying around.

My other question is there a way to protect yourself from the van de graaff? Or is it left for you to figure out how to access things from a distance? At this moment if I were to do this setup in survival the current would kill me instantly.

If you've got GeoStrata installed, make a couple dozen resistance and regeneration potion crystals and plop them around. I think you can survive 2 MW into a Van de Graaff that way until your 5-minute buffs run out.

What is the maximum amount of power it can produce?

I've run 28 full-sized turbines off one, but that was more for space and performance constraints than a lack of steam output. The whole setup in a survival world (which is to say, a lot more to render than a superflat creative world with no mobs around) ends up slowing my FPS to a crawl of 15-20 FPS, and that's with a 4670k @ 4.2 GHz and a GTX 770, also running off an SSD - hardly an anemic system. The server thread running the overworld also ends up getting to about 50% core usage as well, with not much else going on. The answer is probably somewhere in the 5-10 million RF/t range, though converting it all to RF would probably kill your server since you'd need about 500-1000 rotational dynamos to do so.

Is there a way to shut the reactor down? Right now I do this by destroying part of the injector multiblocks and the solenoid.

Turning off the power supply to the solenoid should have the same effect as destroying it, but short of what you're doing it's really difficult to do. It's technically possible to pipe plasma through fluiducts, so I could see a setup involving turning off your preheater(s) and draining the pipes of plasma potentially working, but the injectors themselves have a fairly large internal tank, so it'll take a few minutes to shut down that way.

 

[Reika]

Since you said 5m RF/t and beyond.
What is the maximum amount of power it can produce?

There is none, as it is a function of how much plasma you pump in. The most I have ever seen is 58GW (10.3M RF/t).

though converting it all to RF would probably kill your server since you'd need about 500-1000 rotational dynamos to do so.

I am actually working on an industrial-scale generator.

 

[RavynousHunter]

Wait...I thought there wasn't a cap on how much a Rotational Dynamo could output. Was I mistaken, or is this a recent change of which I'm currently unaware?

 

[Reika]

Wait...I thought there wasn't a cap on how much a Rotational Dynamo could output. Was I mistaken, or is this a recent change of which I'm currently unaware?

A cap was added in v17.

 

[Roflcopter]

How to build the new turbine generator?

 

[Reika]

How to build the new turbine generator?

Wrap the core in rotor windings - except for a two-block-deep cap of steam bypass, then wrap that in housing.

 

[Moshakra]

yes

 

[Pyure]

There is none, as it is a function of how much plasma you pump in. The most I have ever seen is 58GW (10.3M RF/t).


I am actually working on an industrial-scale generator.

I'm excited about this. Hope its a multi-block fwiw, to go with all my other large reactor-stuff.

 

[Gwen Gordon]

Imagine you had a potential source of energy so powerful that it eclipsed the generation capabilities of everything else in the game, capable of being pushed to 5 million RF/t and beyond.
However, this power comes at a cost - the necessary structure is large, complex, and expensive, necessitating over 1500 blocks placed in the exact correct locations. Additionally, while the fuel is not expensive to mass-produce, the system burns though large amounts of it, up to several buckets a second. Furthermore, the system requires a constant power input of about 24000RF/t to keep running.

Would you build this? What if there was tech that either required this or could be pushed to extremes with it?

How about if it looked like this?

awesome post

 

[Zaflis]

Those big spinning wheel looking objects on the right of first screenshot look a big harsh on gpu. If they could be reduced down to 10-30 triangle versions i might give it a go. Furthermore all spinning particles and effects should be visual only. If million particles are all affected in calculations per tick etc, it wouldn't leave performance room for much of anything else on a server. Something along the lines of:
- 1 big entity adds Effect by 10000.
VS
- 10000 small entities each add Effect by 1.

 

[techno156]

Well, I showed my friend this in the afternoon, I think he's going to try and build one of these as quickly as possible now...

 

[Reika]

Those big spinning wheel looking objects on the right of first screenshot look a big harsh on gpu. If they could be reduced down to 10-30 triangle versions i might give it a go. Furthermore all spinning particles and effects should be visual only. If million particles are all affected in calculations per tick etc, it wouldn't leave performance room for much of anything else on a server. Something along the lines of:
- 1 big entity adds Effect by 10000.
VS
- 10000 small entities each add Effect by 1.

???

 

[Zaflis]

???

That's a good question... First 2 sentence of my post deal with this, and rest of it go about multiblock structures in general.

Do you have any guess how many polygons that is, 100000, maybe 1000000 to render just 1 spinning machine like that? We fight with FPS performance every day with FTB packs with simple things like still fluid tanks, and then mod developers come at us with these? I guess i should be offended, but i'm ok with that. Not like anyone is forcing me to use it.

 

[YX33A]

This argument again? Haven't we all learned that it's bullshit yet? As a reminder, it's rarely how complex it looks, but rather how complex the code involved is. And the code involving this is one that taxes your CPU, not your GPU, so it could involve 4d rendering* and be about as difficult on your GPU as it currently is.

That's a good question... First 2 sentence of my post deal with this, and rest of it go about multiblock structures in general.
View attachment 10769
Do you have any guess how many polygons that is, 100000, maybe 1000000 to render just 1 spinning machine like that? We fight with FPS performance every day with FTB packs with simple things like still fluid tanks, and then mod developers come at us with these? I guess i should be offended, but i'm ok with that. Not like anyone is forcing me to use it.

*Assuming one could figure out a way to render such things in Minecraft, anyway.

 

[abculatter_2]

This argument again? Haven't we all learned that it's bullshit yet? As a reminder, it's rarely how complex it looks, but rather how complex the code involved is. And the code involving this is one that taxes your CPU, not your GPU, so it could involve 4d rendering* and be about as difficult on your GPU as it currently is.

You are aware that, on a server, there is only one CPU, while every individual player has a GPU? High CPU use on a server is worse then high GPU use, as now instead of affecting just one player you're affecting the whole server.

Unless I'm horribly mistaken somewhere?

 

[YX33A]

You are aware that, on a server, there is only one CPU, while every individual player has a GPU? High CPU use on a server is worse then high GPU use, as now instead of affecting just one player you're affecting the whole server.

Unless I'm horribly mistaken somewhere?

No, quite right, in some sense. Same issue in the end, people ignoring to get a good CPU while getting a great GPU.
A server doesn't need to do both, the client has the rendering to do, and the server has the back-end work to do. So if it's bad on a server, that's because it's got a weak CPU, just like most gaming rigs which have a great GPU and assume it's enough.

It's the fact that @Zaflis and so many others have assumed that all those polygons must be bad due to rendering issues, but if stripped of all useful code, beyond the rendering, they are barely more noteworthy then a chest or two. It's the fact that there is code that uses the CPU that causes any sort of issues with RoC and it's sub-mods, and that can only be solved by getting a better CPU, or if possible, make it perform better.

 

[abculatter_2]

Well, yeah.

You basically just stated why a lot of people complain about RoC: It takes a sizable amount of system resources, especially compared to other mods. The rendering might not be the main issue, though it does represent it pretty well.

 

[Zaflis]

It's the fact that @Zaflis and so many others have assumed that all those polygons must be bad due to rendering issues, but if stripped of all useful code, beyond the rendering, they are barely more noteworthy then a chest or two. It's the fact that there is code that uses the CPU that causes any sort of issues with RoC and it's sub-mods, and that can only be solved by getting a better CPU, or if possible, make it perform better.

Amount of polygons hurts performance everytime, you cannot go around that. If you have programmed with fragment shaders you might know about all the data required to render that. There is a reason game developers have throughout the years aimed to make game characters look as good as possible, with as few polygons as possible. That is why techniques like bumpmaps were developed, to illustrate complex surfaces on top of a plain flat cube. Lets just say that i can't even use "far" settings on terrain rendering or game starts lagging. GPU is already pushing its limits rendering all the terrain, add to that massive mods then...

It is second part of my earlier post that goes about the CPU optimizations. I wasn't claiming this mod is badly written, i have never even tried it to know how it works. I was only noting my worry as a fellow programmer. I heard someone say before that this structure is made of hundreds if not thousands of entities. That clashed in my ear badly because it's a multiblock structure, and not just 1 but cooperation of many multiblock structures. Each of them can have a central controller block that takes care of about all the calculation related to their child blocks. When structure is formed, it can save information about it's "wholeness". If each individual component of a multiblock structure works on its own you get lag without a doubt.

 

[abculatter_2]

Just going to mention that the thousands of entities you heard about was most likely reffering to the fusion circle itself.

Honestly, you should only need one of those in an entire server, as that one reactor can suppose enough energy for 20+ large bases. (5-10 million RF/t+, with theoretically no maximum)

Although, I would imagine the large number of turbines (The image you linked), combined with the steam blocks flowing through them, as well as any shafts they're attached to would likely use a sizable chunk of the server's CPU.