jakalth

Power hungry... You could always just make multiple 3x3(default sized) MFR farms. Each one will eat a chunk of your power output when they have something to do. And with multiple small ones, instead of a single larger one, they'll be a bit less efficient and eat more power. You could also play around with modular force field system. Using lots of coercion derivers to power up a force field emitter, a biometric identifier, and an interdiction matrix, can eat up lots of power. Especially if you use the anti-hostile module in the interdiction matrix and increase the coverage area of both the interdiction matrix and the force field so that it covers your whole base. If you make an identification card for yourself, and place it inside the biometric identifier, you'll be able to use [shift] + move to walk through the force field without having to lower it first. letting you keep it running non-stop if you like.

Engineer's toolbox has/had a module that could convert MJ --> RF. And the energy converters mod, last I heard, still could do the conversion. But both would require being added manually to the pack on your end. That is if you still want to try using the combustion engines. On a side note; you could still use the combustion engines as a dedicated energy producer for your quarry, if you don't mind making a mobile power station out of Redstone in Motion to move your engines with your quarry. Template carriages would be easier, but frame carriages would allow 3 axis movement. RIM would just save you from having to rebuild your engine array each time you move your quarry, and not have to have exceptionally long kinetic pipe runs too your quarry. And all you'd have to do is remove 1 carriage to run your power pipe out, and replace it to move your engines again, if you use the frame carriages.

right now? you don't. The machines that will use EMC are not finished in Equivelant Exchange yet. best you can do, for now, is simple exchange work using minium stones.

Hmmm, now that is a true monster reactor HeatHunter. I knew someone would push it all the way. the 50,000 mb/tick might just be the upper limit to how much steam a reactor can produce. by the looks of it, i would also say that is probably the limit to how much water it can store as well. And a reactor can not produce more steam then the capacity of the coolant tank in its GUI. hmmm, 50K mb/tick, that would require at least 7 fluid transfer nodes with full 64 upgrades of both speed and mining just to move that much. Using tesseracts as a hub to transfer the water into the reactor? :edit: yeah 50,000mb is the hard limit to a reactors coolant tank. so a reactor can not convert more then the capacity of this tank, per tick, into steam. no matter how large the reactor.... complicated..... And sadly, even with the most efficient turbine, thats only 583,000RF/tick. far less then the reactor its self can produce for power.

The floodgate sounds like an interesting option if I plan on expanding the reactor. I've been working on it in creative. But even in creative, filling that big of an area, 1 source block at a time, is tedious... And for building up the walls, I've been making use of the extra utilities builders wand. Makes quick work of repetitive tasks like that. I've tested the tall skinny design as well. If you look at this picture Here: In the top center of the picture, you can see the tall thin 7x7x32high reactor I tried making. That thing isn't overly powerful but yeah, it is efficient, relatively. Have to run the control rods on it at 90% to keep the temp down under control, but otherwise acts the same as the 32x32x10 reactor. Main difference is, tall thin reactors are easier to build and work with. The less control rods, the easier it is to adjust the settings on it. And by easier, I mean far less time consuming. But, overall, I have found little difference between tall skinny and short broad reactor designs. They both have similar overall efficiencies once adjusted. The main thing that makes the difference in the design is how much space is available for the internal coolant. For example, in the picture above, just left of center are 2 similar reactors. One has 5 + shaped clusters, the other has 5 larger block clusters. They both have very similar power outputs, but the one with the + shaped clusters has a lot more space between the fuel rods. It has it's control rods at a lower setting and still runs cooler, hence uses less fuel. That reactor can be made taller still if i wanted too. The other design has the control rods all maxed at 90% already and runs a lot hotter, hurting its efficiency, and meaning it can't be made any larger without running the temperature very high. It's interesting stuff here with all the testing. There does seem to be a fall off point though, in reactor efficiency, once you start making them truly big. :EDIT: So Curunir, a reactor shaped to resemble a radiation warning symbol you say? How about This: ? outputs 75KiRF/tick, all control rods can be run at 0%, and it has an unusually high radioactivity level 565%. interesting, no?

How about a 32 x 32 x 10tall reactor? Probably not the max size you can make and still have it work, but it's pretty close too that. The reactor has 205 reactor cores clustered in sets of 5, aligned in the effective "+" shape. The control rods are all set to 80% so I know for sure it can go taller, possibly even another 5 blocks higher. I call it the; "Far-Too-Big-Unless-You-Intend-To-Power-An-Entire-City" Reactor. It's truely huge... This is it's stats. The reactor has a huge amount of power potential from the 205 reactor cores. Each core is 8 blocks tall and the whole thing requires over 6,500 yellorium ingots just too fill it. And it burns through yellowium fast! An ingot every 20-25 seconds. A simple(yeah... nothing is simple when you build on this scale...) adjustment to the control rods, changing them to 90%, drops it's power output by 45%, but also drops its fuel usage by a sizable 60%. making it far more efficient, but also far less impressive. Anyone think they have what it takes to try reproducing this massive reactor and increasing it's height too 32x32x15? (it took me 2 hours to increase its height from 7 --> 10) Or better yet! Build it as is, and convert it to steam generation, then actually try using ALL the steam it would be capable of producing? If my calculations are correct, by using steam from a reactor this large, you'de be able to produce somewhere in the range of 1.3 -1.4 million RF/tick... And THAT is a lot of power.

I is a sad monkey... Hollow carrages and Applied Energistics ME cables do not work together. Probably due to lack of forge multipart support in the ME cables... planetguy: you are both a scolar and a gentleman for keeping this mod going. You have my thanks.

So does redstone in motion. But due to it's size, I think both mods would not allow that perticular ship to move. Not to mention how badly moving the ship would break stuff on it.

Ok now for my actual tech base. This is the Tactical Hovercarrier; Theodore Schmelt. She is a light tactical reconasisce carrier of the Minecraftia 328th Militia. Her design utilizes advanced anti-radar covering and noise reduction technology to allow her to move into hostile regions with low risk of detection. This is a field picture taken by a captured creeper agent. The agent ended his own life before we were able to extract further info from him. Ground view of the carrier, while she hovers over the forest near a suspected enemy stronghold. Recent changes in militia regulations has allowed us to show several declassified pictures of non-sensative parts of this marvelous carrier. Above view of the carrier, taken from a Baracuda assault craft as it circled in for a landing inside the carrier. Note the three long range tactical redeployement shuttles(galacticraft rockets) on the aft of the carrier. A picture of the one still stored Baracuda assault craft, inside the hanger bay of the hovercarrier. The Baracuda is a rugged workhorse of the Minecraftia Militia, with many years of service under it's belt. The view looking forward, inside the hanger bay of the hovercarrier. The hanger has room too hold 2 Baracudas on the launch rails and 1 more in the fore repair and refit area of the hanger. The fore section of the hanger houses all the storage for repairing, refitting and rearming the Baracudas for missions outside the influence of the hovercarriers armaments. The Command and Observation area of the hovercarrier is roomy and has a wide field of view thanks to the lowered deck position and plenty of blast protected canopy. The Commander has good tactical awareness from the center chair and the many displays all at a quick glance from his station. The beating heart of the hovercarrier is it's compact 5 core reactor. Utilizing the potential power inherient in the strange Yellorite ore discovered deep underground, it keeps the whole hovercarrier powered over extended deployment without the need for long and complicated refueling stops. Any supplies needed by the hovercarrier or the Baracudas can easily be supplied by the internal processing and assembly stations inside the lower deck of the hovercarrier. No part is too complex or labor intensive for these stations too handle. And lastly, no hovercarrier is complete without the lift generated by its four Theriton +5100RF/tick, ducted thrust turbo fan lift engines. These amazing engines give the hover carrier it's lengthy staying power and heavy lift capability. Even if one engine should fail for some reason, the others can compinsate, keeping the hovercarrier aloft and mobile while repairs are made. And their durable design means any repairs are few and far between.

Thermal Expansion became a stand alone mod for 1.6.x It has it's own power system and it's own engines, called dynamos. As ThePagen said. To expand on it. Your Pulverizer would run off a steam dynamo instead of a sterling engine. The steam dynamo uses coal and water to produce "Redstone Flux"(RF) the mods new power system. Most of the mods in the newest Tekkit use RF directly and without any problems at all. MJ on the other hand has some limitations, but is still usable by several of the mods like Extra Utilities, Applied Energistics, and of corse Build Craft. Thankfully, the conduits in Thermal Expansion can convert RF too MJ too run your buildcraft stuff. So your main focus should be on generating RF for power, and buildcraft engines are the only power generators in Tekkit that do not generate RF.

I have no problems transfering the fluid back and forth from item form and fluid form via buckets in a fluid terminal. At least as long as the fluid item is still connected strait to the me system. Even inside a DSU with a normal item storage bus attached, it still works just fine, all be it, not the way it was intended to work. I have tested, and after a save and reload of the map, the number of fluid items in the DSU remains the same, but the DSU fills very quickly since each item form of the fluid is only worth 1mb of fluid. or 1/1000 of a bucket. But, any fluid items removed from the DSU by any means other then the storage bus can not be effectively placed back into the DSU and extracted as fluid through the terminal again. This leaves the bug as a high risk for causing loss of fluids you may have stored in your ME system. Loss, that may not be recoverable...

Does a base that is little more then a huge, cluttered, Big Reactors testing complex count? Then I submit the following for my initial base. Big Reactors Testing Complex. It has many reactors, of all sizes, ranging from tiny single rod reactors only capable of outputting less then 130RF/tick, small 5 core reactors producing steam to run the various testing turbines, up to the massive reactors in the bottom left. The biggest, capable of producing 160KiRF/tick, and the ones just to the right of it able to produce over 100KiRF/tick. the building is incomplete, obviously. Working on an actual techy base that is an airship with a big reactors core and 4 small, wide turbines acting as stand in lift engines to keep it aloft. Think of it as a hover carrier. When it's done, I'll post pictures of it here for viewing. :Edit: Yeah, the reactor testing complex is in creative. it covers about 8 x 14 chunks and is by no means finished. I'll probably never stop working on it. This world is where I go when I want to test out ideas with Big Reactors mod. theories, designs, steam transfer systems, water piping systems, turbine designs, and turbine power ring material testing all takes place here.

Confirmed. With the way extra cells handles fluids, it treats them as a fluid display item (4402:0-??). As in, it is no longer the same fluid while in the ME network. Due to this, it may not be regestering the item as a fluid type. So this is what is allowing the storage bus to store water inside the deep storage unit. Also, due to the nature of this fluid item, it does not have an sctual stack size so when you pull some out, your pulling out as much of a stack as it will let you pull out, in my test case, a stack size of 10254... and the stack auto breaks up into the normal 64 stack size if you try placing it into your inventory, the rest spills out onto the floor in item form. This seems to be a bug of some type that lets the storage bus treat it as a normal item, not a fluid. The fluid storage bus does not allow the fluid to be stored in a DSU.

Sounds like a bug. DSU's were not designed to work with ME fluid storage, so apparently nothing has been put in their code to prevent this from being done through a storage bus. It makes me wonder what effect this has on the long term stability of your game if it's allowed to hold a fluid. I would be worried of the game crashing or the map getting corrupted by this happening. So no, this is not an intended action. I have not confirmed this yet, but it sounds like it could either go bad, or may not be much of an issue at all, depending on how this effects the long term of your map. For now, I would say not to use the DSU's interface if you allow this to happen. But then again, DSU's only with with the item ID and number that item, when keeping track of inventory. And, you can store filled buckets in a DSU, through it's interface. So who knows, other then the interface issue, that might be the only bad thing that happens. I'll have to check into this further for sure.

na, would only need 6 tesseracts once setup. 2 on each turbine and 2 on the reactor. you'de need a third coolant port on the reactor to add water initially, and to keep it topped off since some of the steam/water seems to leak out of the system slowly. Seems the larger the reactor, the more "leak" there is, so the more accumulators you'll want hooked up to it. But 1-4 accumulators should be all you need to keep the setup going once everything is full of water(that includes the two turbines waste tanks as well). Too fill the waste tanks on the turbines you only need to let the reactor fill, pulse it on for a few seconds to send steam to the turbines, then turn it off again and let the reactor refill. this should have your turbines waste tanks full now of water. At this point, with your reactor filled with water, and the turbines waste tanks full of water, you should be able to send water from your turbines back to your reactor, start up the reactor again, and leave it running non-stop.

Liquiducts could not keep up with that high of steam/water flow. tesseracts or extra utilities transfer pipes would have to be used. or linking the reactor and turbines directly by building them in contact with each other. the turbines can be veritcal instead of horizontal. if the number of blades in the turbines were increased to between 34-40 blades, the steam requirements of each could be dropped to below 900 without loosing power output. meaning you could have 4 turbines, each outputting over 10,000RF/tick run off the same 3500mb steam. You'de just have to make the turbines considerably bigger.

Not a bad looking setup, but yeah tighter packing of the rods, with enough coolant between them and the sides of the reactor, allows the reactor to be slightly more efficient. But the difference only matters over a LONG time of running the reactor. And if you've got a quarry or laser drill bringing in yellorium, the added efficiency this would allow isn't that important. All told, you could probably reduce the amount of coolant needed by a collumn or two with the + design but... Your design is simple, upgradable, and looks clean. Nicely done. The most important thing to remember here is: Are YOU happy with the reactor? If so, I would call that a win.

Not sure if that would work too well. The power tool it's self IS the axe. The axe upgrade only adds a multiplier to how fast it can chop(aka upgrading it from worse then wood, too better then diamond if you turn it up high enough). So if adding the power tools ID to the list does not work, then I'm not sure here. As for slowing it down, the two mods might be conflicting with each other, or the mod simply doesn't recognize the axe tool as a true axe, but still tries to apply the "alter speed to simulate chopping the whole tree" effect.

Are both tanks chunk loaded using a chunkloader or dimensional anchor? Are both tanks input/output set correctly? If they are not set, they should not work at all, even if you are there to watch it. So if they work while you are near them, then this is not the issue. Do they only have problems when you exit or reload the map? if so, then the chunk loaders just need to be "tapped" to keep working correctly. "tapping" only requires going near then, so going to the nether for example, and going close enough to the chunk loader/endertank that you can see them in the distance, then going back to the overworld. If your on a server, the server owner may have disabled chunk loading while the players are logged off. You'de have to ask the server owner if this is happening. (this is done to minimize server load so the game runs better on higher population servers. But not all servers do this, it is not done by default.)

If you sending all the waste water from your turbine back to your reactor, that alone should make it self sustainable. But I guess that does require that you have waste water in your turbine to begin with. You'll need to let the coolant level in your reactor completely fill before turning it on. let your turbine use the steam produced to fill it's coolant tank, once this is full shut down your reactor and let it's tank fill up again. once that is done, there should be enough water in the two devices that they can keep each other filled. Just make sure your turbine is NOT set to dump all waste. Have it set to only dump the excess waste. Having it dump all waste works if you use another method to keep your reactor filled. Reactor steam --> turbine Turbine water --> reactor on seperate tesseract channels otherwise they will get steam and water mixed. You'll need seperate coolant ports for both steam output and water input in your reactor. and each tesseract is linked with seperate ones on the steam input and waste water output on your turbine. With that setup, you'll only need a small input of water, going into a third coolant port on your reactor to make sure it stays topped off. And the extra water input should only be Other option is as TokiWartooth said. make an infanite water source. Place a fluid transfer node directly above it and use transfer pipes to connect that to your reactors coolant input port. Right click on the fluid transfer node and place at least 32 speed upgrades and 32 mining upgrades in the node, you need to have both upgrades in it. You might have to make it a full stack of 64 of both if 32 is still not enough. At 64 of both speed and mining upgrades the transfer node can move up to 8,000mb of water per tick from the infanite water source.

Or, if your using a turbine, use a second set of tesseracts to return the water from your turbine too your reactor. then a single auqeous accumulator is all you'll need to keep your reactor topped off.

Mekanism has always had a hit and miss like/hate problem with Tekkit. Some of the stuff is cool, other stuff is redundant, while the rest is just silly(both good and bad). It's had bouts of instability and has been in and out of the pack several times. So to be honest, I don't really know if it will ever be back in this version of Tekkit. But you could always try adding it in to your game yourself for playing single player.

That entirely depends on the server. Some servers allow chunk loaders to operate while the owner is not logged in, some have plugins that turn them off when the owner logs off. It's just a matter of preference of the server owner. By turning off chunk loaders when their owner is offline, this tends to allow the server to run a bit faster.

Ah, that's something I missed then. Thanks catching that mistake viesiu.