Gildan27

FYI, before I expanded my biofuel setup, I decided to do some tests on the Laser Drill in the continued spirit of experimentation and efficiency. I found that a Laser Drill running at maximum power requires 400MJ/t. If you set up the following: http://imgur.com/FKuIUeA ...and set all the Energy Cells to output 100MJ/t, that Precharger only draws from one Energy Cell, showing that it does not draw more than 100MJ/t. If you then drop the one that it is pulling power from to 95MJ/t maximum output, it will start pulling from another one as well, meaning that it draws 100MJ/t (well this proves it draws 96-100, but there's no way to give something 96MJ/t, so you'd have to do 100MJ/t anyway). That is, in the unlikely event that it's not just straight 100MJ/t (had to be thorough). Therefore, the entire system needs 400MJ/t to run at maximum power. I'm very much looking forward to having this block.

Nice, it would be fun to see some screenshots!

Yeah, at maximum speed, I think I figured it would take about 6 months before the DSUs filled all the way. The the reason I added it was so I don't have to listen to it running all the time, it's super annoying to listen to all those leaves breaking all the time. Although that was before the ComputerCraft computer that only runs it at night...

I haven't done anything with RedNet yet, I just needed it working and knew how to do it quickly with good old-fashioned Redstone. There's another latch back there for the on/off/auto switch, so the space back there is getting pretty cramped. Thanks for the tip, I'll look at RedNet for sure as the next enhancement to the system.

Correct, it is just powering/unpowering tesseracts. It seemed the simplest way. I believe that there's a way to use redstone signals to control the export busses (which would be less expensive), but I had hit or miss luck getting them to respond reliably and gave up. They're all wired to one "master" tesseract, which allows for a master power off. For the level controllers, basically, yeah... it has two sides for each one, an upper side and a lower side. For example, if there was just one level emiter to output at 9999, it would shut it off at 9999. Then the Bio Reactor would use one of that item and kick it on again. So it would basically run constantly once it hit 9999. I thought this would be annoying after a while and might mess with my fertilizer production (if they were all trying to run at the same time). That's why I added the lower one as well, to let it be off within a range. I'm using the tileable RS NOR latch from here: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/892820-ultimate-collection-of-redstone-circuits/#RS, #7

Whoa, wait, you mean there is a justifiable reason to add more power? And yeah, your reply got in while I was still typing that ^ up. To clarify, the Planters and Fertilizers are full of items via the ME Network and will thus instantly plant/fertilize/harvest each item on its own as long as there is power. The system cuts power from the tesseracts in the control room for each item to manage the levels as needed. Edit: Just read http://wiki.technicpack.net/Laser_Drill, I will be needing one for sure (for glowstone and Nether Quartz). I wonder how much "an extraordinary amount of power" is?

Yeah, this is I think the third iteration of this design; the second versions ran off of potatoes and oak saplings, and it was constantly needing babysitting (taking items in and out), and having my two quarries run out of power all the time. This setup was created and designed to solve these problems. To answer the questions: 1). This was designed prior to my having any grasp of how much power was too much, and I figured that more was better (of course). Right now, it powers the power plant (aka, the farm), three quarries, a resource management area (pulverizes ores, makes ingots while maintaining certain dust levels, and maintains certain levels of other things like sand and glass), two ME networks, and two work areas. I'll be adding a rapid armor charging station and some kind of backup power grid (haven't worked that out yet), an automatic crafting area, and some kind of mob-killer, with which I hope to get a steady supply of Shards of Minium, with which I hope to auto-mass convert the hundreds of thousands of wood blocks from the plant to diamonds via EE3. I don't know if this will be possible, but that's the eventual plan. But all that is probably all less than 100MJ/t. My original design actually was set up to have four of those "power cores," but I don't think I will make them at this point, now that I see how much power things actually need... 2). Ah yes... the original idea was to have 1x1 farms for each item in the following pattern: wxwxwxwxwxwxwxw ... where w is wood and x is dirt/planted item. The reason for 1x1 farms is because of fertilizer. Fertilizer is the backbone of the system: the sheep need to produce enough sewage per tick to create enough fertilizer to run the plant and not have a net loss of fertilizer. 23 sheep for one sewer/composter is enough to keep one tree going constantly (plant, fertilize, harvest) without a net loss in fertilizer or waiting for anything. I believe (but did not fully test) that Fertilizers fertilize faster than Harvesters harvest, so having more trees would upset the 23 sheep to 1 tree balance. One of the Wikis says that a sewer can't handle more than 8 animals, but that is incorrect (it's easily testable and disprovable). It's 23-24 sheep per sewer max if you don't connect the sewer to the composter with pipes. While I have enough space for 10 PETA-unfriendly pods of sheep, I don't have them all full. I think only 6 of them are full. The reason for this is, that breeding 240 sheep and moving them in there with Safari Nets is horribly time-consuming and boring, and also, I have set the levels for fertilizer to be so high that even if the system ran all night, it wouldn't deplete what I have in store. This would probably solve the 1 tree to 23 sheep balance problem as well, but this was a later revelation and the building was already sized and built. If I'm correct about fertilizer, you might be able to produce more items in less time, but you'd need more fertilizer. If I'm not correct, then I don't think a larger farm would accumulate items any faster than a 1x1 one. More testing would be needed. I did have to expand it as you see because some of the trees (spruce and birch, I think), don't want to grow if there are non-transparent blocks (aka, other trees) within a certain radius. So I took the whole thing back out and made it bigger, separating the ones that don't want to grow near each other with the other items (seeds, netherwart, potatoes, carrots). The structure was already sized at this point and I did not explore other designs with larger farms. The thing with seeds, netherwart, potatoes, and carrots is that they don't grow instantly, they have three or four levels until they are ready to be harvested, unlike saplings, which use one fertilizer to be fully grown. So those items go through three or four times the fertilizer as the saplings. Seeds further complicate this because I do not think they always drop more seeds when you harvest them. As a result, my seed production lagged a little. I added the strip of seeds (the 1x3) to see if it would accumulate faster, and I think it does, because as said above, I think that Fertilizers put out fertilizer faster than Harvesters harvest. That's not fully tested because I soon realized that I was going to have a zillion saplings and 3000 seeds unless I had a way to regulate each item on its own, which I then did. Sorry it was long, and hopefully it helps. Thanks for the interest. I love talking about efficiency and making things more efficient, any suggestions or further questions are welcome.

No problem. I had previously done some math wrong and thought that Biofuel Generators produce 30MJ/t instead of 15MJ/t, so this was helpful for me as well. If it's useful to you or the OP or anyone, here's a quick runthrough of my power generation system: http://imgur.com/a/1StxZ

I have concluded that ratio is 1 Bio Reactor for every 10 Biofuel Generators. Here were my findings: First, we need to establish a system that draws the maximum power provided by a set of Biofuel Generators. I have created the following to do this: If you fill the Biofuel Generators with Biofuel and set the inputs and outputs of both Energy Cells to 90 with this setup, the middle one does not have any net gain or loss, and the one on the right charges up. It therefore has 90MJ/t going in and 90MJ/t going out with no net gain or loss of MJ. If you add another Biofuel Generator, the middle one will see a gain, and if you take one away, the middle one will see a loss. If you change the inputs/outputs to 95, the middle one sees a net loss. Therefore, I conclude that six Biofuel Generators produce an effective 90MJ/t, or an effective 15MJ/t each. I say "effective" because we are losing some power to the cables. There will always be cables. In any case, this setup pulls off all the power generated by the Biofuel Generators. Now we add a Bio Reactor with nine types of items in it, and pipes and let the system fill fully with Biofuel: Letting this run, we see that the buffer in the Bio Reactor never drops below 5000, and the internal Biofuel storage is never touched. We therefore need to scale this out until the internal Biofuel storage in the Bio Reactor starts to see a drop (that is, there is no longer enough Biofuel to run the system). Adding a second one of these (12 Biofuel Generators), it is clear that the internal Biofuel storage starts to operate at a loss, with the number continuing to drop slowly, so the magic number is somewhere between 6 and 12: Now that we know that 6 Biofuel Generators can produce 90MJ/t, as long as we attempt to pull more than that, we can simply remove Biofuel Generators and know that we're still pulling the maximum that we can. Removing one still operated at a loss, but removing the second one causes the internal storage of the Bio Reactor to go up and down +/- 100MB, but never having any overall net gain or loss. Therefore, I conclude that one Bio Reactor can produce enough Biofuel to keep 10 Biofuel Generators fully stocked at maximum power output. This produces 130MJ/t.

I'm a lurker, but thought I'd chime in. I think the ratio is pretty high, I could do some testing later to see. I had two Biofuel Reactors running with 9 items each, and I had 48 Biofuel Generators running on that and no matter how much power I pulled, I couldn't make the levels in my tanks drop (two quarries, a plant farm, a large ME network, and a quarry processing area, etc.). Although, 48 Biofuel Generators is a lot of power, so perhaps the levels never went down because there was no way to use all the power/biofuel without running a much larger amount of power than I actually am. I added another set of 48 Biofuel Generators last night, and then I started having problems keeping enough Biofuel. I'll do some tests this afternoon in Creative and see if I can help answer this question. I'd think a good test would be to make a system that is pulling all the power generated by a set of Biofuel Generators, and then seeing what it takes to keep up.