New low value for Uranium ore

[Weylin]

Uranium used to be worth 6 diamonds, now it's worth half a diamond.

I'm a little concerned about this, because while it does make it harder to acquire diamonds, it also makes it much easier to produce Uranium ore.

At this point, the breeder reactor seems to have lost its usefulness.

It's an expensive, risky, complex, and time consuming reactor to set up, and if ample fuel can be acquired with tier 1 collectors, I don't much see the point anymore.

I'm leaning more towards not allowing it to transmute at all, or making the process of refining uranium a much more time consuming and complex process than shoving it in a compressor.

Something that would require a whole operation to be set up, so regardless of how much uranium ore you have, you'd still need to process it.

Not saying EE should be removed or anything, though normally me and my friends greatly limit our use of it, or kind of forbid any systems that combine tech and magic because of the various exploits.

[gavjenks]

If you're using EE on your server in conjunction with IC2 in the first place, then it's alreayd horribly horribly broken and imbalanced. Uranium makes no difference.

Why would you even bother with nuclear reactors at all? With like 20 cheap geothermal reactors, you can output as much as even a beefed up externally cooled nuke reactor, and just EE yourself magical lava cells... And no risk of blowing up or having to learn complicated reactor stuff. Or EE yourself coal and glass and copper and rubber and make multiple thousands of EU/t solar arrays with no effort aside from setting up a very simple factory.

You're worrying about a tiny leak in a ship that is already underwater.

[Weylin]

We allow EE, but we keep it the hell away from everything else.

As you just pointed out, sooo many ways to use it that just turn it into easy-mode.

[Wixo]

EE just adds a different form of gameplay into Tekkit. How else would we have Mark I nuclear reactors with 1300 EU/T output? While it can cause horrible consequences on larger servers it's just perfect for 10-15 slot servers

[warpspeed10]

You're worrying about a tiny leak in a ship that is already underwater.

Hehe well said.

[gavjenks]

EE just adds a different form of gameplay into Tekkit. How else would we have Mark I nuclear reactors with 1300 EU/T output? While it can cause horrible consequences on larger servers it's just perfect for 10-15 slot servers

Eh? I have done this before without EE and without really all that much effort. A bunch of BC pumps in little pools of water constantly pumping water into a tank. The water is drawn off with railcraft liquid loaders into buckets, which are pushed aroudn by buildcraft transposers and pipes.

Constantly, full buckets get pumped into the reactor and empty buckets get pulled out. 1500 EU/tick requires 6 buckets per second, which is very very doable with several filters/transposers and a lot of pumps.

The uranium for such a device is pretty easy to obtain without EE too if you are running 4 or so autominers (IC2) in the fields nearby.

Any machine can be made without EE... The only thing you would "NEED" EE for is if you're making huge creative architectural works out of exotic materials. And if that's what your main goal is, why the hell are you playing tekkit, instead of creative mode or using mods that dupe things or voxelsniper, etc. on a creative server, where you don't have to do any work for your materials?

[littleweseth]

Constantly, full buckets get pumped into the reactor and empty buckets get pulled out. 1500 EU/tick requires 6 buckets per second, which is very very doable with several filters/transposers and a lot of pumps.

I've found that RP2 Relays are very good for inserting water buckets, and retrievers are very good for pulling the empty buckets back out.

[gavjenks]

I've found that RP2 Relays are very good for inserting water buckets, and retrievers are very good for pulling the empty buckets back out.

Why spend all those extra resources? Buckets can't stack, so there's no benefit to having relays and retrievers over the humble transposer (and filters for choosing specifically empty buckets from the reactor).

Transposers also have internal storage, as do the tubes in between them and the reactor (stuff will bounce around until there's room for it), so the chest space of a relay is not needed either.

And there's no real benefit to having a machine on the receiving end instead of right next to the reactor, either. Since you can put and take things in and from reactor CHAMBERS, as well as a reactor core, there is no shortage of spots for pipes to go.

[littleweseth]

Why spend all those extra resources? Buckets can't stack, so there's no benefit to having relays and retrievers over the humble transposer (and filters for choosing specifically empty buckets from the reactor).

Transposers also have internal storage, as do the tubes in between them and the reactor (stuff will bounce around until there's room for it), so the chest space of a relay is not needed either.

And there's no real benefit to having a machine on the receiving end instead of right next to the reactor, either. Since you can put and take things in and from reactor CHAMBERS, as well as a reactor core, there is no shortage of spots for pipes to go.

Space near the reactor is limited. Retrievers can be on the other end of a tube, so they don't have to be butted up against the reactor (and taking up valuable space!)

This is important when you try to reach flow rates of ten buckets per second in an 1800-2000 EU/t setup. With that many uranium cells, and that few water bucket spaces, you have to extract the spent buckets very very quickly. Eight RP2 retrievers on a fast timer does that quite well.

[gavjenks]

Every filter or transposer can easily handle 2 buckets per second (they are very stable on timers set at down to 0.4 seconds, even, which is more than 2/s). And for 2000 EU/t you only need 8 buckets per second. The 0.4 second timer plus the cooling of the chambers and reactor itself provide safety margins.

So you would need 4 inputs and 4 outputs, as well as one HV wire output for energy.

A core with 6 chambers has a space way on the end of each chamber (6 total). Give these priority as places for outputs with direct filter attachments. Then there are 8 other spots (4 on top, 4 on bottom) you can send in tubes by snaking them in crookedly without hitting the other tubes. Then the HV cable can still go in many places after that, because it won't interact with tubes.

Thus, it is possible to get up to 6 tube inputs and 8 tube outputs as well as an HV cable, without retrievers or relays. Yet you only need 4 and 4. Not a problem. If you wanted 7 and 7, you would need relays, but that would be 3500 cooling per second, which is more cooling than any reactor can physically ever need, by almost a factor of 2.

Also, BuildCraft advanced wooden transport tubes + redstone engines can actually pump out empty buckets out faster, I think, so you could free up additional inputs for redpower that way, too.

[Weylin]

What about using a snow golem, a block breaker, and a compressor?

[bwillb]

What about using a snow golem, a block breaker, and a compressor?

yeah that would be a nice way to get unlimited ice. snow golem prancing about, block breakers taking the snowballs, obsidian pipe or something to pull the snowballs into the compressor

[gavjenks]

Compressors use an arseload of energy, so if you use ice, then you end up effectively reducing the output of your generator by half just to run the compressors. Pumps use virtually no energy, or literally none if you use BC pumps. Thus, a 2000 EU/t reactor isn't possible with ice cooling, because you have to subtract the energy used to make the ice, which is 50% if starting from water, and 25% if starting from snow.

A full size reactor crammed with uranium only produces 2400 EU/t, and you can't have that much anyway since you need a space for buckets or ice. So 2000 is about max, and with 50% used for compressors, you can only get about 1000 EU/t, and you're also being very wasteful of uranium.

A snow golem gets you up to 1500 EU/tick, but at the cost of a vastly more complicated machine (they die eventually, so you have to have an automated pumpkin farm, snow block factory, snow golem factory, etc. for it to be truly sustainable). Much mroe complicated than the water pumps would have been. And you're still coming up short and being wasteful of uranium, for no particular benefit.

[Valkon]

A full size reactor crammed with uranium only produces 2400 EU/t, and you can't have that much anyway since you need a space for buckets or ice.

Not if you use an MFFS Reactor Heat Control unit.

[gavjenks]

Not if you use an MFFS Reactor Heat Control unit.

Pretty crappy option, considering that an ice block placed in the MFFS reactor heat unit only gives 100 units of cooling, while an ice block in the core gives 300...

Since, again, compressors use so much energy, this is a huge dealbreaker, since making enough ice now uses virtually all of the energy from your reactor, causing you to end up worse off than you would have been cooling the reactor without the MFFS thing.

Depending on how you make your ice, it is possible that it would actually take MORE energy to cool the reactor with an MFFS than you get out of the reactor for that additional cooling. Meaning you'd have to input power to the system just to keep it running... *facepalm*

Either that, or the only documentation that seems to exist on this block on the whole itnernet is wrong.

[Torezu]

Depending on how you make your ice, it is possible that it would actually take MORE energy to cool the reactor with an MFFS than you get out of the reactor for that additional cooling. Meaning you'd have to input power to the system just to keep it running... *facepalm*

Regular compressor: 625 EU/operation. 2000 EU/t reactor: call it 8 ice blocks/second to cool. EU output of reactor: 40,000 EU/second vs. EU input required for ice: 5,000 EU/second.

Yes, it's 1/8 of the reactor output. But that's not horrible. Singularity compressors would probably make this more efficient.

[gavjenks]

water -> snow = one operation. 625 EU

snow -> ice = another operation. 1250 EU total.

1 ice = 300 cooling normally, thus allowing an additional 300 EU/tick, which is 6000 EU for the full second that cooling is calculated over.

1250/6000 = about 1/5. Okay not as bad as I thought.

However, if you only get 100 cooling per ice (which is what the MFFS documentation says you get if you choose to put it in their temp control unit), then it is 3/5 of your output. And if you have the compressor on any overclockers at all, then you will probably be using more power than you create to make ice.

Yes a singularity compressor might work.

[warpspeed10]

water -> snow = one operation. 625 EU

snow -> ice = another operation. 1250 EU total.

1 ice = 300 cooling normally, thus allowing an additional 300 EU/tick, which is 6000 EU for the full second that cooling is calculated over.

1250/6000 = about 1/5. Okay not as bad as I thought.

However, if you only get 100 cooling per ice (which is what the MFFS documentation says you get if you choose to put it in their temp control unit), then it is 3/5 of your output. And if you have the compressor on any overclockers at all, then you will probably be using more power than you create to make ice.

Yes a singularity compressor might work.

Snowmen