New Tekkit player needs YOUR advice!

[dekonig]

Hey all, brand new player to tekkit here, need some general guidance.

First off, I'm not too sure of the behaviour of the various forms of power. In real life, electricity has both a current and a voltage, but the tekkit power systems of course don't have this. Do the various power systems then act in the same was current does, or in the same way voltage does?

For instance:

In this situation, if you imagine the bottom branch of the Y shaped cable is receiving a power input of 32EU/t from a batbox, what will the power output be from each of the two top branches? 16EU/t each? or 32EU/t?

In another case, if I have two generators of some kind inputting power of 5EU/t into the top branches, will the bottom branch be outputting 10EU/t, i.e. a combination of the two inputs?

My second question has to do with this little geothermal rig that I have set up:

I'm not too sure how I should go about rigging up the power for these guys. Right now I have two batboxes set up underground, each connected to two geothermal generators. One of these batboxes is linked to my 4Xoverclocked macerator, and the other to a 4Xoverclocked electric furnace in my ore processing system. I'm really not sure if this is an efficient use of the power.

Should I connect all 4 to one energy storage device? Should each of my basic machines have a dedicated batbox, or will one batbox linked to both do? What should my next step be? Conceivably this geothermal rig could be set up to supply a very large number of geothermal generators, probably anywhere from 8-16 of them all linked to this one lava tank, but I'm not too sure what to do with the power.

This a picture of the underground batbox system I have linked up:

Each of the four cables is connected to a geothermal generator. I wasn't sure how the power and the cables would behave if they were interconnected, so to be safe i made sure they were all at least a block apart from each other to prevent them from linking to each other.

Finally, here is a shot of my magmatic power rig:

In the north branch, you can see I've only set up one of the 5 magmatic engines. I'm not entirely sure whether my wiring is efficiently transmitting all of the power out of the phase pipe seen at the top. Since there's currently 6 magmatic engines pumping at 4MJ/t, would I be right in saying that my quarry, which is connected to the other end of that phase conductive pipe, is currently receiving 24MJ/t of power?

Thanks very much for your time. If you spot any dangerous oversights with regards to any of my rigs, please let me know. Only been playing minecraft for about a week so this is all new to me.

[plowmanplow]

Reading through the IndustrialCraft wiki may help you get a better idea about how the systems (other than the magmatic engines) operate. Specifically, look for detail on these topics:

1) Different cable types and their capacities and loss/block specs

2) It is almost always better to just line up your geothermals in a row and feed them all with lava that way, then connect their power output to a single (or chained) storage unit

3) IC2 power can be confusing when considering EU/t and EU/p (that's "t"=tick and "p"=packet). For instance: a machine that says it won't take anything over LV (like an electric furnace) can only take Low Voltage which is voltage in the form of a packet that has no more than 32 UE in it. It can USE a lot more than 32EU/t if you put a lot of overclockers in it and can hook up multiple storage devices to its power input. If you have 4 geothermals generating 20 EU/t each and hook them up to a batbox (or MFE/MFSU) the storage device will charge at a rate of 80 EU/t from 4 sets of 20 EU/t geothermals outputting packets of 32 EU/p (it doesn't output a packet until it fills it up which takes more than 1 tick since the generator is only making 20 EU/t). This is one of the reasons that all the machines have "storage" built in to help buffer this packet size vs. EU/t flow.

4) I know it can take a bit to set up (later in game), but Gates/Autarchic Gates from BC are awesome for doing what you are doing with redstone engines on those pipes (and you might look at emerald as a replacement for the wooden for extraction)

5) Anything but gold conductive pipe can incur quite a bit of loss in transmission. Consider upgrading.

6) On that note, consider upgrading to Redstone Energy Conduits. They are superior to BC conductive pipes in almost every regard (for instance, they don't explode) (part of Thermal Expansion)

7) You may also consider (once you get going with TE) putting in a Redstone Energy Cell. It acts similar to a Batbox/MFE/MFSU but for BC power instead of IC2.

[dekonig]

wow that ticks vs packets thing is pretty hard to grasp.. I shall go read the IC wiki.

Do gates actually improve the efficiency of my setup? As far as I can tell they would only function to turn off the lava supply when its not being used, but seeing as Magmatic Engines don't explode regardless, do such gates have any efficiency or safety function?

I shall replace my conductive pipes for gold ones, after which I guess the main focus will be to finish another 4 magmatic engines to power my quarry at close to full speed, after which I'll go into building the TE machinery. I find BC so much easier to work with than IC is - the LV/MV/HV really complicates things.

[plowmanplow]

Gates allow you to make a pipe automatically move the liquid so that if you put an emerald waterproof pipe on a lava tank and apply a gate set to pulse if liquid is in the tank then it will keep your pipe network full all the time. Thermal expansion (to my knowledge) is more efficient in terms of CPU load for many things compared to BC so you might have better results using what you can from there for liquid and power transmission, with the caveat that you currently cannot attach BC gates to TE conduits and liquiducts.

As for your magmatics on the quarry, keep in mind that a quarry needs power to not only move the gantry, but to actually break the blocks so in order to move a gantry at max speed, and provide the power to break those blocks you will need a supply slightly north of 48MJ/t. Admittedly, at this rate, the quarry is nigh unto hilarious to watch, and possibly overkill. I also believe it is slightly less efficient at this speed, but WHO CARES hehe, it is freaking fast.

[dekonig]

Ah I see! I've begun the process of converting my piping to TE pipes, which was quite hard in the beginning cause TE's material requirements can get pretty obscure... Currently I've set up an oil refinery rig. The refinery's output is phased to a large tank in my power station, and the fuel is then used to power a pair of combustion engines that are phased to power the refinery. I've connected a further two combustion engines to the fuel tank, and their output is routed into a redstone energy cell, and from there the power is routed to my various TE machinery.

In the long term I'd like to unify the combustion power system into a single storage, from which point it can be routed to wherever requires power. In this regard, I guess I could link all four of my combustion engines to a single energy cell, and use a tesseract to route power to my refinery as well as machinery? Unfortunately, because Gates don't work with TE pipes, I'm not sure how to set it up so that the combustion engines will turn off if the redstone energy cell is full. Also, how many combustion engines can I reliably link to one energy cell without it being loaded up to full too quickly?

Finally, if my redstone energy cell is outputting at 100MJ/t and I have it linked to both a refinery as well as a quarry, how will the game decide how much power to output to each of them?

[plowmanplow]

The BC machines will simply use up the the max power they have been designed to use (check BC wiki to find out exact numbers)

You can put a structure pipe on a energy cell which will allow you to place a gate on it providing you a mechanism to output a redstone signal when the storage cell is full (or vice verse) to control power to your engines.

[jackguo380]

Just a quick note that you should almost NEVER use stone conductive pipes (Unless your poor to death, and seriously need a conductive system) they lose 10% of the power per BLOCK... so after like a few blocks you only got 60% of your power left... Remember that copper cable is also very high loss, i believe its 0.25 eu/block (1 Eu every 4 blocks) Its not huge but overtime it builds up. Plus it doesnt really matter how you hook up the power as long as the machines have the right voltage and are connected it should work ok. BTW overclockers are a huge waste of power, you should use them only if you got plenty of power to spare and not a lot of time. and try out Thermal Expansion machines their quite nice, very simple too compared to IC2 (Bonus! they dont explode...)

[dekonig]

Well my Rig of 8 combustion engines were doing a fine job of running my refinery and quarry, up until they all suddenly blew up this afternoon. Still picking through the rubble and trying to figure out what happened, maybe my pumps failed or my energy cell got full up and the engines were building up heat? Anyway I had to stop quarry and refinery production for now, probably gonna rebuild a new combustion plant, this time with autarchic gates set up to stop the engines when the cell is full?

[plowmanplow]

Yes, you can put a BC structure pipe on the cell with a regular gate to put out a signal when the cell is full, or on one of the pipes connected to the engines to turn them off when they get past a certain heat level.