Question on Solar Panel Arrays

[zorn]

Im wondering about Solar Arrays and MFEs and MFSUs.

I have 3 med voltage Solar arrays at one base, going into glass fibre cable. The cable goes to a T, where one side goes to an MFE and the other leg goes to a line of 4 MFEs in a series.

it seems there is 192 EU/t coming down my main fibre cable, does the first MFE just take 128 EU/t and the rest continues on with the cable? If I had not made a T of the fibre, and just sent all of the solar array power to an MFE, would it have blown up, due to too much power?

[DiscordianAgent]

The issue in ic2 power is "packet size" - you can plug in any number of power generators along a line and it will work fine, provided no packets they create are too big for the thing receiving them. For instance, the mass fabricator has a limit of 512 packets ("hv"), so many erroneously think they can only attach it to say, 1 msfu (which gives 512 out). They could actually plug in 4 mfsu's in parallel along the line and the massfab will be getting 2040 a tick in 4 packets, and will hum along 4x faster. What you can't do is plug the massfab in to a nuclear reactor that puts out, say, 550 eu, as this is too big a packet now. You could however put a hv transformer on the reactor and use this to convert it into 512 packets, it will break them into 512 size and give 2 every once in a while when the remainder totals up to 512.

[zorn]

yes but lets say i have an MFE hooked up to 6 MV solars, is the MFE able to even get all of the power from them from one cable? Or should i have 2 MV solars on one cable to one side, then another 2 hooked to a different cable running to another side of it.

So, lets say i put 10 mv solars on one fibre cable, and hooked it up to an MFE. What happens? The packet size of each unit is the same, right? Medium voltage? But can all those solars squeeze their packets into one MFE?

[MaxHawkes]

3 med voltage, Right. That does not need transforming, Secondly. I belive so.

[DiscordianAgent]

So, lets say i put 10 mv solars on one fibre cable, and hooked it up to an MFE. What happens? The packet size of each unit is the same, right? Medium voltage? But can all those solars squeeze their packets into one MFE?

Yes, the MFE will get 10 packets of MV power per tic. The only limit is on size of energy in one packet, not on number of packets that can come down a line from generating sources.

To go a bit further on this idea tho consider how useful that setup actually is - 10 MV packets are going in to the mfe and one is going out each tic, so it's storing 9/tic. This should fill the mfe rather quickly, at which point, every packet that can't find a home is just wasted. The general reason you'd want that mfe in the first place would be to save the solar power for night time, in which case you'd want a much bigger pool to fill, like several mfe's hooked up in series, or, possibly one mfsu hooked straight to a MV transformer. I often see people in online games making bad designs with batboxes, like too much power going in (once saw a watermill setup that made 50eu/t continuously into a batbox that could only output 32) or too much going out (1 HV solar going into 1 mfsu going into a massfab, had no point, the mfsu never built up any excess power to run at night because it was outputting the same amount as it was inputting).

You can always snake a cable around the mfe and into the line it is outputting to, then when the battery is full the packets just take a path around it and keep flowing into things down the line, this avoids the 'choke' issue.

[Industrial Miner]

Lets put it in this way:

You have a tube (the wire) with holes in it. You have different sizes of M&Ms. You pour those M&Ms down the tube. If the tube is large enough, bigger than the biggest M&M, it won't fry the tube. And now all those M&Ms go into your machines. Lets say, you put them in a LV machine, the electric furnace. If the M&M is bigger than size 32, the furnace will blow up.

Back to the tube: You see, it doesn't matter how many M&Ms you put in it at once, the M&Ms don't fuse all their energy into one big M&M. So you can put in like 500 M&M's with the size 32 into a tube and it won't matter. The tube will transport as many M&Ms as it can take as long as every M&M isn't bigger than the tube itself.

But the only machines which do fuse the M&Ms together are batboxes, MFE's, MFSU's and the transformers in reversed mode (you input power into the smaller dots and take it out on the 3-dotted side, only if you add a redstone signal to the transformer).

But now to the holes part: You see, all of those small M&Ms lose a bit of their weight after they pass a hole, which is different for each wire. If you transport the small-sized M&Ms through a wire, each one will lose a bit of their weight (their energy). So you'll lose more energy if you transport it in the smallest size (voltage). So it's better to transport large amounts of power in HV/EV.

[DiscordianAgent]

That analogy works, I saw another one on the ic2 forums comparing it to magic power gnomes but yeah, same idea.

Actually if we're getting deep on this I will admit I am confused on one point myself: how is power absorbed by receiving devices? Like, I have seen times where having 3 massively overclocked devices on a line fed by a single MFSU has resulted in some devices failing to get enough power when all three are running, but then putting another MFSU onto the line left them working fine. Is the power wanted just subtracted from the packet in the line? In that case, there are 2 packets going, does one get depleted and then the other?

I just go caveman on it, if I overclock them and they still don't have enough power, then it's time for MOAH POWAH, forget all the thinking about it.... once the game has gotten to that point resources are usually not the challenge so why not have the AE assembler spit out another HV solar :-)

[Industrial Miner]

The machines just extract the power from thuie energy source. But the rate at which the power can be supplied is limited at howmuch the energy source can provide in a single packet.

And if the received packet is more than the machine needed, it will fill up the machine's power reserve and also take up the rest of the energy inside the packet. This is only when the receiving machine can accept the size of the packet.

But back to the power failure: You see, by having one MFSU, you can provide your machines a total of 512EU/t. And if all the energy costs of all the machines combined is bigger than the 512 EU/t, you won't have as much power to power them all at thesame time.

So by placing more parallel storage units, you can provide power at a much bigger rate than when you place the storage units in serial. Two MFSU's will give you 1024EU/t in two 512EU/t packets and 4 MFSU's will give 2048EU/t in four packets of 512 EU/t.

[zorn]

So an MFSU can actaully take say... 1 million EU into it in one *tick*, it just cant take it from a machine that is sending packets larger than 512?

The confusing part is that they say it can only take 512EU/t, which implies that it can only accept 512 EU PER unit of time. By puttin 2 HV solars on it, it is receiving 1024 EU per tick, its just receiving 2 packets per tick, not one larger one.

And say... fibre cable can basically carry as much current as you want, just in 512 packets. It could transport a zillion EU per tick, just only in 512 EU packets.

i kind of wish they set it up how I thought it worked, it would be more complex. A fibre cable handles 512 EU/t, if you put two HV solars on it, that is more energy per unit of time going down the cable, and it melts, like a real cable would if you put 100 amps on a 10 amp line (if the voltage was the same, then the power would be 10 times greaterthan the cable was designed to handle.)

[Industrial Miner]

You're kinda right on the part with the MFSU being able to take any amount of packets up to HV. And if there is a energy source that sends off >the maximum voltage than the machine can take, it could fry your cable first if that can't take the voltage, and if they could, the machine will blow up when it gets the first packet which is higher than the machine could handle.

[DiscordianAgent]

I was thinking about this the other day and I realized it actually IS a lot like amperage vs voltage, in that IRL, Watts = Volts x Amps, and in IC2, it's that Power = Packet Size x Number of Packets. I hadn't realized this until I started shocking myself on a copper cable that hadn't shocked me previously, because I switched up to nuclear and added a MV transformer coming off, so it was 4 packets coming down instead of the 1 I'd had before.