Atomic Science Fuel Life Config?

[LostInTheWired]

We've been having fun with the new stuff in the recent update, but...honestly...we've had a few issues with Atomic Science. We're not huge fans of how these generators act. We'd like to increase fuel lifetimes by a great deal and decrease output. it seems like a much better system to us. Sadly, I didn't see anything in the config file except for output. Is there ANY way to increase the life of the fuels? 4 seconds for a deuterium fuel rod is pretty absurd...

[Spoonman]

Yes i agree with you but deuterium cells are cheap to make. As long as you have enough glass and tin you can automate these and create hundreds of them at a time. I have more of an issue with Fissile rods. Uranium is not common at all, they are harder to find than diamonds i believe. Fissile rods deplete real fast. As far as anything you can change inside the config files i don't know.

[CharlieChop]

what you guys should try is to harness the steam. reactors create more steam than the turbines around can use. one of my friends in the server showed me this and now i power nearly 450 turbines (or 52ish large ones) from 4 fusion reactors. one tap of the power button and the turbines keep running for a long time.

[CharlieChop]

Edit: something about server will not respond. ended up being a double post.

[LostInTheWired]

Well, we kind of see this power equipment as a tiered system. Redstone/Steam engines for early game (easy to set up, takes a great deal of maintenance/management to use constantly), magmatic engines and similar for a kind of mid tier (larger up front cost, but lower maintanance requirements, like just moving the pump around the nether), and then fission and fusion reactors as a final tier (massive up-front cost with the benefit of much less constant babysitting, throw a fuel rod in and it lasts a long time, keep it maintained with computers watching and no issues).

It's kind of what we're looking to create, as we always felt nuclear power would fill that gap at the end for us. As it is, I don't really want to pipe everything and everything to a fusion reactor, nor do I want a million deuterium rods being made just to run the reactor for a day. It's insane to me. Yes, I could run pipes and auto workbenches, ect., but it's not really what we're looking for.

[Fyrst_Igor]

what you guys should try is to harness the steam. reactors create more steam than the turbines around can use. one of my friends in the server showed me this and now i power nearly 450 turbines (or 52ish large ones) from 4 fusion reactors. one tap of the power button and the turbines keep running for a long time.

How ? I would love to see that. I cant power more than a 5 big ones efficiently pr turbine.

[CharlieChop]

its a work in progress.

in those images your can see the 4 reactors placed in the shape of a flower, covering as much water as possible. then i placed the steam funnels on top and then liquiducts with redsone blocks to extract the steam. the steam goes into tesseracts.

http://imgur.com/a/2jvQE

[Fyrst_Igor]

Have u changed in the config file to allow layered turbines? Cause i havent, and so anything above the first layer of turbines get no steam.

[Dewfire]

Have u changed in the config file to allow layered turbines? Cause i havent, and so anything above the first layer of turbines get no steam.

Nope, only single layer allowed.

[TokiWartooth]

So Charlie, what you are saying is rather than put turbines on the reactors themselves, just siphon off the steam and use it elsewhere in a more efficient layout? how much steam do you generate per deuterium? some general numbers would be cool, I may mess with this myself.

[Dewfire]

Yea, he and another guy on our server are doing it like that and they are running a lot more turbines then I am with just putting mine over the reactors.

[KiwiUSA]

Yea, he and another guy on our server are doing it like that and they are running a lot more turbines then I am with just putting mine over the reactors.

Hey Dewfire, I would really love to see some pics of this setup if you can arrange it. Also, has AtomicScience.cfg been changed from it's default at all?

[Dewfire]

The only change I made was the Turbine output from 4.5 to 10.

[phazeonphoenix]

On the subject of steam from reactors, I'm confused about how you would siphon off the steam to use elsewhere in Tekkit. Reading from the Atomic Science Wiki about the Steam Funnel it states that they are only capable of piping steam vertically not horizontally. What does that mean? Well I was able to make a subtle change to the design of a fusion reactor I'd recently built, first in creative then in survival. Here's the original design:

As you can see I had three tiers of turbines. To test the output of this, I attached three empty RECs and used the multimeter to measure the throughput into them. Each REC was being charged with about 43 ~ 45 MJ/tick. After reading this thread and the wiki mentioned above I made the following change when I implemented this:

A ring of steam funnels erm... funneling the steam up from the lower tiers so I was able to create large turbines instead. The output increased to 50 ~ 55 MJ/tick for each REC with this arrangement. I suspect it's more about the fact I have a few missing turbines in the first design than any capturing of lost steam via funnels. This isn't by far the best design. It's merely the first I came up with.

All in all I'd have to agree that the lifetime of the fuel seems a bit off. When I first fired this baby up I made 4 stacks of Deuterium cells and that barely lasted maybe 2 hours? I'm unsure of the exact time but it wasn't very long. Yes, cells are inexpensive to make, but has anyone successfully managed to build a auto crafting solution? I haven't ventured into that realm just yet.

Things just need to be better balanced IMHO. I have a bank of 36 magmatic engines that output a totaled 144 MJ/t that is contained in a room about 24 x 16 x 12. It's generously spaced so I can walk around them and requires me to move the lava source pump in the nether about once every two weeks or so. I'm able to flip the switch and leave this setup running (via chunk loaders) virtually indefinitely with no fear of meltdown or explosion.

By comparison my Fusion reactor setup above is 11 x 11 x 6 (just the reactor / turbines portion not the cabling) and produces ~150 MJ/t yet a stack of fuel only lasts about 30 - 45 minutes.

[CharlieChop]

you can power a lot more turbines. yes, the funnel only moves steam vertically, what we did was use a liquiduct to move the steam from there. thats why you see so many redstone blocks, those are powering the liquidutcs to extract the steam from the funnels.

if you want any more images tell me and ill post em.

[phazeonphoenix]

Ah that was the missing piece, liquiducts. So you're saying one can use liquiducts connected to Steam Funnels to pipe the steam into the bottom of as many turbines as it will power that way? So in your setup your turbines are underneath the reactor(s it looks like you have 4)? I would appreciate seeing more of your reactor design.

[KiwiUSA]

Holy Steaming Awesome Batman,

I've been thinking about this all wrong. The steam funnel / liquiduct combination is mind-blowing.

To test, I built one of those pre-packaged fusion reactors with a radius of 4. Replaced the turbines with funnels and liquiducts and piped the steam into a tank (a big tank). Connected up a REC at 10MJ/t to the reactor and inserted 1 (just one) deuterium cell.

It generated 910,462 mB of steam (from the single cell), only consumed about 9,560 MJ from the REC.

Second Stage - piped the steam from the tank to 9 large turbines (81 small ones) and it generated 1,586,043 MJ at 175 MJ/t.

So 1,576,483 MJ excess at 175 MJ/t from a single cell.

Totally have to rethink the control system now.

P.S. This is with an unmodified AtomicScience.cfg

[LostInTheWired]

While this is honestly all very interesting information (it will help me with future designs and all), I'm guessing fuel lifetimes are hardcoded? That would actually be pretty frustrating, since part reason we're moving our server to tekkit is because we know everything will play nice instead of us having to vouch for every mod every update. If anyone knows where the Atomic Science forums for suggestions are, I'd be appreciative. I do think it should be a config option.

[KiwiUSA]

While this is honestly all very interesting information (it will help me with future designs and all), I'm guessing fuel lifetimes are hardcoded? That would actually be pretty frustrating, since part reason we're moving our server to tekkit is because we know everything will play nice instead of us having to vouch for every mod every update. If anyone knows where the Atomic Science forums for suggestions are, I'd be appreciative. I do think it should be a config option.

Apologies for the thread hijacking. Here's a link to the AS forums: http://forum.calclavia.com/index.php?forums/atomic-science.39/

[CharlieChop]

Ah that was the missing piece, liquiducts. So you're saying one can use liquiducts connected to Steam Funnels to pipe the steam into the bottom of as many turbines as it will power that way? So in your setup your turbines are underneath the reactor(s it looks like you have 4)? I would appreciate seeing more of your reactor design.

ill post more pics when i get back. about an hour or so

[CharlieChop]

So, just to give you an idea of what i did.

first i looked at how the plasma extended. it took me a very long time but i finally found that it usually extends 6 blocks out from the source to the NSEW directions, it extends more but i wanted reliable steam production, and some spots spent entire minutes without the plasma even coming close.

once i knew how wide the plasma extended i just started a layered placement of steam funnels, making sure that the electromagnets that were touched by plasma has a wáter source and a funnel on top. the design you see there is 4 reactors in a flower shape. some funnels extend upwards more than others because some magnets are lower than the top ones as we all know.

after that it was just using liquiducts making sure that all of them were in extraction mode and then (on my first try) used Rednet cable. do not use rednet cable like this, its not reliable the signal doesnt reach all the spots. after i noticed that, and the thread about rednet causing lagg i decided to remove it and added redstoneblocks.

after i did this i just piped the steam downstairs, like you can see on the second picture. the steam goes into a bunch of liquid tesseracts that then i pump it into my turbine room. each set of 9 large turbines has one tesseract underneath. im planing on following kiwi´s idea and pump it into a large 12.2k buckets container made out of liquid managers.

[KiwiUSA]

Thanks CharlieChop,

Steam continues to be generated long after the fuel has been used up. A long time after, so the control mechanism has to be centered on fuel insertion.

Using layers of tanks, I use a gate to emit a signal when a higher level tank is out of steam, that triggers the insertion of a single cell into each of the reactors.

I'll share some results later on actual fuel use using this method.

[KiwiUSA]

Double post - sorry

[CharlieChop]

http://imgur.com/a/2jvQE

i added a couple more pictures so you can see how i used the multiple steam funnels to take the steam from the lowest line to the top and how i fed the turbines.

[TokiWartooth]

This is gonna require a complete rework of my current reactors, and my new ones.