11x11x11 Power Reactor Producing 104659.6

[Scypio]

Everything is explained here.

 

[Jojomo]

What exactly are the laws of effeciency for reactors? I know grouping is a factor. Whats the most effizient capacitor/reactor ratio. What else aaffects it?

A two year thread necro...

Scypio has already linked to all the info you need to learn about it.

Capacitor size is really a semi-separate issue that depends on how much of a buffer you need between power production and consumption, which basically depends on how big your weapons are and how many you want to fire at once.

For reactors, it's best to have as few groups as possible, and make each one as large as possible.

If you only have one reactor you'll probably (unless it's a very small ship) want to make it output the softcap of 2 million e/s. Do this first by making the bounding box for each group take as much space as possible (which will likely be restricted by your hull), and then increase the number of groups until you hit softcap.

If you have multiple reactors docked together, you'll have to weigh the increased vulnerability of having more reactor entities against efficiency: making each reactor entity output 2 million e/s isn't very efficient, smaller outputs will be more efficient per block.
So you can have fewer 2 million e/s reactor entities, or a larger number of smaller reactor entities.

Bear in mind that thrusters can't use power from multiple reactors, they can only use power from the ship root entity, so make the reactor there large enough for whatever thrust you want.

 

[Gasboy]

A two year thread necro...

I've never understood the upset over "necro". A newb can't win.

Search for an answer, ask a question in an old thread, people bitch about necro.

Ask that question in a new thread, get told they should have used search.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[|-Silas-|]

The term necro...??

 

[Top 4ce]

The term necro...??

Urban Dictionary: necro

 

[|-Silas-|]

Do shield rechargers work like reactors and used the same efficiency Matrix?

 

[kiddan]

Do shield rechargers work like reactors and used the same efficiency Matrix?

I don't believe shield modules benefit from any form of grouping.

 

[Jojomo]

I've never understood the upset over "necro". A newb can't win.

Search for an answer, ask a question in an old thread, people bitch about necro.

Ask that question in a new thread, get told they should have used search.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Um, I gave him a detailed answer...

And I can't speak for anyone else but I don't tell people to search instead of starting a thread.

 

[12yanogden]

Ok I'll post em after school.

I know this was awhile ago, but did you ever post it or do you still have the design?

 

[Panpiper]

I know this was awhile ago, but did you ever post it or do you still have the design?

I guess this needs to be restated, again and again and again... Under no circumstances should you EVER build a cube reactor! These sorts of cube reactors were an intellectual exercise ONLY. They are NOT meant for actually generating power in ships. The only time you would ever use any sort of cube for power is if your ship just happens to be a perfect cube, and you are filling that space with reactor blocks.

There was a time when such cubes were potentially useful, back when we used docked reactors with power beams. Even then however, long line docked reactors were almost always preferable to these cubes. But docked power reactors with power beams were effectively removed from the game when Schine introduced Auxiliary Power Reactors. There is no longer any call to be using such incredibly inefficient power systems as cubes.

ALWAYS run lines of power reactor modules the full length of your ship, from one end to the other. Sprout two additional single sets of reactor lines from that main line that spans the height and width of your ship. Nest these 3D Xs to create more reactors if necessary (in a manner such that they no flat facing of one set connects with another flat face of another set, keep reactor line groups seperate), until you reach the soft cap of two million power. Then start building groups of 9-10K auxiliary reactors if you need more power. Forget completely that you ever even heard of power cubes. They have NOTHING to do with good power systems in ships for Starmade.

 

[Magrim]

Truth

It doesn't help that the guides on Steam covering power are misleading to the point that a new player would be confused and might think block reactors are the way to go.

I know this was awhile ago, but did you ever post it or do you still have the design?

I PM'ed you my reactor design so you can take a look at it but please bear in mind that these block reactors are very inefficient. The reason, is because they have a lot of groupings and the more groups of reactors you have the worse your ship's power efficiency becomes. Sure, your ship will make more total power with more groups, but each individual module on your ship will go down in efficiency.

Each reactor module you place (no matter how you place it) will always generate a base 25 e/sec. Efficient placement, IE: lines and such, will award you bonus power. This bonus power hard caps at 2,000,000 e/sec, total ship power generation does not hard cap, only the bonus does, which is why people choose to call it a soft cap. Getting all of the 2 mil e/sec bonus is actually somewhat difficult to achieve, unless your ship is extremely large (a single group of reactors 5,164 meters long, is the minimum needed to get all of the 2 mil bonus power.) If you do manage to reach this cap, every reactor placed after that will only give you 25 e/sec.

Back to the reason why block reactors are inefficient. It is always preferable to add to a group of reactors than it is to create another group of reactors (as far as efficiency goes.) The moment you start a new group, that is the moment ALL reactor modules on your ship go down in efficiency. This isn't that big of a deal usually, nearly all ships have multiple groupings, but this is especially important when building a cloaking ship where efficiency is your top priority. For reference my stealth ship only has 4 reactor groups, a necessity since i didn't want her to be excessively long. With 5 groups I could have reduced the length even more but each reactor module would not be able to cloak as much mass as the 4 group design. You will notice that many cloak capable ships on the dock use a ton of reactor groups to produce a great deal of power, and while this works, they are imho missing the mark. The ship is capable of cloaking, jamming and all that but it is, more or less, a blob of flying reactors with little detail. If they would consider individual reactor efficiency, when designing their cloaker, they could enjoy a bit more creative freedom.

 

[Jojomo]

This bonus power hard caps at 2,000,000 e/sec, total ship power generation does not hard cap, only the bonus does, which is why people choose to call it a soft cap. Getting all of the 2 mil e/sec bonus is actually somewhat difficult to achieve, unless your ship is extremely large (a single group of reactors 5,164 meters long, is the minimum needed to get all of the 2 mil bonus power.)

From a practical point of view, you can get 99% of the "bonus" at slightly under 1700 blocks, which is very achievable for titans getting close to 1km long.

 

[Magrim]

From a practical point of view, you can get 99% of the "bonus" at slightly under 1700 blocks, which is very achievable for titans getting close to 1km long.

I didn't mean to imply it would be practical to want to get 100% of the bonus power (it takes over 1800 reactors to go from 99.9% to 100%) I was only illustrating a point. I should have added that beyond 895 reactors in one grouping, (if it is your only group) you actually loose efficiency per reactor module. Multi group efficiency is a bit trickier, depending on the size of each grouping and whatnot.