Challenge: Smallest 1,000,000 power/s reactor.

[highwaystar]

There was a massive storm of people trying to make the most efficient 5x5x5 and 7x7x7 reactors, but that is all amateur stuff. I want to see peoples attempts at the smallest, one million power per second, reactor.

The one using the smallest number of blocks will just be a single straight line, but that's too easy and too long for practical purpose.

What I'm looking for is the reactor with the smallest dimenstions.

 

[DracoNB]

Are you looking for a cube shape or what shape do you define as smallest?

 

[highwaystar]

I\'m open to any shape really. I just want compact sized reactors that make at least 1,000,000 power per sec. If yours is a cube then that\'s cool. Although if I had to give a preference I\'d say cuboidal shapes (3D rectangle) as most people make ships that shape.

 

[DracoNB]

Well honestly the best way to do power is just to follow the shape of your ship, with as many \"lines\" as you need.



So you could do say... 6 \"lines\" of 350 blocks to hit 1 mill power, so thats anywhere from a ship that is 350 long and at least 12 tall, to one that is 100 wide, 75 tall and 175 long.



Trying to make it into a reactor shape is a bad use of space / mass.



The longer your \"lines\" the more efficient each block in them is.



40 \"lines\" of 80 blocks is close to a million as well

 

[Moph]

To get it to the most compact shape possible, it\'s going to have to be a cube. You should post a starting bid to challenge us highwaystar!

 

[fire219]

I hate to rain on your parade, but 1 million e/s is the exact point where box dimensions do not give any advantage anymore. The most efficient and smallest reactor would be a solid cube.

 

[DracoNB]

This is incorrect, you can get 1 million with 1500 blocks using 3x 500 rows, or only 1500 blocks (and there are lots of other combos)

 

[Moph]

Okay, so to start the ball rolling... Here\'s a 23x23x23 cube.

 

[highwaystar]

I see \'power pipes\' touching in that. Did you check to see if the thing produces more without that?

 

[Moph]

Yes, that block links to a single which extends in the axis you can\'t see and increases the power. It would make more visual sense if there was another layer above it. Imagine two chopsticks laying across each other and perpendicular to each other, that\'s the sort of principal employed there. I also started out going for an even number of blocks in the cube, so the centre is more geared towards that, than an odd numbered cube unfortunately. I.e. it\'s a bit unbalanced, but that is because I hacked off the layer on one side, it would\'ve been 24x24x24 and balanced, but way over 1,000,000.
It may be better if the centre was started with the aim of it being an odd sided cube, but I\'m not going to try that, as this one took the best part of an hour to build!

 

[DracoNB]

This is why I\'m confused by \"smallest\", that is almost 6000 blocks (600 mass) vs 1500 blocks I mentioned above, or 80 x 40 = 3200.

Considering the size of the rest of the ship you\'ll need to REQUIRE 1 million energy, why not make it more efficient in mass / total space taken (used) instead?

 

[Moph]

Perhaps some people are trying to restrict the size of their ships, rather than making them long and thin.

To be honest, 23 is a hell of a lot shorter than the 350 you suggested in a previous post!

Perhaps the interior of the ship requires that the power generation isn\'t littered around everywhere which is purely a matter of design and personal taste.

But.. this is all ignoring the whole point of this thread, which was a challenge to find the smallest dimensions you could get 1,000,000 e/sec from. It didn\'t ask anything else. It didn\'t give any context.
It\'s a fun challenge. Leave it at that and move on.

 

[highwaystar]

I\'m fighting gigantism. Trying to make a ship that seems small but can kick a hole through a ship and the planet behind it lol. Plus the longer a ship is, the harder it is to turn. I wanted to see if it was possible to make a ton of power in a small envelope without just making a borg cube.

 

[Morhe]

To those who don\'t think there\'s a point in finding the most compact reactor setup to hit the scaling cap, there are actually two very good reasons to work on this particular problem:

1. Some supercapitol ships have begun using a system where hidden internal docks are placed just in front of internal powerdrain beams, with modular reactor-and-energy-storage-only ships docked to them. The pilot can switch to a powerdrain computer and fire without aiming to refill their energy storage, effectively allowing the ship, as a whole, to break the 1mil soft cap on reactor recharge rate at the cost of a short weapons-down time mid fight. Discovering the most compact 1mil reactor design possible would be incredibly valuable when designing this type of ship. With this setup, the compactness of the design is all that matters, because the mass of the reactor won\'t be added to the ship itself anyhow;a super-compact 1-mil setup would be ideal for the modular \"reactor ships.\"
2. It\'s fun. Compact-reactors are like a twisted, three-dimensional sudoku puzzle. Some people just enjoy seeing how small they can get them.

 

[Moph]

A solid cube like this you mean?
It\'s 34x34x34, and does in fact need that single block to push it over the 1 million mark.

 

[Nootau]

I\'m fighting gigantism


If you are using close to 1m energy/s then you are a giant.

 

[DracoNB]

I said \"line\", which I use as short hand for the ever expanding box dimensions. So its not a straight line of 350 blocks, but one that could be 100 x 100 x 150 like I mentioned in my original post.

Anyway, what I\'m trying to say is that for mass (and thus internal space taken) \"reactor\" designs are very inefficient.

 

[DracoNB]

Oh I get that, and I\'ve heard of Calibri\'s 80 million regen monster, but I don\'t understand why you\'d ever need something like that since

A) The game can\'t handle it,and

B) You\'d just need to increase your thruster count a ton to be able to haul all of those docked ships around (once the extra mass is fixed), so you just need even more power to provide for thrusters to provide you to have more power....

C) You need to create docking space for those other ships, and instead of trying to squish them into a cube, if you allow them to be as \"long\" as possible you will be get the most power per block and thus would have more space. So really, you should try to figure out how to make the best \"reactor\" that fits in the smallest volume of docking space.

 

[highwaystar]

Nah, giants are those massive ships that take a millenium to turn around.

 

[Nootau]

If you are not a \'giant\' where are your using 1m e/s? Reactors will never work for Cloaker/Jammers for those are out.. so where is the power going?