I have been quite busy the last couple of days in trying to wrap my head around the power issues of my titan.
Here is the problem, i know how to get enough power, which is trough docked power reactors with power supply beams, but now i need to know how many power supply beams i need to get the maximum power transfered over to my mother ship. also, what is the best reactor setup?
I currently have two large blocks of 6x2x350 consisting of 6 lines of 350 power reactors in a checker pattern. on the front of each there is a logic clock to fire the power supply beams. I just dont notice the difference in my power usage (which isn't weird i guess since, just the thrusters alone can drain my 29 mil power in a matter of seconds)
Anyone have any tips on optimal setups? would gladly hear them!
You don't.
Docked power gens. create a ridiculous amount of lag, and honestly, in my opinion, just shove the power systems into your ship, and if you can't do that, build either A) a bigger superstructure or B) don't do that. The docked power gen is a bad idea, as it's just not worth the lag to just shove the external power to the hull of the ship itself.
1) No Capacitors
You create your power reactors, and then have two separate power supply beams on two different computers built into it. Set up a clock pulse with a 2.5 second delay to an activator and a not, and hook your supply computers up to those. One beam will always then be firing, and you just fine tune the number of beam modules until you are using the same amount of power your lines generate.
Advantage: Steady supply of power.
Disadvantage: Multiple computers and onboard logic constantly firing for all reactors causes more lag.
2) Capacitors
Build your reactor, then add capacitors, enough to store a little more than twice as much power as it can generate in 2.5 seconds (so take your e/sec and multiply it by say 3 just for a safety buffer). Now build a single supply beam and test fire it to see how much of your energy bank it drains. Keep adding modules until you drain the capacitors *ALMOST* dry but still manage to regen up to 100% before the next firing. Then set a logic clock to that.
Advantages: Simpler build, less lag overall.
Disadvantage: Only fires half the time, making your energy regeneration spiky.
I prefer method #2, and then build the reactors in pairs. I stick a wireless block on each reactor, hook that up to the computer, and then run the actual clock logic only one time on the main ship and send the fire commands off to the reactors wirelessly. The logic is set up so that one of the two is always firing, reducing the spiky nature.
You don't.
Docked power gens. create a ridiculous amount of lag, and honestly, in my opinion, just shove the power systems into your ship, and if you can't do that, build either A) a bigger superstructure or B) don't do that. The docked power gen is a bad idea, as it's just not worth the lag to just shove the external power to the hull of the ship itself.
finally! the answer i have been looking for! i'd like to try out option two but how do you do the thingy ma jingy with the wireless blocks to the one clock on the ship? could you explain that in some detail? as what to link to what? a step by step tutorial maybe?
Dangit, I have to concede that you're right. Docked reactors are somewhat fixed now. Just dock them and use logic clocks to trigger a power drain computer and suck power from your docked reactor ship. That'll give you a boost in power.
finally! the answer i have been looking for! i'd like to try out option two but how do you do the thingy ma jingy with the wireless blocks to the one clock on the ship? could you explain that in some detail? as what to link to what? a step by step tutorial maybe?
Bench has a good video on how to make a clock pulse with an on/off switch here:
Build that on your ship, using 5 delays instead of 1 (each delay is half a second, and you want 2.5 second delays, which is the fire/recharge time of the power supply beam).
The activator with the not attached to it? Those would be your outputs.
For every docked reactor you have, put down an activator block near the clock. Hook half the activators up so they're triggered by the clock activator, the other half to the not.
From each of those activators, link a wireless block to it.
On your docked generators, put a wireless block on it, and link the beam computer to it.
Now, hit C on the wireless block for the reactor over at the clock, then fly over to the reactor and hit V on it's wireless block to link it. You should get a server message saying that wireless blocks are now connected. Do that for all your reactors.
Turn the clock on.
Half of your reactors should now be firing at any given time, dumping their entire contents into your main ship with no further intervention on your part, and only a single logic clock driving them all. With the clock on/off switch serving as an emergency cutoff.
Although I globally agreed with Edymnion's first post, you may have to use some capacitors in the first solution: imagine you have 1200 power supply beam modules, each of these modules will consume 300 energy per tick (5 ticks per activation, 2 ticks per second), your capacity must be at least equal to the energy required by one tick (i.e. 1,200*300=360,000). However, you can have less capacity than the energy required to fire the beam for 1s (i.e. 720,000) or to fire the beam for the whole 2.5s (i.e. 1,800,000).
If your energy generation is below 100,000e/s the base capacity of the ship (50,000) will be enough and you won't need any additional capacitor. However, if it is greater, you'll have to add capacitors (although less than in the second method).
Regarding your original docked reactor design, if each entity has 6 reactors groups, using lines of 175~250 blocks rather than 350 would be slightly more efficient:
You'd get 760,928 e/s with 6 lines of 207 blocks (i.e. with 1242 reactors blocks, which means 612.66 energy per reactor block), rather than 1,032,241 with 6 lines of 350 blocks (i.e. with 2100 reactor blocks, which means 491.54 energy per reactor block).
Ideally, you'd use a single line of 597 reactor blocks per entity (it gives the best ratio with roughly 1200 energy per reactor block), but using several groups isn't that bad as you often need much more power supply beam modules than power reactor blocks anyway (and it allows you to fit your docked reactor in a more "cubic" shape).
As for reactor layouts, if you're looking for a compact and reasonably efficient docked reactor (and you don't mind the potential lag caused by the potential destruction of rail dockers in combat), there's a way to fit 8 entities each sporting 8 groups of power reactors (for a total of 8*8*175 power reactor blocks, i.e. 11,200) in a 16 x 16 x 143 bounding box (with holes, usually filled up with either capacitors, weapon blocks, and/or powersupply blocks). Each of the 8 entities would produce 766,130 raw energy per second (for a total of 6,129,040 raw energy per second) and could supply 612,480e/s (for a total of 4,899,840e/s).
This would require 8x 2x 1276 power supply beam modules (i.e. 20,416), 8x 253 power capacitors (i.e. 2,024), and 8x 8x 175 reactor blocks (i.e. 11,200), leaving 2968 free blocks in the 16 x 16 x 143 bounding box (minus the 8 cores, 16 power supply beam computers, rails dockers, and a bit of logic for the alternating beams).
That would make 547.23 raw energy per second per power reactor block, 145.65 supplied energy per second per block (actually a bit less because I didn't take into account the computers, cores, dockers and logic), 133.84 supplied energy per second per block (including the unused empty space in the 16x16x143 bounding box, the computers etc).
If you're interested, the layout is basically this:
This image just describes the placement of power reactor blocks.
The holes are in white, the black, red and blue cells on the top and the left are helpers to count the blocks.
The grid in light grey cells separate each 16x16 cut of the reactor, note that the light grey color is also used by one entity.
Each colored cell in a cut represents a power reactor block, differently colored cells belong to different docked entities.
the R/D/C letters indicate possible placements for dockers and cores don't mind them.
The last cut (on the bottom) must be repeated 125 times (18 cuts + 125 = 143). The holes must be filled with capacitors and power supply beams.
This basically isn't a thing anymore for internal docked reactors.
Explosions no longer pass through hulls, so internal reactors cannot be hit without first dropping shields entirely and then digging through the hull and any intermediary blocks. Odds are by the time a docked reactor is even hit, the ship is already overheating and the fight is over.
You don't.
Docked power gens. create a ridiculous amount of lag, and honestly, in my opinion, just shove the power systems into your ship, and if you can't do that, build either A) a bigger superstructure or B) don't do that. The docked power gen is a bad idea, as it's just not worth the lag to just shove the external power to the hull of the ship itself.
I've been considering adding a docked power supply or two to a ship I've made, and it got me thinking about them in general. I suspect someone has done the math, but I'd love to hear it again: how big/many docked power supplies do you need in order for them to be efficient?
So, I have a ship that generates 1 million e/sec, and thus any additional blocks I add directly to the ship provide a flat amount of energy. In order to make a power reactor, you have to add power supply beams, a little logic, the power reactors and capacitors. The power reactors are charging the power supply beams, I believe. Either way, you're taking up a lot of space trying to take advantage of the power reactor bonus. When does it become more effective to use one rather than just fill that space with power reactors to begin with?
A traditional power supply based docked reactor peaks at about 145 power per block last I checked, may be higher (~165 if math now works right) or lower depending on changes to tick handling since I last checked.
I hate that docked power reactors are basically a mandatory thing to bypass a terrible limit placed on energy recharge rates.
I dont even get the reasoning behind the soft cap on the reactor bonus at 1,000,000 power a second. If its so horrible for people to just build giant reactor setups to easily get millions of energy that ti had to be nerfed and limited to a million, then why is it totally fine for people to bypass it with a ton of docked reactors?
Some people even have ships with as many as 40 docked reactors putting out a million energy each.
They seriously need to just get rid of the 1,000,000 bonus limit, or at least increase it to something much, much higher.
It is a bit silly... I guess it was put in place as a 'buff' to small ships to make them more viable and effcient than larger ships (bigger ship = less efficient reactors)
My thinking on the softcap has changed. It used to be an annoyance but now it's really just a bonus for small ships. Larger than that and don't bother with it. I brute force it from the start and get my line bonus at the end for icing on the cake. My new ship takes up as much volume as my super miner with docked reactors. The difference is that it's solid, and lag free (mostly) but heavy as hell. This necessitates a more conservative hull design to keep the weight down because... Well, let's face it, between 1/3 and 1/2 of all my power goes to jamming. My next experiment after the prototype GSV class is finished will be to abandon jamming in favour of super high shield regen and hyper-lethal turrets.
I like DRs for their gadget-like nature. They are like my plank reactor base in minecraft it's fun to use and fun to make. The thing is I don't take my base with me in minecraft but that's exactly what I'm doing here and there are consequences.
I believe (as in, its what I think, no clue if its right or not) that the system was put in place originally to help keep overall ship size down in that it would just become an increasing hassle to power larger and larger ships. Smaller ships are easier for the game code to handle, so this was a good thing.
Then people figured out that they could bypass it with docked reactors, and they basically went "Well damn, didn't think of of that, but its really inventive and creative. Let 'em keep it."
I believe (as in, its what I think, no clue if its right or not) that the system was put in place originally to help keep overall ship size down in that it would just become an increasing hassle to power larger and larger ships. Smaller ships are easier for the game code to handle, so this was a good thing.
Then people figured out that they could bypass it with docked reactors, and they basically went "Well damn, didn't think of of that, but its really inventive and creative. Let 'em keep it."
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