Fission reactor extention/changes/overhaul

that doesn’t make sense though, because graphite is used and not graphene and it’s just stupid to require that just to make things more tedious because the nuclear reactor is a lategame thing regardless

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I politely disaweeg, sometimes things really just need to be juggled and balanced around for the sake of balance. Thank god for minetweaker, no matter what the final consensus is.

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That is already the case, kinda. Each rod in the reactor can already be controlled, but only on and off. This is enough to allow controlling the power output of the reactor already. A partially insertable rod would be nice, but it would maybe be a bit difficult to implement and causes some problems making the reactor maybe too easy to control.

Nice to know, I’m not really a GT6 expert or anything, so my material balance and crafting/processing recipes may very well be… suboptimal. I never even played GT6 a lot in survival mode for now, was holding off till the final version was released, only to find that there was something I wanted missing so I had to implement it myself first.

I’ll keep graphite, as I think the realism outweighs the relatively small balance function in this case. True balance can obviously only be archived when the reactor is gated behind a draconic evolution ender dragon farm and requires clay :smiley:

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I mentioned it because I didn’t really like how you could just instantly shut the reactor off… cause there’s no decay heat or anything like that. But now that you think of it I can see the on and off switch being like the control rods… never thought of it like that before

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@greg What about making the ‘rods’ look raised when the block is off, it will cause a chunk rerender, but redstone does that anyway, so…

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The Rods change color when that happens, so I dont end up with even more “block in other block” action. :wink:

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Color change should be in tooltip then. Plus you could still show them as risen (you’re re-rendering the chunk anyway with a texture change) if a block isn’t above it at the very least (I’d rise it regardless, lol). ^.^

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The inside of the Rod doesn’t change color (That is for the Rods only), it’s the Fuel Capsule Part of the Texture that will to indicate if a rod is active or not.

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Another three and a half weeks, another short update post.
I’ve been hard at work over the last weeks, but not with developing for GT6, but rather university assignments and procrastination. An assignment that would be due this week was delayed though, which is why I continued working on GT6 for the last couple of days.

The second part of the reactor overhaul got merged into the GT6 repo, adding breeder rods and the new durability/efficiency system to the testing version of the mod. You’ll have to wait for Bear to test it though, and wait a little longer till my next PR gets merged into GT6 and that gets tested, because that contains a fix of a new issue I discovered today, the geiger counter not working with the 1x1 reactor.

So what exactly have I been working on the last couple of days?

Moderators are finally finished and they work like I described previously, with one simple change to better balance them: Moderated fuel rods consume double the durability. This makes them more useful in a new special way, but reactors less efficient for power production.

Depleted fuel rods have gotten new byproducts, being 1/6 of a dust of a better nuclear fuel. So quickly burning through your fuel can be a good option in some cases. While this isn’t realistic, because realistic would mostly be nuclear waste, this is fun and allows getting all nuclear fuels with just GT6 alone. It’s a bit inspired by NuclearCraft, the “progession” of fuels goes so: (Th232 or Co60) -> U238 -> U235 -> Pu244 -> Pu241 -> Pu243 -> Am245 -> Am241 -> Nq528 -> Nq522 -> Cyanite -> Yellorium -> Blutonium -> Ludicrite -> Th232. The fuels only obtainable by breeding U233 and Pu239 aren’t obtainable by this, but produce Pu243 and Am241, which skip quite a few steps.

Plenty of new coolants have also been added: Semiheavy, heavy and tritiated water, molten sodium and tin, Carbon Dioxide and Helium. All these have effects I described in the previous update post.

A small surprise feature, the reactor has been made automateable. I felt this was needed with the addition of breeding and the new byproducts. Rods can be inserted and extracted from the top and button sides. However, automation is everything but easy, as the reactor (or at least the rods you want to access) need to be turned off to be able to access the slots. Combined with the space limitations, you need to be quite clever and use a lot of universal extenders to properly use the feature. And robot arms if you want to properly automate the 2x2 reactor.

What’s left to do is only additional content in form of new coolants. Molten salt and thorium fluoride are still planned. I also want to add a coolant especially designed for subcritical reactors and neutron absorbers, as I feel they have been left a bit abandoned when compared to reflectors and moderators. Nothing too crazy, just higher base outputs and much lower factors. Will probably be molten lead, if no one comes up with a better idea. If it stays lead, it’ll also prevent any radiation of nearby entities, but consume trice as much durability to balance the constant output, unmatched safety and easy setup. Though this durability hit could also be seen as a positive to some.

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Always more important! ^.^

Woot!

Sounds quite nice!

Makes me wonder if larger is automateable at all, perhaps combining extenders, mini portals, and lots of panels, lol.

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} else if (mTanks[0].isEmpty()) {
	if (mEnergy > EU_PER_WATER) tIsExploding = T;
}

reactor core will explode when stopped and empty if it previously contained thorium salt.

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Thanks for pointing this small but very significant oversight out, I just fixed it.

As a small side update, the code for everything I want to add is done and pushed. That means that molten salt and thorium salt are added as reactor coolants. A new reactor coolant focusing on making absorber rods more useful hasn’t been added, but the existing ones have been rebalanced or changed completely, to make each one more useful and unique.

The industrial coolant one is ofc left unchanged, still filling the role for subcritical reactors and being a good use case for absorbers.

Water has also been left largely unchanged mechanically, old reactor designs still work, but there has been a significant minor change: Water now causes fuel rods to become moderated. This makes water reactors inherently more inefficient, as moderated fuel rods have double the durability consumption and can’t be used for breeding. Using moderator rods in water reactors is also encouraged this way, as they don’t provide any additional debuffs, as their debuff is already applied.

Liquid metal reactors have been left unchanged, still fulfilling their role as breeder reactors.

Gas reactors are probably changed the most and now fill the role of the basic unmoderated supercritical reactors and breeders. They no longer decrease the neutron maximum and are much more stable because the neutron emission has been decreased. Helium and CO2 are also much more distinct and not just linear upgrades. CO2 raises the factor slightly while Helium decreases it. This allows Helium to operate only very high factor fuels supercritically (factor >= 1/3) without moderation, but do so much more stable, CO2, although being more unstable, can be used as a supercritical breeder even with fuels with a factor of 1/4 or as a very compact supercritical reactor.

Molten salt (LiCl) is one of the best coolants available, having a emission as low as Helium, but not increasing or decreasing the factor. The biggest benefit still being, that the neutron maximum of fuel rods is raised by 50%.

Thorium salt is in a way the coolant that makes absorbers really useful. It increases the neutron maximum by a factor of 4! But this massive increase comes at a price, the coolant, the thorium salt, isn’t turned into usable heatant by neutrons, but just cold molten salt used to produce the thorium salt. The energy needs to be extracted by a secondary reactor loop with another coolant. To help a bit, it increases the factor a bit like CO2, while still halving he emission. The self emission is also set to 0.

I’ll probably do a full documentation soon-ish

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Was it all tested by running reactors? MultiTileEntityReactorRodNuclear.getReactorRodNeutronEmission() modifies mNeutronSelf, mNeutronOther, mNeutronDiv and mNeutronMax. I can’t find where these are reset to previous values.

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I did some testing, but more testing would always be nice.
Luckily, they don’t need to be reset, because they don’t get saved to NBT.

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It’s very possible that I don’t fully understand how that works :slight_smile:
Barely related: I almost finished breeding Th-232 into U-233 (with 8 Co-60 rods).

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First breeding done!

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Molten tin and sodium make reactor moderated (function MultiTileEntityReactorRodNuclear.getReactorRodNeutronEmission).

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Thanks for the report, the issue has been fixed.

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I built a moderated supercritical Co-60 reactor for large invar boiler (up to 4096 HU/t). I discovered that it (the reactor) irradiates me when I’m at ~16 meters or closer… How could I forget that :stuck_out_tongue:

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So this document seems to be unfinished and hosted on a virus leaden spam site. It tried to sell me Trump coins when I followed the link on my computer, and then I tried to download it on my cell phone and it asked for push notifications and then tried gave me the “your phone has all of these viruses, click here to disinfect” bullshit.

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