FTB: Gunpowder

[Akira Doe]

I'll need to look into Bees, I keep saying I would but now I've been "stung" by Thaumcraft...

[Brew]

Me too. My quarry just collected a rocky drone and a rocky princess, and I need to figure out what the heck they might be good for.

[Deweyoxberg]

Did someone say bees can make explosives?!

........................

I will "bee" very pleased shortly...

[Akira Doe]

So thanks to some inspiration from Gasman I've made a Gun Powder factory that requires Netherrack and wooden Logs as the input and eventually it outputs gunpowder.

This process takes a long time, but without the use of Bees it seems to be the best way to get gunpowder in the quantities we need for Industrial TNT.

The thing that worries me is that I have to run this setup (6 redstone engines, lots of pipe, 3 pulvs, an induction furnace etc, I'll post pics when the server comes back online) all the time that I'm online, at least until I have enough gun powder for the current project.

Now I'm sure I'm not the only one who has a setup like this who is running it constantly. It can't be good for the server. There has to be a better way to get such an important ingredient for the iridium plates.

Uu-matter is an option but requires even more machines with either a quarry or other source of blocks and then a bank of recyclers etc then waiting to use the Matter Fab at spawn (at least at this stage, I don't have the power requirements to run my own, yet).

I'm just trying to find the most efficient yet server friendly way of doing business.

[marvelmanic]

How do you guys stick to one project?

I get to working on something, decide I need something else, then 4 hours later, I will have one thing done and can't remember what it was I originally wanted to do.

[Akira Doe]

Well... Often when I say "project" I mean endgame. For me the endgame is to have my own Matter Fab run off only the overflow of my power network.

To get there it has taken a lot of secondary projects and machines and factories built along the way.

First was the Matter Fab it's self, I know, wrong place to start but I thought before I start any of the other work I should make sure I could make it first.

Second was the power grid setup. When my last MFSU is full, it emits a redstone signal that with the use of a splitter diverts the power generated (that at this point would be wasted as there is no storage left) to a second bank of MFSUs that are only connected to the matter fab.

I did want to setup the matter fab to only run when these MFSUs have a charge but I've not got that far yet. The idea was, let's say there are 3 MFSUs,

Power Input -> 3 -> 2 -> 1 -> Splitter -> Matter Fab.

The idea was when 3 is full, use redstone to open the splitter. When 1 is empty, use redstone to close the splitter. That way the Matter Fab isn't on/off/on/off all the time as the overflow trickles in.

It is only on when there is enough power, sort of like a capacitor. I thought that might be more server friendly, but I'm not sure. That process hasn't been created yet as I don't remember all my redstone circuits just yet.

The most important thing is power, and that's what I'm working on now. I've got 5 Advance Solar that I want to upgrade to UHSP. The first is almost complete. I've got everything done but the last of the gunpowder I need to make the remaining 7 iridium plates.

Once this is done, well I'll probably start over on the second one, or work on the Matter Fab "capacitor" (if you will) so I can at least start making some small quantities of UU-Matter "at home".

I thought about Nuclear Power, but I need to think some more. With Brew and Dewey in the fallout zone I'm not game to risk it. Especially after seeing the damage I caused in single player (deliberately letting one overheat to see when I was in for).

I made one totally encased in Reinforced stone which didn't create much damage on the ground, but since I didn't use a flat land server (or what ever it is called) there were mountains around, well, there was before it went critical. I had even enclosed the entire reactor in the box of it and it still created heaps of upwards and outward damage.

[OranjeJus]

Originally Posted by Akira Doe

So thanks to some inspiration from Gasman I've made a Gun Powder factory that requires Netherrack and wooden Logs as the input and eventually it outputs gunpowder.

This process takes a long time, but without the use of Bees it seems to be the best way to get gunpowder in the quantities we need for Industrial TNT.

The thing that worries me is that I have to run this setup (6 redstone engines, lots of pipe, 3 pulvs, an induction furnace etc, I'll post pics when the server comes back online) all the time that I'm online, at least until I have enough gun powder for the current project.

Now I'm sure I'm not the only one who has a setup like this who is running it constantly. It can't be good for the server. There has to be a better way to get such an important ingredient for the iridium plates.

Uu-matter is an option but requires even more machines with either a quarry or other source of blocks and then a bank of recyclers etc then waiting to use the Matter Fab at spawn (at least at this stage, I don't have the power requirements to run my own, yet).

I'm just trying to find the most efficient yet server friendly way of doing business.

My Bio-fuel refinery is:

1 Aqueous Accumulator, 1 Squeezer, 4 Fermenters, 12 Stills, 16 Redstone engines, with 14 gates, a bunch of pipes and teleport pipes, Fluidducts and Redstone Conduits, and is only 1 piece of 'equipment' in a base I share with EK and Nas.

We also have our RedPower sorting system, ore processing, matter fab, steve's cart tree farm, a quarry, recycling complex, workshop with engines for machines, power room for quarries, lots of cabling to connect all the EU machines to the power generators (no EU tele-cables booo), and some other stuff I forget about cause there's a lot of concurrent projects we're all working on.

Granted, it's not all running at once, but when we're all online, there's usually a total of 12 to 14 players, and we will not be the only ones who get into the machinery and automation side of the modpacks (which is predominantly the point of a lot of them.)

From experience, so long as you are careful to handle your overflows correctly when using BC pipes (items building up on the ground are killer to the server and I killed it good back in my first few days on here ha ha,) what you have described is perfectly fine to run non-stop while you're around. I'll go one further and encourage you to think about how you can improve it and make it as efficient as you can. (Provided you like building machines. I do, and if you see me on, feel free to come check out the refinery I just built.)


- OJ

[Akira Doe]

I like building them so most of my stuff is mark 3 or 4, so they've already been rebuild and refined many times over.

[OranjeJus]

Sweet, that's awesome. I'm really interested in what you're doing here, as I'm working on some quantum booties to replace my long-falls. So I need gunpowder too. I've not come across this netherrack -> gunpowder thing before so any details you got I'm keen to check out. Can probably reverse engineer it if I need to of course, but asking you is easier in the short term =)


- OJ

[Akira Doe]

I'll give you the short version. Firstly I had been doing this manually until Gasman showed me his setup. I would never have gone down this path if it wasn't for his factory and him sharing the idea, thanks Gas

The recipe I'm using is,



1 x Coal (263) or Charcoal (263:1)
1 x Sulfur (20257:96)
1 x Niter (20257:97)

I'm using a tree farm to feed an Induction Furnace to create the Charcoal.

Pulverizing Netherrack produces Cobblestone but more importantly gives a change to produce Sulfur.

Pulverize the Cobblestone and you get Sand. Using an auto-crafting table turn the sand into Sand Stone.

Pulverise the Sand Stone and you get 2 x Sand (pump it back into the auto-crafting table) and a chance to produce Niter.

Now that you've got the material needed put them through another auto-crafting table and you've got Gunpowder.

It takes a lot of Netherrack to get the Sulfur needed. Lots of Cobble/Sand to make the Sand Stone and therefore get the Niter.

Since you can get all you need from Netherrack and Charcoal, I'd get a Mining Laser if you don't already have one to mine the Netherrack and setup a Tree farm to feed your charcoal needs (if you don't already have one).

If you are making a factory I'd recommend using insertion pipes and lots of chests because some materials are produced faster than others and the redstone engines can feed the Pulverisers faster than they can process the materials.

Here is a somewhat bad screenshot of mine. I'll go into more details another time as work is starting to get busy.