Kovarex in a row anyone?
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brunzenstein
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Kovarex in a row anyone?
Im looking for a simple stackable solution stacking a bunch of Covarex machines in a line so that they start with the first one introducing the 40 good uranium and then filling subsequently one after the other with the good uranium - and the bad as well.
Re: Covarex in a row anyone?
Something like this?brunzenstein wrote: ↑Fri Oct 22, 2021 7:37 am Im looking for a simple stackable solution stacking a bunch of Covarex machines in a line so that they start with the first one introducing the 40 good uranium and then filling subsequently one after the other with the good uranium - and the bad as well.
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brunzenstein
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Re: Covarex in a row anyone?
Thanks - not quite as this set-up is overfilling the kovarex machines.
I want to have no more then 40 of the good / 5 of the bad origanum in the maschine
I want to have no more then 40 of the good / 5 of the bad origanum in the maschine
Re: Covarex in a row anyone?
I Use this. The Kovarex enrichment is tilable vertically quite easily. It's very heavily inspired by a design I've seen somewhere an eternity ago.
pics or it never happened
IIRC, it can produce 320/mn, which should be enough to power shy of half the known universe.Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.
Re: Covarex in a row anyone?
That sounds very herbalbrunzenstein wrote: ↑Fri Oct 22, 2021 4:43 pm Thanks - not quite as this set-up is overfilling the kovarex machines.
I want to have no more then 40 of the good / 5 of the bad origanum in the maschine
. Seriously though, the overfill is only about 20 minutes worth of production.Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
Here's the one I use to get the Kovarex up and running as fast as possible, with some test/demo rigging (everything outside the beacon box that isn't blue). You need a sink for the unused U-238 from your ore processing, at least until it produces its 40th U-235. I don't think it's possible to get from the 40th U-235 to the 120th faster than this does it.
pic
Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
This assumes the availability of high-level speed modules. I would usually be kovarexing long before I had such things.
Yes, that's true however you do it.You need a sink for the unused U-238 from your ore processing, at least until it produces its 40th U-235.
Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
If you don't go hard on research then you use whatever speed modules you have and things run slower, but the design works with any level.
I go for PA2 + fusion as a priority, which makes speed 3 basically a gimme. I don't understand "long", though. The only thing you need that kovarex prereqs didn't already get you is AE2+S2+S3, those are just *dirt* cheap by comparison.
Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
On a random multiplayer server i once met user FuzzyOne, which had designed a marvelous set of cascading centrifuges:
It takes U238 from outside, but the U235 is passed on to the next centrifuge until it reaches the last centrifuge which outputs the U235 to the loginet. The thing takes its time to boot up, but i remember it to be a joyful proces,
seeing the centrifuges spark one by one.
It takes U238 from outside, but the U235 is passed on to the next centrifuge until it reaches the last centrifuge which outputs the U235 to the loginet. The thing takes its time to boot up, but i remember it to be a joyful proces,
seeing the centrifuges spark one by one.
- Screenshot_20211023_161221.png (796.85 KiB) Viewed 7513 times
Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
It's not about tech level, but about industrial capacity. Producing any significant quantity of high-level modules takes lots of resources (and lots of power). Isolated (and therefore meaningless
) datapoint: in the vanilla game I'm playing right now, I'm about 20 hours in and have been kovarexing since about the 14 hour point; the only tier 2 modules I've made so far are those required for my power armour (at about 16.5 hours); and I expect it to be another 2 or 3 hours before I make my first tier 3 module.Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
If you don't want to spend for the S3's yet, use what you've got, it works with those too. I don't understand what you're getting at here. 1500 purple science for the Kovarex research feels roughly comparable to the cost of the S3's to build that, am I wrong about that? I don't power my initial launch base on nuc power anyway, that's for the modest little megabases I build, so the S3's aren't an issue.Khagan wrote: ↑Sat Oct 23, 2021 9:48 pm It's not about tech level, but about industrial capacity. Producing any significant quantity of high-level modules takes lots of resources (and lots of power). Isolated (and therefore meaningless
Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
While that is a very interesting design I believe it achives the exact oppsite of the wanted result. Seems like it has an extra slow startup. You have to fill the first centrifuge and then the output is lost to the second. So any more input has to start filling the first centrifuge from scratch.T-A-R wrote: ↑Sat Oct 23, 2021 2:20 pm On a random multiplayer server i once met user FuzzyOne, which had designed a marvelous set of cascading centrifuges:
It takes U238 from outside, but the U235 is passed on to the next centrifuge until it reaches the last centrifuge which outputs the U235 to the loginet. The thing takes its time to boot up, but i remember it to be a joyful proces,
seeing the centrifuges spark one by one.
Screenshot_20211023_161221.png
bpkovarexcascade.txt
And when stuff exits at the end won't it be spread around to all centrifuges? So you really have to fill them all up before it keeps running on it's own. Right?
Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
You are right, the overall cost is comparable. But my science factory is already set up to produce flasks at that rate; it's just a matter of choosing to research Kovarex rather than any of the other available techs. My (bootstrap) construction factory is not designed to make nothing but high-level speed modules at the same rate.
That's the key difference then: I go for nuclear power ASAP.quyxkh wrote: I don't power my initial launch base on nuc power anyway, that's for the modest little megabases I build, so the S3's aren't an issue.
Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
Playing a little bit I've found a solution which reduces overfilling the centrifuges quite a bit:
It depends on the timing of the input inserter which grabbing some U-238 after grabbing the required U-225.
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Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
Does that even work? At start only the first centrifuge runs and none have any green uranium buffered. Then the cycle finishes what happens?
A) The first inserter puts dark uranium on the belt that everyone ignores. It then puts light uranium on the belt and the second inserter grabs it all and puts it back into the centrifuge and overfills. Later the centrifuge is all filled up. So when the cycle completes the next cycle starts. So the second inserter grabs some dark uranium. Meanwhile the first puts dark uranium on the belt. When it comes back to place light uranium on the belt the second inserter is back and ready to pick it up. Both uranium types will be fully overfilled.
B) Like A but later when the first inserter puts the light uranium on the belt the second is still swinging because it had more to pick up than the first inserter placed on the belt. So it misses some of the light uranium and the centrifuge isn't overfilled fully.
Or is the timing such that it pick up just the right amount letting all the produced light uranium pass?
C) Like A but later the first inserter starts with light uranium while the second refills the dark uranium. So some gets past and it doesn't grab enough for the next cycle. But one is already running and it will get enough from that to keep going. Overall the centrifuge isn't overfilled fully.
Unless it's case B and the timing is magically exact right on the inserter speed I sill see overfilling. Is that what you referred to with "it depends on the timing"?
Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
Simple and minimized use of U235 (the good green) are mutual exclusive: e.g. you need combinators for that.brunzenstein wrote: ↑Fri Oct 22, 2021 7:37 am Im looking for a simple stackable solution stacking a bunch of Covarex machines in a line so that they start with the first one introducing the 40 good uranium and then filling subsequently one after the other with the good uranium - and the bad as well.
Could you state the design parameters more precise?
quyxkh's design is the fastest one of the lot, the only (minor) drawback is that you can not use production modules in the centrifuges.
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brunzenstein
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Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
Things to remember about circuits:brunzenstein wrote: ↑Sun Oct 24, 2021 9:13 pmpls explain how it works in detail - I tried but couldn't really figure out
Thanks in advance
- the signals on a circuit are the sum of those signals on all connected output posts for that tick
- signals are signed 32-bit values
- combinators deliver the results from their summed input signals one tick later on both output posts
- filters are set from positive signals only
This is very much easier to *see* once you grasp the principles than it is to read about. Step through the process described above in your head, pretty much word by word, and imagine what's going on, once you get it the text will go back to being a glob of useless text and you'll be able to just look at that inserter wiring and understand what it's doing, but as far as I know everyone must suffer the excruciating agony of the text at least once.
The centrifuge-unload stack inserter is wired read-hold and greenwired to the centrifuge-unload yellow inserter, which is set enable-if u238>0, stack size 1. Centrifuges unload the catalyst u238 first, then the catalyst+produced u235, so the first thing that happens at the end of a cycle is the stack inserter unloads two u238, which enables the yellow inserter, which picks up one of whatever's available -- and since the stack inserter picked up all the '238 that's just one u235.
The centrifuge-loading filter inserter is greenwired to a u235 accumulator exactly like the one for the demo inserter, but it's also redwired to a constants box set u238=1, u235=2147483608 which is 2³¹-40. Because of how 32-bit numbers work, 2⁰ is the lowest bit and 2³¹ is the highest bit, and a lit highest bit signifies a negative number if you're doing signed arithmetic the right way (which Factorio does).
Here's another torture trial, it's like the one above: much, the prose is harder to understand than the concept once you get it.
Addition and subtraction work identically whether you're using signed or unsigned numbers. The convention, besides making for cheap and efficient hardware implementation, also happens to match how the universe works. Seriously, this is simple objective fact: if you imagine that you can write an infinite number of binary digits to the left of the integer point, so in binary an infinite number of ones, you get infinite ones…1111. Subtract one from it and you get infinite ones…1110, which is also what you get when you multiply it by two. If 2x = x-1, x=-1. So the all-binary-ones representation represents negative one when you're doing signed arithmetic, and 2^N-1 when you're doing N-bit unsigned arithmetic. Modular addition and subtraction giving the bit-identical results either way is just the universe telling you "now you're getting it".
And when you add 40 from the accumulator and 2³¹-40 from the constants box, you get 2³¹, a negative number, the u-235 filter shuts off after the filter inserter has loaded 40 of them, but the u-238 filter stays lit forever because the accumulator isn't counting those.
Re: Kovarex in a row anyone?
The integer over/underflow is not universal. It's a side effect of how you implement negative numbers in your computer. Nowadays basically everything uses the Two's complement for integers. But that wasn't always the case. With One's complement logic you go from 2^31 to -0, -1, -2, ... -2^31, 0, 1, 2, ...
Luckily that has kind of died out. The Two's complement design is much easier to illustrate with a piece of paper. So lets talk more about the numbers in factorio and lets use a small number of bits to make it easier to understand:
Take a piece of paper and cut a strip from it. Leaving a bit of space at the end write the numbers -8 to 7 on it left to right. That's your numbers with 4 bits instead of 32. Now glue the two ends together. Increment a number goes one to the right, decrement one to the left. Addition goes to the right, subtraction to the left. So, for example, if you set a constant box to 5 and then add 3 from the accumulator you start at 5 and go 3 to the right: 6, 7, -8. You get -8 and negative numbers won't set a filter in filter inserters. That's how that trick with the HUGE numbers work, same thing just more bits mean bigger numbers.
Luckily that has kind of died out. The Two's complement design is much easier to illustrate with a piece of paper. So lets talk more about the numbers in factorio and lets use a small number of bits to make it easier to understand:
Take a piece of paper and cut a strip from it. Leaving a bit of space at the end write the numbers -8 to 7 on it left to right. That's your numbers with 4 bits instead of 32. Now glue the two ends together. Increment a number goes one to the right, decrement one to the left. Addition goes to the right, subtraction to the left. So, for example, if you set a constant box to 5 and then add 3 from the accumulator you start at 5 and go 3 to the right: 6, 7, -8. You get -8 and negative numbers won't set a filter in filter inserters. That's how that trick with the HUGE numbers work, same thing just more bits mean bigger numbers.