Redesign Stirling Engines
asiekierka opened this issue · 12 comments
The old heating mechanic of Stirling Engines does not work with RF's constant power system. Seeking input on this one!
While #2051 fixed bugs, this is a somewhat deeper issue that needs more investigation - specifically, whether the behaviour of Stirling Engine heatups changed due to the constant power move.
@adudney - indeed, while your code fixes some minor "fails" in the RF conversion, the major issue (Stirling Engines never get warmed up) is still there.
Ah, so the problem is that when it is outputting energy to a sink such as a pipe it never heats up?
If so, what mechanics does heating up add in a continuous output system? In the old system it sped up the piston so that it would output smaller packets more often, now that it outputs continuously it makes sense that it would never heat up until the sink stops receiving energy. I don't think that really needs to change.
@Sailren - as I said, the current stirling engine mechanic doesn't work well, especially with pumps.
my stirling engines blow up when connected to a pump some time ago, even when it had a gate trigger for red trunk, red pipe signal ....
@Sailren That's fixed in 6.1.3, in 6.1.2 stirling engines were producing heat way too fast, in 6.1.3 they power pumps very well.
I'll probably take a stab at this tomorrow. I'm thinking of greatly lengthening the time between 10RF/t is produced and 3RF/t is produced, so as to allow things that take less than 10 but greater than 3 per tick to be powered by the stirling engine purely by letting it heat up. (Sort of like dynamos but not quite?)
I'll also take a stab at re-allowing pumps to be powered by redstone engines. Maybe with a small API of sorts? ILowEnergyHandler? :P No methods or anything, just implement it and you can now be powered by redstone engines. Huh. Does that actually sound like a good idea? (Those sentences started as a jest, but now it's got me actually thinking…)
@adudney - I'm not sure if that makes a lot of sense. I personally think we should leave a Stirling Engine redesign for 6.2.0, in fact, and just make sure the current behaviour sort-of works in 6.1.x.
And I planned an IEnergyConnectionRedstone, yes.
