Outsourcing to DarkSkies, reports on Canned Food!

We at Weapons and Tactics Research are not to far beyond ourselves to consider only our own R&D centers the pinnacle of innovation and opportunity.  That's why we've sent one of our hard working mining engineers to Industrial Lemon to join DarkSkies town.  Industrial Lemon is a Tekkit world that spans very lossely into the power of Equivalent Exchange, an alchemy styled mod that proves its worth in diamonds... literally.  This world seems more balanced in the sense that Transmutation Tables are only accessible to member+ rank, meaning that a person must still keep an item on them in order to transmute into another. Also, relays don't work here which prevents items being produced from thin air, at least not without reaching very late game in IndustrialCraft.

Our first project has been exploring the EMC values of various foodtypes.  IndustrialCraft has a very powerful machine called the canning machine, capable of purifying lesser foods and storing them in tin cans.  These purified foods not only replenish hunger, but heal as well as consume a good degree faster than regular food.  Zombie meat is capable of replacing two hunger bars but with a great chance of causing Hunger 1 for 30 seconds, sapping those two points away.  Canning the food processes the meat in a way that prevents this from happening!  Spider eyes also are purified in this manner.  Mushroom stew is a filling meal but not very satisfying.  All of these foods are strengthened quite a lot by canning.   But how does this relate to Equivalent Exchange?  EMC values could play more of a role in determining what the best food overall to can is, and what food items should be transmuted into it to gain maximum benefit.  After all, if two mushroom stew become five zombie meats, that fills two whole more cans than just canning mushroom stew- with the added bonus of zombie meats being stackable.

The following table shows our research thus far:

• Mushroom Stew, 70 EMC, Cans 4
• Cooked pork, 64 EMC, Cans 4
• Cooked Steak, 64 EMC, Cans 4
• Bread, 72 EMC, Cans 3
• Cooked fish, 64 EMC, Cans 3
• Cooked Chicken, 64 EMC, Cans 3
• Apple, 128 EMC, Cans 2
• Rotten Flesh, 24 EMC, Cans 2
• Spider Eye, 128 EMC, Cans 1
• Cookie, 22 EMC, Cans 1
• Melon Slice, 16 EMC, Cans 1

From this table, we can see it is very apparent that apples, spider eyes, and bread are among the highest EMC values, while rotten flesh holds the best EMC value for canning at 12 EMC per can.  We would therefore recommend large wheat farms transmuting their contents into zombie parts for canning.  Soylent Green is zombies.

Automated factories: what method is better?

If you're familiar at all with Buildcraft or Redpower, you'll be well aware that both mods include ways to automate processing of machines, such as your macerator and extractor, both of which can produce multiple goods for each action.  Because of this, automatic extraction from the output is often preferred.  Today's look introduces the cheapest options for automating with both mods, analyzes their cost, and any additional advantages and drawbacks.

Buildcraft is the one we have seen other companies use, and upon first glance it's easy to see why.  It has a very quick build time and requires very little resources to get working.  All that is required is a redstone engine (once again, all calculations are made in vanilla non-renewable resource and tier 1 non-renewable resource costs) and a redstone engine requires a piston to become functional.  So for one redstone and one iron, plus wood and stone, a simple automated factory becomes possible.  Buildcraft pipes, when branching, will perform an equal ratio distribution regardless of distance. In this way they play nice with multiple machines.  Lastly, the included tool to manipulate special piping and engines costs a maximum of 3 iron and never breaks.

So, why have we elected to use Redpower's mechanics when possible?  Let's take a look at the drawbacks.  Buildcraft allows for a slightly streamlined workflow but since each machine requires a steady flow of redstone signal, a switch must be wired up to each redstone engine to keep it working.  And redstone engines are very low power and require some time to reach maximum efficiency.  However, these pale in comparison to the final flaw in Buildcraft piping: if the exit is blocked, the item will drop from the pipes and require manual cleanup!  This makes the drop and forget method of automated machine preperation next to impossible.  The loads would have to be carefully balanced in order to achieve maximum efficiency.

Redpower's automation using transposers seems a bit trickier.  Before one can pipe anything, they will need brass piping, which has to be smelted from 3 copper ingots and 1 tin ingot in a red alloy furnace.  Thus, to begin one must start by collecting enough clay to make a red alloy furnace!  If all that is desired is prepping a machine, however, a transposer can be streamlined so that it directly takes from the chest and directly deposits into the top of the machine.  However, transposers are still more expensive than the redstone engine, requiring two redstone and one iron ingot to create.  Furthermore, they work from redstone pulses, not a constant redstone signal, which means timers should be created to automate their inner working.  Timers are also quite expensive to build.  Stone much be smelted into stone wafers, then redstone must be crafted into the wafers to create the mechanisms needed to build the circuit.  Finally, timers are noisy bunches.

With all those drawbacks, why use it?  Well, for starters, a transposer will never drop an item.  If all the pathways to machines are blocked, it will flow back into the transposer, jamming the device and preventing it from functioning until the pathway has been cleared.  The internal buffer of transposers is large enough where even stacks of items will not be lost. Transposers are also easier to manually cut off-simply provide a constant redstone signal to the machine and it will stop functioning.  Cutting the signal to a redstone engine will cause it to have to build up momentum all over again.  This is useful for manual overrides of a machine should you ever need to do so (for example, grinding a large amount of coal).

With everything considered, the most cost effective automated macerator/smelter combo appears to be a transposer feeding items to the macerator, then wooden piping extracting the output to electric furnaces, and finally wooden piping extracting the smelted product to a proccessed chest for further sorting.  We have preferred to use all transposers for maximum control over the process.  Though costly in redstone, we have never lost an item to the machines dropping it.  We also believe this is much safer for mutliplayer options.

Overclocker Tips and Tricks

Today while working on ore processing we discovered an interesting trick with IndustrialCraft's handling of overclocker upgrades.  By inserting the upgrade during an operation the machine will suddenly "catch up" to where the overclockers would have had it, had they been in the machine since the beginning of the operation!  Although we are sure this is a clear cut case of too much HAYO, and that the machines will eventually figure this out and stop dropping pantloads when overclockers are inserted into them during operation, for now it works.  You can use this trick to save potential EUs on many applications.

Grand re-opening

We at Weapons and Tactics Research are heading back to the roots of our trade, namely research and development.  Upon establishing a front in Tekkit Survival (possible map updates coming soon!) we began with a simple ore refinement center consisting of a macerator and electric furnace.  This outpost quickly grew into a fully automated ore processing center complete with redpower automation and cutoff switches for singular automated processing. It is now complete with a backup macerator and electro furnace, as well as a mass fabricator powered by 12 low voltage solar arrays, 6 water stills, and an overclocked recycler fed 4 cobblestone blocks per lava flow cycle.

Our staff consists of one mining engineer who is equipped with the latest in quantumsuit technology, aside from the chestplate as we believe in green solutions as often as possible.  All of our equipment has been electroized aside from the hoe which rarely if ever needs tending to.  A rubber tree farm and chicken farm are kept nearby for their respective needed applications.  No, we do not forget to recharge our helmets.

Currently in construction is our R&D building branded with the WATR logo.  Six floors of research and development with the underside of every floor set aside for redpower wiring if need be, soon to be powered by as much solar and geothermal power as a single MFSU will support, our building will be dedicated to testing and verifying alternate methods of construction, automation, and resource gathering.

As a bonus, our first overview of equivalent methodologies will be described here!  Today we examine Forestry's electric engine designed to power all manner of forestry and buildcraft contraptions, and compare it to Power Converter's Energy Link.  As a reminder, all costs are calculated in terms of tier 1 nonrenewable resources.  That is to say, any block or resource that can be gathered or harvested infinitely in vanilla Minecraft or can be processed into from an infinite resource using only tier 1 technology from any mod excluding EE is not counted towards the cost when weighing in the difference between construction costs.  At some point we may recalculate an item's EMC cost as closely as possible before refinement, as some items like rubber and refined iron have no EMC value.

With its relatively inexpensive cost of 11 tin, 1 iron, and 1 redstone, forestry's electrical engine will take but a modest toll on your resources and be easy enough to save up for.  What it saves in setup time though it lacks in application: Not only can it only power one machine at a time, it must receive a constant redstone signal in order to function.  The electrical engine converts 6EU/t to 2Mj/t, enough to suck an entire stack of items out of a chest.

However, the Energy Link is a powerful contender.  The initial build cost is crazy, requiring a copper cable, two alloy plates, two gold gears (that's 8 iron on top of 8 gold), and 4 redstone for a total cost of 12 copper, 9 tin, 14 iron, 8 gold, and 4 redstone just to begin construction of one.  On the flip side, it can provide energy conversions of any needed amount to any side, meaning it can power four pumps for less than the amount of one water still's electrical output.  It also doesn't require any redstone signal to convert energy, allowing it to be used in tighter constraints than the electrical engine.

So, which one should you use?  It's all up to the space requirements and application.  Once high level matter generation has started it might be more efficient to use Energy Links unless it is actually essential to have a cutoff switch for your devices.

Next time, we'll demonstrate why glass was not included in the cost of any of these machines.  After an initial setup of your first cobblestone generator and automated ore processing chain, you'll discover how to convert cobblestone into glass!  You will never have to worry about breaking a few glass blocks again.

WATR finds new home

This will be our final post on matters concerning Weapons and Tactics Research at this address. We have found a new home at We, the Players, where our creation and research into strategy will continue to foster and grow with Duriiel as our partner.

Before we shut down operations here, however, we will leave you with an exclusive insight on an upcoming project and weapons package: our Greaser set's high end weapons have been decided! Available to the UAC marine includes a rocket launcher of disproportionate power, but limited ammo. Meanwhile, a counter to the heavy machine gun has been devised- a sniper rifle that can detect invisible targets! Finally, high end destructive power in massed groups will have to be seen in order to be believed as our innovative Chain Lightning Gun will mop up those unsightly mobs within seconds.

For updates on our Greaser package, please stay tuned to our new location, We, the Players!

Possible DoomScript Addition Forces Recall of W.A.T.R. Weapons

We at W.A.T.R. believe in proper coding techniques. However, recently we were informed that there has been a coding requirement we were not following. We apologize for the inconvenience and will be recoding our weapons shortly. For the concerned, our weapons have not broken as of yet; the coding requirement is to ensure future compatibility with DoomScript.

DoomScript is still in its infancy, with an alpha version available now. There is no guarantee this form of DoomScript will be a finalized version, but a highly important coding requirement was created in preparation of any finalized version of DoomScript: all state labels called from codepointers are to be enclosed in quotations, just as inventory item names are.  This is because state labels are considered literal strings, and with the event of coming variables it will not be easy for a parser to figure out whether the jump is referring to a variable jump or a state label without these quotations denotating it a string literal.

Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause while we recode our weapons. Production and innovation lines have been streamlined into error checking until all weapons are brought up to date, at which point we will continue with current weapon design.

Thank you.

Presenting Individual Dual Fire

The individual dual fire system is an extension and combination of previous hacks in ZDoom's inventory and weapon systems.  The general outline for the system is this: the right handed weapon is controlled by the Ready, Fire, and AltFire states, while the left hand is governed completely by the Flash states.  The Right weapon is triggered in the same way as usual, while the left weapon is triggered by inventory items.  By using inventory items, both weapons can trigger independently from each other, so they can be fired sequentially or simotaneously.

One forseeable problem with the technology is the burden this places on the user.  Instead of having a single way for fire the weapons, he must manage two buttons per gun.  We feel that the technology and keyboard is capable of creating a solution, namely by allowing the engine to handle things like running for the player.  An advanced mouse, preferably with easy to reach buttons, eases the task as well.

We hope that you will enjoy the Individual Dual Fire system.  Our first weapon to be rolled out with this design is the Glock.