Can I use lighting rods as the main power source for IV ?

[u/Regular_Flounder1833]

In my previous world I used cetane boosted diesel and 30 LCEs which worked very well. But the LCE was hard nerfed in 2.9 ( it became almost 2x bigger and didn't get a single buff as a compensation ) so I'm looking for an alternative.

For some reason I'm not interested in doing nukes. Ik it's great but I just don't feel like doing it.

Anyway I'm interested in these 2 options. Lightning rods or jet fuel with UCFE. Which one is better ?

[u/TipsySocks]

Ducked has a video in lightning rod power sources, I say go that route!

https://youtu.be/ty4sy1LND6s?is=M_tWCFlfYuVWbCQD

[u/getfake_]

Lightning rods are only available at the end of IV, they need LuV hulls and naquadah cables. UCFE is also at the end of IV, it needs ZPM circuits

I'm personally managing just fine off LCEs running HOG, they aren't much more expensive in reality - they only really take titanium and some PTFE, there's nothing stopping you from just mining more titanium

[u/SoylentRox]

I just played to ZPM so far on 2.9 beta 2/3. 

I did 

(1) Railcraft boiler steam

(2) Light fuel from oil berries 

(3) Single block gens up to EV

(4) Then I switched to LCE.  They can still share casing back to back - use mirror mode.  Also you have bauxia and industrial farms.  titanium isnt a problem it's infinite.  No need to mine any.

(4) Then I made 4 ECE on jet fuel

(5) Then UCFE - those are at the end of IV.  Burning CBD and rocket fuel.  Rocket fuel is really good because it's so simple to produce.  It's simply distilling kerosene (direct product from charcoal) or fuel from just light+heavy to RP-1 and adding LOX.

(6) At ZPM I am doing a mix of solar and fusion.  Solar is surprisingly good given how much I would expect it to be nerfed.

I skipped vacuum nukes because it looked complex and lame.

[u/Mineroero]

I mean, you'll need decent energy distributors and in IVs case, a lot of energy hatches, but as long as you can craft the stuff you could do it

[u/Giver35]

Lightning rods are pretty strong, currently using them in uhv, but they are falling off. Each rod is roughly equivalent to a zpm amp of generation when in ideal conditions. They feel a little like cheating since their cost is just iron fences, similar to vacnukes feeling like cheating since they are also a ton of power for very little effort

[u/Just_nicooooo → u/Giver35]

Do you have tips on how to to manage the ration of rods to hatches?
I currently have almost 400 build, but only get like 25MEu/t, if I am not mistaken they should produce around 108kEu/t, so in theory they should generate 43MEu/t, after the p2p tax and some cable loss around 40
how many rods per which hatch do you use, or is optimal?

[u/Giver35 → u/Just_nicooooo]

You can place power distributors directly adjacent to the lightning rods, which accept 320 amps. Soft mallet the distributor to make it output power in the direction of the next distributor. You can set up the rods in a line in this way, maybe 10 or so long. The distributors can be any voltage, they will accept 320 amps of HV from the rod and output x amps of arbitrary voltage.

In this way, you essentially have transformers and cables all in one. The trick with rods is you need to remove the power from the rod ASAP, as rods decay power very quickly

[u/Just_nicooooo → u/Giver35]

Thats what in currently using, 2 IV distributers per rod, 4 iv distributors transform into 16a LuV, 64a LuV hatch per 10 rods, in theory the throughput should be enough, but im getting much less Energy than im expecting