Make combustion fuels more competitive mid to late game

[jmoiron]

Modpack

FTB Interactions Remastered

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.

The switch from GTCE to GTCEu included the addition of a powerful gas turbine fuel, nitrobenzene.

Despite the heavy amount of buffs in the pack, the modified diesel processing line that is clearly being encouraged is not competitive with benzene and gas turbines after EV. I think combustion fuels should be buffed to make them more competitive with gas fuels in midgame.

The energy densities are as follows:

Gas:

• benzene -> 352 eu/mb (available at MV)
• nitrobenzene -> 1280 eu/mb (HV)

Diesel:

• light fuel -> 320 eu/mb (LV)
• diesel -> 480 eu/mb (MV via mixer, crystallized @ HV)
• CBD -> 720 eu/mb (HV)
• nitro-diesel -> 960 eu/mb (HV)
• nq fuel -> 44800 eu/mb (IV, req Aurellia)

CEu also adds gasoline which requires a lot of petrochem:

• gasoline -> 1600 eu/mb (HV, post LCR)
• high octane gasoline (HoG) -> 3200 eu/mb (EV)

Even in its modified form (which includes a 10x yield from oil), the diesel line requires a lot more processing, a lot more mod interaction, and is generally less energy dense than gas until late-IV.

Oil procurement cannot be automated until moon. Benzene is created trivially from wood, which is farmable early via tree beacon, and then industrial forgoing, and finally the eio farmer. Nitrobenzene is a simple mix of benzene, nitration mixture, and water; compare to tetranitromethane synthesis for CBD, which is still only ~55% as energy dense.

On top of this, gasses get burned in the large turbine after HV, a more fiddly but more scalable multiblock generator than the LCE or ECE (I'll get to the LuV Diesel Generator in a bit). The fiddliness is a big setback in GTCE, but CEu also adds >100% efficiency rotors, rs latch covers, and the Power Substation, which improve fuel economy, make automating turbines easier, and improve the time you can spend running them at peak output before you start voiding power.

Normally, oil/diesel being weaker in IV+ is offset by having richer early power, simpler LCE/ECE logistics, and some perks like getting sulfur and plastics for free from your petrochem setup. A player using benzene for power still generally does some petrochem early (at additional expense) for plastics, but in Interactions, you get PE & PVC from a chicken, which pulls even more focus away from the oil route.

A lot of this is nitro being OP (which is a problem in CEu itself), but I think it serves a purpose. GTCE has a really bad midgame power vacuum imho; CEu adds nitro, HoG + ECE, GTNH adds IC2 reactors, rocket engines and naq reactors; in omni/nomi/moni you don't really do GT power but this vacuum is filled by numi spam and/or nuclearcraft.

Interactions filled this vacuum too, with nitro-diesel, nq fuel, the LuV Diesel Generator and the Photonuclear Fission Chamber. I think these could be made to be well balanced within CEu with some buffs, and balancing them against nitrobenzene would be a good way to do it.

Mod suggestion

No response

[jmoiron]

I wanted to add some suggestions but I didn't want to make this ticket longer so I figured I'd add it in a comment.

The gap between nitro-diesel and nq fuel is already vast; closing it slightly wouldn't hurt. The yield for gasoline is poor compared to nitro-diesel because it can't come from the 10x interactions oil pipeline, but I think it makes sense to buff nitro-diesel to be somewhere between nitrobenzene (1280 eu/mb) and HoG (3200 eu/mb) anyway.

The LuV Diesel Gen (as noted in the quest book) actually squanders some of the energy of nq fuel; it is both more expensive than the ECE (it requires fusion coils! so it's gated by the ZPM assembler) and a downgrade. Make it a significant upgrade over the ECE and viable for early ZPM power.

The fuel for the PFC cannot be automated (outside of matter duplication, you'll have to mine it) until infinity chicken, and it only produces 1A LuV of steam (though since steam uses a turbine you can realistically about ~1.6A LuV). It's a cool multiblock though; some ideas to make it more viable:

• PFC is an EV tier machine that outputs LuV energy; make an IV tier one that outputs ZPM energy, uses tungstensteel + better coils
• Have the PFC output a spent fuel that can processed to regain some of the input (or have the spent fuel be processed into better fissile fuel for the next tier PFC)
• Have it output plasma instead of steam (as it is, the PFC produces an enormous amt of distilled water from nothing)

Alternatively, you could nerf nitrobenzene to make it less viable. Making it require LP or Mana or Starlight would make it slightly harder to produce and be more interactions-ey. It would still probably be very strong unless its energy density is changed.