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Gear train and helvenhammer


Gladi

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If you're talking about using a large gear to boost the speed/reduce the torque, you need a lot more windmills than a baseline setup. We're talking around 4-5x as many, possibly more.

Additionally, I'm recalling that helvehammers have a penalty when running at higher speeds, so their requirements are actually a bit beyond what you'd expect from the above point alone.

Even when you do get sufficient power, I've noticed the speed oscillates a fair bit, or at least my most recent run with the creative power sources did.

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The thing about gearing up is that it multiplies input side oscillations on the output side. And the input side isn't static by any means. Mouse over your windmill rotor sometime and watch the wind strength vary.

Another effect I've been wondering about is that, potentially, the system works with discrete speed steps. I've tried to ask people like radfast a about it but haven't gotten an answer yet. What I mean is that the windmill rotor might only be able to assume a limited number of discrete speeds. Like, for example, one hundred different speed steps - one for each percent of maximum speed. Or some other model.

Accordingly, if you gear up, and the windmill rotor changes speeds by one step, then after the gear, the difference between the steps will be nearly five times as large, and thus way more visible.

My biggest indicator for discrete speed stepping is actually the start-stop behavior at extremely low speeds, though. When the wind is just barely strong enough to run a machine that has been geared up, that machine will still tend to move at a fairly decent clip... and then suddenly stop hard. And then suddenly go back to moving at a fairly decent clip. And then stop again. For me, that's a clear indicator that there's a hard limit on how slow the windmill rotor can turn. It simply cannot become slow enough for a geared-up machine to gracefully slow down below a certain point. The next step slower is simply 'stopped'. And so it stops. Then starts again on its slowest speed step. Then stops. Then starts. And so on.

This behavior cannot really be fixed by adding additional windmills either. Those just mean that the mechanism runs a bit faster at the same wind speed. But it doesn't prevent the start/stop behavior from reoccurring all the same at a slightly lower wind speed, because each rotor still has the same minimum speed.

Again, that's just an unconfirmed hypothesis of mine. But it's the best explanation I can come up with for what I am seeing.

 

Edited by Streetwind
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8 hours ago, Streetwind said:

The thing about gearing up is that it multiplies input side oscillations on the output side. And the input side isn't static by any means. Mouse over your windmill rotor sometime and watch the wind strength vary.

Considering that I was using the creative mode power sources, there was zero fluctuation on the input side unless I was manually making a change.

 

8 hours ago, Streetwind said:

When the wind is just barely strong enough to run a machine that has been geared up, that machine will still tend to move at a fairly decent clip... and then suddenly stop hard.

I suspect that has to do with there being a minimum torque threshold for the quern/etc to run, while the actual operating speed is a combination of torque and speed. And with the massive changes to torque and speed you get with a geared up setup, let alone the oscillations you describe later, you end up getting those sudden stops you describe.

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3 hours ago, Ashery said:

Considering that I was using the creative mode power sources, there was zero fluctuation on the input side unless I was manually making a change.

But are we sure that the creative sources don't fluctuate? Or is that just an assumption? Can we know they aren't just a copypasta of the windmill rotor code with a toggle to fake a certain wind speed?

I mean, I actually don't know. I can't really read the code either. Someone more versed in C# than me would have to confirm or deny.

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