Railcraft Tank

Railcraft Tank
Name	Railcraft Tank
Source Mod	Railcraft

The Railcraft Tank is an expandable multi-block structure that holds a large amount of liquid. Valid dimensions are 3x3, 5x5, 7x7 or 9x9, from 4 up to 8 blocks tall. Railcraft Tank blocks may be crafted from Iron or Steel. Iron tanks are made of Iron Tank Walls, Iron Tank Gauges and Iron Tank Valves, and can hold 16,000 millibuckets of liquid for each block in the structure. Steel tanks are constructed from Steel Tank Walls, Steel Tank Gauges, and Steel Tank Valves, and can hold 32,000 mB. Steel Tanks are thus much more efficient, but Steel is harder to obtain and requires a Blast Furnace.

Construction

The frame of a Railcraft Tank made of Wall Blocks

The frame of a Railcraft Tank must be constructed of Tank Wall blocks. The inside must be empty and the walls may be filled in with any of the tank blocks. Gauges are transparent blocks that allow players to see a visual representation of the tank's liquid level. Valves allow the tank to interact with other machines, Fluid Pipes, and Liquiducts. The tank will form into a single structure once all the outer walls are complete, and nothing is inside, including players, blocks and floating entities.

Storing Liquids

Liquid is pumped into and out of the Railcraft Tank through a Tank Valve, using pipes, tubes, or other machines with powered liquid outputs (such as the Aqueous Accumulator). Liquid can be pumped in from any valve on the sides or the top, while extracting all liquid from a tank requires it to be drawn from a valve installed on one of the bottom 2 rows (if a valve is installed higher the tank will not empty completely). Valves installed on the underside of the tank will automatically output liquid into a connected pipe or container. The contents of Buckets, Cells, Glass Bottles, Tin Cans and other liquid containers can be added by dropping them into the top right side of the UI. However all containers but Buckets will be destroyed. Furthermore, simply 'Right-clicking' a Tank with an empty Bucket or liquid container will fill it (if there is enough liquid in the tank), with a full container, the liquid will transfer to the tank.

Rebuilding

The bottom center block of the structure stores the record of the tank's contents; it may not be removed and has to remain in the center. Railcraft Tanks can be mostly dismantled, rebuilt, or built to a different size as long as the center block remains. Breaking and replacing any other block doesn't affect the contents, although inaccessible until the structure is valid again. To relocate a Tank it is recommended to empty it first.

Efficiency

As the size of the tank increases, so does its efficiency. The capacity of an Iron Tank is 16 Buckets (16,000 mB) per block of volume, including the empty space inside, at the cost is 1 Iron Plate per block. So a 3x3 tank built 4 high has a capacity of 576,000 mB and costs 34 iron plates, this means a ratio of ~16.94 buckets per plate, while a 7x7 tank built 8 high has a capacity of 6,272,000 mB and costs 242 iron plates which gives a ~25.92 buckets per plate.

Capacity

The following tables lists the capacity of the various tank sizes in units of buckets.

Iron Tank

Base/ Height	4	5	6	7	8
3x3	576	720	864	1008	1152
5x5	1600	2000	2400	2800	3200
7x7	3136	3920	4704	5488	6272
9x9	5184	6480	7776	9072	10368

Steel Tank

Base/ Height	4	5	6	7	8
3x3	1152	1440	1728	2016	2304
5x5	3200	4000	4800	5600	6400
7x7	6272	7840	9408	10976	12544
9x9	10368	12960	15552	18144	20736

Requirements

The following table lists the total amount of blocks required to build the various size tanks.

Base/ Height	4	5	6	7	8
3x3	34	42	50	58	66
5x5	82	98	114	130	146
7x7	146	170	194	218	242
9x9	226	258	290	322	354

Storage/Cost Ratio

The following table lists the cost efficiency of the various tank sizes (in B/BlocksRequired) - for Steel Tanks, double the values.

Base/ Height	4	5	6	7	8
3x3	16.6	16.9	17.1	17.3	17.4
5x5	19.5	20.4	21.1	21.5	21.9
7x7	21.5	23.1	24.2	25.2	25.9
9x9	22.9	25.1	26.8	28.2	29.3

Color

Tanks may be colored by placing eight blocks of the same type around any vanilla dye in the crafting table, or by right-clicking on a block in the world with an IndustrialCraft 2 painter. All blocks in a single tank need not be the same color. Breaking a tank block removes its color.