Parallelized turbine example

Larger Power Systems

If you have a need for much more power, in the hundreds of kW range, designing a clean system with failsafes becomes essential. You will likely need T2 poles for the amount of power you'll be transporting, and a way to use it all. The large amount of power required by the irresponsible drill can be a good sink.

Basics

You'll likely want to round to the nearest power of two above the amount of power you're striving for, so 256kW for the irresponsible drill. This makes crafting turbines and generators and arraying them easier, as well as being close to cable limits for efficiency.

It's recommended to split generators, turbines, and other parts of the shaft network into separate banks, so that maintenance and control can be easily done. Your will likely only pull 200+kW when your drill is running, and so you may want ti shut off some turbines when your power draw is not that high. As well, you may want only some generators to be online when you are underspeed, and it's easier to turn off banks of generators than trying to figure it out in huge clumps.

Whichever turbine you're using, make sure you have enough fuel. I would not recommend using the steam turbines without a reactor of some kind, either ReactorCraft, NuclearCraft, or BigReactors. You will regret it when your steam vanishes from your tank or you're building 32-64 HP RailCraft boilers. The gas turbine, while producing about half the power of its steam cousin, reacts faster, consumes a more reasonable amount of fuel, and can be more fuel efficient than the steam if you;re running fluid fuel through a boiler. You'll still need a large amount of fuel, though.

You'll likely want power storage of some kind, overspeed/overvolt protection, and some way to limit the power coming out of your shaft network so that you don't need to spin up again. As well, you'll want spin-up to be automated, so it can recover from a shutdown without your intervention.

Parts of the system

Spin-up

You've got a couple options for spinning up your turbines, and while steam doesn't need to be spun up, it's helpful if you do because of how painstakingly slow it is when you have many flywheels.

Since you've likely got your liquid fuel automated (and if you don't, you should do so soon), your best choice for manual spin-up is to use 200V fuel generators, as at 6kW per they're a large power output for the space, though unable to be automated because they require manual fuel input and turning on by hand. If you're looking for automation, dependability, and automatic startup, your best choice is solar panels with either of the power storage options discussed previously. This allows automated spin-up and turbine speed recovery at any time, as long as it's not too frequent (which it shouldn't be anyway).

You'll want to feed that power into a shaft motor for startup, but you don't want it to always keep running and wasting power while exploding the shafts, do you? This is where clutches and tachometers are important. You can set a tachometer to disable a clutch if the system is above ~700 rad/s second, after most fuels should have ignited and be producing power in your gas turbines. If you're using steam turbines, it can also cutoff at there, as the turbines start to be decently efficient at that point, and can normally get up to speed reasonably from there.