Efficiency Comparison: Electric Detonation Compressor vs. Detonation Compressor

TL;DR: The Electric Detonation Compressor is the key area.

The Explosion Compressor unlocks at the HV stage, used to craft rockets, entangled singularities required for hypercubes, and certain crystals obtainable only through explosions. The Power Explosion Compressor unlocks as its "higher tier" at the ZPM stage, no longer requiring explosives, but its voltage requirement jumps from LV to UV. So, when is the Power Explosion Compressor better?

The raw materials for making explosives (Industrial TNT) are gelatinized toluene and mixed nitric acid. The former is made from toluene, sugar, and polyethylene powder. Toluene and polyethylene come from petrochemical and biomass, and sugar comes from greenhouse-grown sugarcane. The latter is obtained by mixing nitric acid and sulfuric acid, and both can be directly extracted. Therefore, you won't lack explosive raw materials, so saving explosives is not very meaningful.

Compared to the explosive compressor, the electric explosive compressor can hold parallel and acceleration chambers, and with expansion modules, it can also hold laser and overclocking chambers. However, its required voltage is 7 levels higher than the explosive compressor, and even with lossy overclocking, there is already a 128x speed difference under the same energy. Some materials for the expansion modules require Titan Steel Coils unlocked in the UHV stage to smelt; before that, only energy storage up to 64A can be used. Since the explosive itself is a fast recipe of 1s=20t, (overclock chambers above UIV) will only take effect once and then be capped at the 1t limit, with the remaining energy multipliers only being used for parallel processing.

Above, it was qualitatively explained why the Electric Detonation Compressor is underperforming; below are some quantitative data. Assuming the Detonation Compressor is equipped with an LuV Power Amplifier, the Electric Detonation Compressor has acceleration and overclocking chambers of the same tier as the stage. Slash separation indicates the difference due to configurable maintenance chamber limits for Expert/Normal/Simple.

It can be seen that after UIV, the Electric Detonation Compressor's efficiency only achieved a reversal. On the other hand, the only item requiring a large amount of detonation in the late game is Resonant Amethyst; the efficiency of 1t 512 parallel is still sufficient, and it is more likely to be limited by the speed of the Circuit Assemblers.

Conclusion: The Electric Detonation Compressor is a zone.