What's the most efficient layout of solar panels. also what can you use to pick them up without breaking them?
Most effective formation is anything, so long as there are no gaps between panels. Mos convenient formation seems to be the flower or tree. You can use an electric wrench in lossless mode to pick them up without damaging them.
Use an Electric Wrench on lossless mode. I can guarantee you there's shittons of flower setups on the IC2 forums.
like all IC2 machines use the wrench and heres the wiki page to help you out morehttp://wiki.industrial-craft.net/index.php?title=Solar_Panel
There's A Flower Formation that I've heard of which works really well, but I just go really high and keep on adding solar panels downwards so it looks like a pyramid. Also use a IC2 wrench or even better IC2 electric wrench on lossless mode to collect machines without destroying them.
O_o i don't even understand how they could be "outdated". Old maybe, but certainly still functional. basically, the way solars work is like this: Can see sun? If yes produce EU If no, do not produce EMC. To make a functional array, all you need to do is make sure there isn't anything above your panels, and there's no eu loss from the cables. Flower/tree arangements are really just about convenience and aesthetics, since the resource requirements are pretty negligible.
Flowers went out of fashion when the LV, MV and HV solar panels came in, with a HV being equal to 512 normal panels the need kind of died. Flowers will still work of course, but its very easy to just upgrade. 8 normal + transformer make 1 LV , 8 LV + mv transformer make 1 MV panel etc.
Compact Solars for the LV/MV/HV solar stuff - http://forum.industrial-craft.net/index.php?page=Thread&postID=42234
Its not part of Advanced Machines, its part of its own addon called "Compact Solars". AFAIK it is in Technic, I'm positive about it being in Tekkit though.
Solar Flowers became obsolete when tin cables were introduced. Before that, people used copper cables, which loose energy after 4 blocks... That's where the flower design came from, as it uses as few cables as possbible... So now they are purely used for aesthetic purposes...
Flowers are still optimal (or near-optimal) for servers and low-end computers because you can wire them up with a minimum of intersections, leading to less overall computation.
Not so much. You want to maximize branching, so you have every five panels connected by one cable, and every five of those connected to one cable, so it's like a tree trunk with five main branches, and then every branch has five more branches, and every branch has five leaves. So basically it's logarithmic.
Hmm not sure if I'm getting this, I'm not very good at visualising stuff. I imagined the pyramid type of flowers where you have an intersection at every y level. But even with the design you described, you would have 1 intersection (where the horizontal lines meet the trunk) for 25 panels. And on the other hand the straight line, where you have no intersection at all for 120 panels. Except if the cables connecting to the panels would count as intersections, then the flower design you described would have less intersectons per panel (6/25) than the line (40/120). Ok, you would have to connect 5 flowers to get the 120 ( respectively 125) panels, so at the end it would be 35/125 to 40/120, thus the flowers would still be slightly superior. So, to cut a long story short: do cables connecting to panels, machines, etc. count as intersections? I'm genuinely interested in this, as I happen to play MC on a very low-end computer and every performance boost is welcome...
It's not intersections per panel: It's maximum number of intersection traversals required. To find a path, the electricity just tries each possible path until it finds an appropriate receptacle, and the fewer number of steps it has to travel and then go back each time it finds a dead end is how fast or slow the pathwalking is.
