FyberOptic

As previously mentioned, you can still run Tekkit Classic and use all of those old mods. I still very much enjoy that pack from time to time. Even Tekkit Lite still has IC2 and RP2, but I think I'll always have a softer spot for Classic. The game just felt different back in the 1.2.5 days. Anyway, IC2 is a bit of a stickler. The active version is referred to as IC2 Experimental, which basically changed most of the recipes and involves a lot of microcrafting, but adds a lot of new machines. A number of people hate it, other people just found other mods they prefer instead. I personally try to like it, but it's hard when it's not well documented. Alternatively, there's a version referred to as IC2 Classic, basically Minecraft 1.4.7's version ported by Immibis to run on even as new as Minecraft 1.7.x. It's always fun. RP2 was just gone after Minecraft 1.4.7. Parts of it have been faithfully cloned by various mods, like Red Logic, and similar to IC2 there were some more direct ports of the original mod which drew a lot of community ire so they vanished pretty quickly. But there's so many mods which can replicate nearly all of the functionality just as well if not better than RP2, so it's just a matter of learning some new mods, for the most part. Eloraam came back in recent months and is working on an RP3, but that will probably be a ways off.

Honestly the only real problem I have with the current Technic launcher is that there's no way to set stuff like the Java version or JVM options to use when launching Minecraft. This is important for me to be able to run the game smoothly. Are there any plans to add such a thing to this new launcher?

Personally, I almost wouldn't even suggest beginner modders fool with a mod loader of any sort. Minecraft is a complex beast. It's going to take you some time to learn your way through its code. The best way to do that, if you ask me, is to use straight-up MCP and just go in there and start changing things. You can do anything you want, like changing the size of creeper explosions, make mobs act stupid, make yourself stronger, change block and item properties, etc. You can come into it with even just a beginner's Java knowledge, have fun, and learn in the process. You can still compile this out into a JAR mod if you really want, as well. Forge is just added complexity. You have to learn the tools, you have to learn the API, you have to learn the directory structures, etc. That's hard if you don't even know how the game works yet. Harder still if you're a beginner to things like Eclipse as well. And worse, Forge for Minecraft 1.7 will lock you out of Minecraft's code. One dev environment type won't let you see Minecraft's code at all. The other will at least let you see it, but won't let you change it. This can make it harder to learn Minecraft's guts and/or debug certain behaviors. I can't quite bring myself to suggest people get into modding by starting with 1.7 + Forge. 1.6.4 + Forge is fine though. This is just my two cents of course, but I remember living in the land of confusion once, and this is the advice I'd give myself, looking back.

You should check to see if the source code to the mod(s) in question is already available. It is for many popular mods, like BuildCraft. Decompiling mods can be more trouble than it's worth. Dumping it in the JAR doesn't work as well as it used to. Immibis made a swell tool called Bearded Octo Nemesis though which can help with the deobfuscating part.

I'm having a strange problem regarding redstone activation and the mouse buttons. I was having a very annoying stutter when trying to break blocks when near my home area, and I finally tracked it down to not the blocks themselves breaking, but merely from holding the mouse button down to do so. If I did it in open air, I experienced the same drop in framerate. I was able to follow the increasing lag spikes to my Redpower timer, which I turned off, and that helped. I then disabled a repeater loop I had set up elsewhere, and suddenly the lag spikes when holding a mouse button were totally gone. To demonstrate, I assembled a simple group of basic redstone and repeaters and set them off in a loop. Then I held a mouse button. As you can see in the image, I had consistent extreme lag spikes each time. It's worth noting that this only occured with the left and right mouse buttons, not the middle one. When I logged out of my Tekkit Lite server, and used the exact same client to connect to a vanilla Minecraft server, this problem didn't exist at all. Perhaps it's associated with the Redpower mod. If I get the chance, I'd like to make a vanilla Minecraft + Redpower by itself and see what happens. But until then, I'd like to see how many other people are experiencing this problem. p.s. It might be worth noting that it seems that the lag spikes produced when the Redpower timer activates are worse/thicker than just the combination of repeaters. p.p.s. I started running a quarry out away from my base, and after returning, I started to realize that I could cause the lag spikes yet again despite no redstone signals happening. So I went all the way back out where the quarry itself is, and I was able to recreate the lag spikes out there, too. When I got them initially, there was no quarry running, it was just on the redstone pulses. But now they're sporadic but rapid. The quarry is running via two teleport pipes, one for energy from combustion engines and one to dump in a chest, if that's relevant. Either way, there's some relation, since I get the lag spikes just from holding a mouse button (the right one in this case).

I had this same problem. I don't believe the machines themselves are rotating, because they all seem to still be functioning properly. It's probably just the textures. It seems to be an IndustrialCraft v1.115 bug. I downgraded that mod to v1.114 and it disappeared.