[Rotarycraft replacing Mekanism]

Rotary is something different; that can be a good thing. I'm trying Voltz 3.0 for the first time, coming from experience with Tekkit Thermal Expansion, who also recently changed their power systems. I know how those work, and moving to Rotary looks interesting.

 

The question is how on earth does it interface with anything? I spent a pile of iron on a windmill that does nothing; built half a waterwheel before learning it needs lubricant from the grinder, which itself needs a gasoline engine? This is nuts.

If the windmill could make a trickle of power, and there was any kind of Universal electricity, we could make do; but right now I can't find any kind of electricity. 

 

The problem with such a drastic change in modpacks is the thousands of tutorials and wikis are all wrong now.  Even the official VoltzWiki talks about some kind of motor/wire stuff that isn't part of 3.0, so I am failing to complete the "BASIC ELECTRICITY" tutorial!

I disagree with your base assumption. There is only a documentation problem with such changes if you allow them.

Voltz is a mod pack put together with a certain idea in mind. To put simply, Voltz is build around 3 pillars: UE, Mekanism, and ICBM. If you change any of those, it's really not Voltz anymore.

 

I'm not saying Rotarycraft is bad in any way. It's a very interesting mod which could be quite fun to play. The problem is that it has nothing to do with Voltz. Voltz is Mekanism.

[Rotarycraft replacing Mekanism]

But the question of "Why RotaryCraft?" still remains.

From all the reading I've been doing, it seems to not use any part of UE. It's basically a standalone mod where you need a generator for every machine you want to power.

How is this good for Voltz?

[Rotarycraft replacing Mekanism]

I decided to chase down this matter. Most of the information I found was from chatting with the Universal Electricity devs on IRC.

 

It seems the Mekanism developer has opted himself out of the Voltz pack. He is moving away from Universal Electricity and as such is pretty much incompatible with Voltz as a whole.

The best reason I could find for this move was that the Mekanism dev feels the Universal Electricity devs are moving too fast and making too many changes.

 

I'm not sure exactly what those changes are, but it does seem like this is a final decision on his part.

 

Voltz will no longer have Mekanism because Mekanism is no longer going to be compatible with Voltz.

 

*sadface*

 

*UPDATE 1

As I'm basically working off of public data, I tried to put together a timeline as best I could.

All times are in GMT.

It seems to have all sparked and been decided on 4 February 2014. This tweet at 2:43 was quickly followed at 17:55 by this commit to the readme file in the main Voltz repository on GitHub.

My assumption is that the 2 hours between those 2 were spent assessing the severity of mismatches between UE and Mekanism.

[Rotarycraft replacing Mekanism]

I tried my best to search through this forum and on the Internet in general (Google warrior level 80) but have sadly come up blank.

 

Have we ever been given an official answer as to why Mekanism was removed from Voltz 3.0.0 and replaced with Rotarycraft?

Please no rage or otherwise unhelpful posts. I am trying to understand this move.