gavjenks

Yes... that's why I said "they aren't really better if you're not confined to a small space." Compact doesn't matter much otherwise. True about the distance, but it's not because of packet size, and it's also irrelevant. With tin cable, and nothing but tin cable, you can power a single MFSU with zero energy loss for up to 3280 solar panels (going out to 40 blocks away in all directions). Who would actually have a need for more then 3280 panels? You'd get your quantum armor in like 5 minutes and then just have stacks of UU filling whole chests in a few hours.

Batteries...

Solar arrays are not really particularly better, if you aren't confined to a small space, and if you only have tens of panels. They don't deliver any extra power, and they cost more (you have to pay for the transformers in the recipe AND for Mv and HV, yet another transformer to step the voltage down for your machines).

That's not very much lava, however I'm not sure why you would ever want or need to STORE it in tanks like that?

No no, I didn't mean delete them in game. Like I said, go to the file directory World/EnderStorage/ and delete all the files there. Like... in the server folder. If it's just you and theres only two, then delete them and that should fix it the end.

What? No, don't try anything that drastic first. Since it is an ender chest problem, you should first try to delete all your ender chests (back up and then delete all the files in World/EnderStorage). I suspect that will allow it to run again. If it does, then try adding the ender chests back in one at a time. I'm guessing it was one particular ender chest that somebody had open when the server went down. Hopefully you can only cause that one player to lose their chest. If none of that works, then delete the whole ender chest mod. Only if neither of those work would I suggest wiping the world. Players don't like world to be wiped, and doing it that rashly is shooting yourself in the foot. Only if other less drastic options fail.

Robots can't figure out which hallway looks like a more damaging target by themselves, at least not CC ones. Also, if I were running a factions server, I would most definitely NOT allow turtles to modify blocks within faction boundaries... that sounds pretty dumb. If turtles can ignore factions, then all you need to do is make a turtle go from sky to bedrock digging every block, then up the next row, and their whole base will be air in a few minutes...

Alpha particles can be very energetic, but not really harmful to humans (if not being emitted from airborne materials or eaten), because your skin is thick enough to block them. *shrug*

?? I did read the full post. I don't see where he mentioned anything that would get reeds into a chest automatically without obsidian pipes or RP. AFAIK it is impossible to make an automatic reed farm in vanilla. You can have items flow to you, but you'd still have to stuff them into the condenser yourself, which makes it nearly impossible to scale it up to any level that will be seriously competitive with other EMC methods at all. I wasn't making the argument that it wasnt fun because it was unrealistic. Lots of unrealistic things can be fun. I was arguing that since most of IndustrialCraft is in fact clearly meant to be realistic (or plausible at least), including water mills, using another mod to make something blatantly ridiculously unrealistic is a very clear sign that it was not in the spirit of the original mod and was not an intended interaction between mods. In other words, I don't care about it being realistic: it's just that that is a strong clue as to the intentions of the modders and whether or not it is therefore a feature or an exploitative side effect. No, that is not an exploit, because it is obviously a central and intended mechanic within BC itself. See above paragraph (its not a reason for exploit in itself. It was a logical clue with regard to IC in particular) As for how redstone relates to IC via engine generators: A) it is not very effective, and costwise, is balanced with other IC2 methods, AND You might easily interpret redstone as a realistic source of nearly infinite small amounts of energy. Radioactive sources in real life that size could easily be imagined to produce the level of tiny power that redstone does (mostly signals), for hundreds of years straight. Weak, well-balanced, plausible... not seeing huge exploit potential there, no matter how you slice it.

Obsidian pipes are not EE or vanilla items, I am sorry to say. Just like everything else, this requires at least two mods that were not written with each other in mind. As for IC and BC, the fact that somebody went off and coded energy links, etc. as a third party does not mean that the mods were "meant to be together." No more than somebody writing a fanfiction romance between Spiderman and Arwen from LOTR means that Stan Lee and Tolkien had each other in mind when they were writing their respective stories... No I can't think of it like that. The bucket of water does not flow into the ocean, evaporate, and fall back down as rain, therefore lifted by solar energy. It's the SAME DAMN BUCKET that moves through a tube and then gets poured in the top again. You can make a water mill with redpower run forever and produce energy forever inside of an airtight, pitch black room with force fields all around it... Try making the Hoover Dam work if you build an airtight box around it. Not gonna work out very well for you.

Oh, but you already changed the rules to allow EMC exploits...

You're going to ban solar panels on your server?

If that's your point of view (that "free energy" whatever you mean by that, is what matters, and not exploitativeness), then all three methods (solar, auto water mills, blaze rods) should all be either allowed or disallowed on the server, all together. There is still no apparent argument here for banning blaze rods and allowing auto water mills.

So your logic is that as long as each block in each mod is doing its job as defined by that mod alone, it's not an exploit? If so, then blaze rod macerating is not an exploit by that logic. Because the macerator is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, macerating blaze rods into 5 powder. And the condenser is also doing exactly what it is supposed to do: condensing powder into blaze rods. If you want to go and change your definitions, that's fine. But you have to change them equally for both situations, which still doesn't let you get around the fact that blaze rod macerating and auo bucket water mills should be treated equally under server rules. Changing the definitions and logic to allow water mills also will end up allowing blaze rods.

I'm not understanding your argument at all. If you use solars, then you are paying full price for them, not 1/13th of the price due to an exploit. With solars, therefore, 0% of the diamonds you're making come from an exploit. Thus, if you want to ban exploits on a given server, it would be completely consistent and reasonable to allow solar panels, but ban water mills and blaze rods. Because one has no exploited benefit, and the other two are almost entirely exploit-driven

No, my point is that the benefit gained from the water exploit itself is responsible for 92% of your diamond making power. If you scale it up, then pretty much all your diamonds are exploited diamonds. When macerating blaze rods, the benefit gained from the macerating exploit is responsible for probably about 98-99% of the diamond making power (it costs you a little EU to keep them running, which is an external cost). In either case, the exploit is pretty much doing all of the work, and giving you all of the benefit. Saying "Oh 92% of your income coming from exploits is totally okay, but 98% is unacceptable!" would be really silly. A blaze rod macerating setup requires either a filter for every macerator, or a retriever for all of them + two filters for the condensers, etc. I see absolutely no difference here in terms of redpower machinery costs. Um, yes you can... It would be really easy to build 400 of these things (just plop it down and attach one RP tube and one tin cable each) in no time at all, and be generating UU every few seconds.

Macerating blaze rods with a simple macerator doesn't spit out a diamond every second either. More like a diamond every 2 minutes or so. Pretty comparable to collectors. It only spits out a diamond every second if you beef up your system to have like multiple fully spun up rotary macerators all going at once... Similarly, of course 13 EU vs. 1 EU is trivial, but when you scale it up (just like scaling up the macerating), it becomes 1300 EU/tick instead of 100 EU/tick... Which is a diamond every 20 seconds or so I think, if you use your UU to make glowstone. All for the resources of approximately 1 MV solar array.

They are pretty game breaking. For about 3/5 of the resources of a solar panel (same recipe but wood instead of circuits and coal), you get EIGHT TIMES the energy output. 5/3 cost factor * 2 water mills per recipe * 2x the operating time * 2xthe EU when they are operating = 13.3 times higher return on investment than solar panels. I'd say that being able to increase your output by a factor of 13, entirely due to an unintentional exploit of mod interactions, is clearly imbalancing. It's pretty difficult to argue that 13x exploit benefit is "just a bit faster" or that it doesn't matter. It is massively faster.

You don't NEED to. You can simply build a filter for every water mill. (and then just one for the deployer) Which design happens to be more convenient has nothing to do with this conversation. The point is: it doesn't require bluetricity. AND, even if you use bluetricity, you don't get any more power out of the mills. So therefore, it's clearly not "converting bluetricity to EUs." Which means it is, in fact, getting more energy from falling water than it takes to lift the water. Which makes it dumb and magical and nonsensical, and therefore exactly the same as macerating blaze rods. (Note: there's nothing wrong with allowing people to macerate blaze rods if that's what you want on a server, along with magical infinite water mills. I am simply arguing that it makes no sense to ban blaze rod macerating, but ALSO to allow any other exploit that works the exact same way. That's just arbitrary and hypocritical.)

Yes fine, whatever. The transformer bottlenecks it technically, not the wires. It's an entirely academic point for most people in 99% of circumstances, since you will pretty much never normally end up with multiple packets per tick going through a wire unless you intentionally are doing that. Edit: just double checked. MV array --> MFE --> Energy link provides 56 EU/tick charging the MFE, even when the link is connected to nothing, just as expected (link drains 72 if it can at all times)

Yeahp. It would certainly add a fun new strategy to factions.

What retriever? You don't need a retriever. Buckets get filtered out of the hydro, into a deployer. Then another filter takes out full buckets and pushes them to the water mill. No bluetricity involved, unless you make it over complicated.

No, only if they are producing more than 512 Eu/tick. I believe what they actually do is just create a packet of a size = to whatever their output is.

The way he did that was by using a copper cable. Copper cable carries 32 EU/tick. Thus, even though the energy link wants 72 constantly, his system bottlenecks it to 32. Thus, when he added a 33rd panel, it started to create a surplus, because no more could go through the copper. That is a solution I didn't think of. However, his quarry is probably now running at a lower speed than it would if he didn't restrict the input to the energy link. ALSO, he said "and I'm screwed at night time" which of course he would be. Even if using the copper cable trick, you'd still need 32*2 = 64 to break even 24 hours a day. Thus requiring 65 panels to have a surplus in the long term.

Um hell yeah I consider that an exploit, if any of the others are. Automated water mills are one of the stupidest things in tekkit. If you look on the IC2 official wiki, it clearly says "manned" and "unmanned" operational output. Making it pretty obvious that it was intended to provide 2 EU/tick only if somebody is standing there feeding buckets into it. Which they would have to do, if not for the redpower mod being installed alongside IC2. By automating it with redpower, you are making a completely nonsensical machine (lifts water using less energy than the water provides by falling???), that exploits an unintentional relationship between mods, and distorts what used to be a realistic machine (humans lifting buckets makes the energy come from the food you eat in game, which makes sense) It is no more realistic and no less "cheaty" than taking advantage of the blaze rod recipes. Also I don't really care if it's "generally accepted" to not be an exploit or not, and neither should you. What matters is if there is actually a good argument for why it is and something else isn't, and I don't see one here.