Some more about my progress through the pack.... screenshots are now in spoilers by request of a thread regular.
(1) Yay, my first rocket! Well, I have moved the launch pad since I made these screenshots since I want to construct a building around the multiblocks eventually, but this looks nice enough. Worth mentioning: The electric arc furnace is painfully slow when producing silicon, but all you'll ever need to produce is one ingot. After that, you can profit from the fact that all EnderIO silicon recipes also accept libVulpes silicon (not vice versa, sadly) and they can be oredict-converted by the drawer system: put your one ingot into a drawer and replace the EnderIO silicon drawer with this one, and all EnderIO silicon will be converted to libVulpes silicon ingots on entering the drawer system. Now all you need to do is replace the EnderIO silicon with libVulpes silicon in your AE2 recipes - probably not more than three: Electrical Steel, Ender Resonator and Z-Logic Controller - and you can continue making silicon from clay as before, which should pose no problem at all if you've been running your void resource miner.
Also of note: making titanium takes forever, and depending on how many rockets you want to build, you'll need quite a bit of it. I automated the process including the recycling of TechReborn cells, but you still need 500+ cells if you make half a stack of titanium ingots. Regarding iridium, you can make two iridium dust from IC iridium ore in an AA crusher and smelt them into ingots in the NeoTech electric furnace - EnderIO machines can't do this for some odd reason probably only known by the twisted brain of the modpack maker
). JEI doesn't always tell you this. In general, it's worth experimenting to see which machines accept some rare materials rather than always depending on JEI.
The second image shows what I took with my on my first trip: rocket fuel (in the pressure tanks), matter receiver, pre-llinked power cell, and just in case I find something interesting beyond dilithium on the moon, builder, shape card, ender chest and lever. An oddity: if you fill you oxygen thanks on the gas pad, your o2-meter fills and any extra tanks (I have four since I can fly by nanobot beacon and don't need a jetpack) show liquid oxygen, but if you pre-fill the tanks with liquid oxygen your meter does not fill.
(2) More IE automation
There was no choice but to build metal presses for all four item types they can make, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to integrate them into my AE2 system. For everyone who watched DW20's AoE videos: you can just drop ingots on the conveyor belt from above, you don't have to do that thing with the transfer node when making prototypes for your autocrafting patterns. Also, as you can see an ME interface can put items on a conveyor belt placed on top of it, which will transport it to the metal press.
Also notable: I still make steel using the coke oven and the improved blast furnace. Why? The Arc furnace is inefficient: its power balance is unfavorable compared to almost every other machine out there, items piped in aren't automatically placed in an efficient pattern, and thus the electrodes need to be replaced up to 12 times earlier. Also, since the coke oven and the blast furnace only make steel, they can run slowly all the time without interfering in any other process. I use the Arc furnace only for chrome and titanium at the moment. Processing of rare ores from other planets might follow, but the standard metals are made elsewhere. BTW, I found out you need to run a TechReborn fusion reactor for the Creative Age. May I mention that I'm not looking forward to that...
In the background you can see my singularity farm, which the guide said you might want to start early. As usual, I went a little all-out on this, and now I'm running 8 matter condensers fed by 8 tier 4 cobble generators.
(3) Some ore processing
This is the ore processing setup I forgot to post in my last series of screenshots. Not the most space-efficient using the IE Crusher but I like how it looks. The item router below the power cell separates out those ores which are better processed by a SAG mill - ie. Redstone, Certus Quartz and Lapis - and the three item routers at the far end separate out those items that don't need to be smelted, while others go through the alloy smelters. Everything then lands in an Ender chest which connects to my storage system. My ores aren't automatically processes since I never know when I might need the ore itself. If my stock of ingots gets low, I go down here and throw 8 or 16 stacks of ore into the crate, and everything else goes automatically from here. Funny thing: once an Enderman was killed by the Crusher and left an Ender Pearl on the conveyor belt.
(4) The brute force approach to solving IC power problems...
You think this is a lot of iron, copper and rubber? Well, it might look that way, but not if you have 30k iron ore because you needed to automine enough to get 3k gold ore. Also, I once burned a couple of tens of thousands of iron to make ReactorCraft High Pressure Turbines when I built a
ReactorCraft fusion reactor - probably the most complex machine in all of modded Minecraft - so this is really nothing. You only get a measly 512 EU/t from this item here, but it is much simpler of course.
BTW, for the first time ever, I needed to make a crafting CPU with two 64k crafting storage blocks. You can see the requirement in the text line at the top of the compound image. I have four crafting CPUs since some machines are painfully slow. Also for the first time: I made my sixth stack of AE2 blank patterns.
Another observation: I spent a lot of time watching mod spotlights and AoE videos for this particular part of my progress through the pack because I didn't know anything about Advanced Rocketry. Advanced Rocketry would benefit from an in-game guide. I usually make my own progress before I watch others' but I had to change this rule for the Space Age.
