A few machinery questions

[Metalmessiah]

So, I've been diligently working on a massive machine center, sorting, autocrafting, all that.

Now i'm working towards having industrial panels for each system and toggles for each one (even using a turtle to swap in a color mod to make the screen glow red when power runs low)

But I have some questions

1. is there any way to regulate MJ output besides conduits? right now i'm using redstone energy cells for system monitoring and regulating power, what i'd like to do is if system A is maxed out, additional power goes to system B, it appears that power is evenly distributed across every link in a conduit stream, but i'm not 100% sure.
Basically my systems should be at 100%, but I have a lava generation tower that I want to drain once everything is maxed out. if I say "if over 50% on supply redstone energy cell turn on redstone that allows power through another redstone energy cell which supplies the lava tower" but this leads to "flickering" I just want to divert "waste" power that isn't going anywhere, if possible. ex: I want standard pipe "if this machine is full, go down the tube to the next one and try that, until at the end you get the chaff" behavior

2. do ME "supply screens" and me "level indicators" work together? example: I have a me supply screen with logs on it, I put a level indicator, that turns on redstone if over 1000, then an export bus that dumps into an ender chest that activates on redstone from the level indicator, will the interface actually work or does it only work on "true" storage options? (in that case I would need a barrel, an export bus, a storage bus, and a level indicator on it. I haven't gotten my ME systems working properly yet so i'm just curious if I can build towards this or not

3. has anyone figured out a way of using an alkahest (not tome of alkahest) to produce redstone from objects automatically? It seems all crafting options I've tried only do the operation on one object, destroying it (if it is not iron or something expensive) instead of producing lapis/redstone

4. I haven't seen definitive proof as to how redstone energy conduits work power loss wise, is it 5% per connection (so first is 5%, next is 6.something, next is 7.5%, ect.) and so on down the line? using a multimeter I haven't been able to really tell whats going on exactly

5. Maybe i'm dumb, but is there any way of using a gate or whatever to get a redstone signal out of a redstone energy cell at a certain power level, and /still/ allow redstone control of the cell from another side? At the same time, is there any way of using redstone to straight-up stop supplying an energy cell (or just cutting power)? when you apply RS signal the cell itself just stops outputting, but it keeps charging, first idea was to use tesseracts as toggles but that costs me 20% power for each one, ouch.

 

[YX33A]

OK, #4 I can answer, #3 I can hazard a guess.
#4: KingLemming has said several times now it's 5% flat if you're using Conduits. Every line of Conduits will lose 5%. Energy Cells break the line(pre-1.5, anyway) and thus you lose more energy if you use a series of Energy Cells rather then run them in parallel.
3#: Last I checked, there is no autocrafting system which understands recipes which use more then one item out of a stack. Ergo, can't be done. You'll have to just use the more expensive items for now. I would actually suggest not trying to automate it yet, because of this issue.

 

[Trunks9809]

2# - both the monitors and the Level Emitters work on the total number of items stored in the ME system. So if you had 100 oak logs in a chest and 1000 oak logs in a barrel, both with a Storage Bus attached, the monitor would show 1100 oak logs, and your level emitter would activate.

By the same token, if you had an ME chest with a 1k storage cells with 1100 oak logs, the monitor would show 1100 oak logs, and the level emitter would activated.

If the chest, barrel and ME Chest are all part of the same network, the monitor would show 2200 logs. The monitor is just a single-item, visual reference of whats stored in the network.

 

[Metalmessiah]

Thanks guys

Trunks: I was under the impression the level indicator needed to be pointed at a container with the item in it to monitor, not just pointing anywhere in the network! that actually helps my efforts considerably.

 

[Trunks9809]

Trunks: I was under the impression the level indicator needed to be pointed at a container with the item in it to monitor, not just pointing anywhere in the network! that actually helps my efforts considerably.

Nah, you just specify the item, the amount, and redstone on\off. It can be anywhere on the network.

 

[AlanEsh]

2. do ME "supply screens" and me "level indicators" work together? example: I have a me supply screen with logs on it, I put a level indicator, that turns on redstone if over 1000, then an export bus that dumps into an ender chest that activates on redstone from the level indicator, will the interface actually work or does it only work on "true" storage options? (in that case I would need a barrel, an export bus, a storage bus, and a level indicator on it. I haven't gotten my ME systems working properly yet so i'm just curious if I can build towards this or not

As Trunks said, the monitor and the level emitter are just looking at your entire ME network. The part that emits the redstone signal is the only thing that has to be "aimed" at whatever you are turning on/off.

If you need to dump excess from your network, you might consider a second, different colored network. I have not done this, but it should work:
Blue network has a level emitter that will activate an export bus when Logs > 1000.
Export bus dumps the logs into a chest of some kind.
Red network includes a Storage Bus (or Import Bus) attached to this target chest.

So when your Blue network goes over 1000 it should export to the chest whose contents are sucked up by the Red network.

 

[Juanitierno]

Level indicator is not an indicator (but it can be used that way). Its called level emitter because it emits redstone.

Their purpose is to provide a redstone signal when something happens in the network.

For example you could use the redstone signal to enable your extruder-pulverizer-furnace combo when you are running low on glass. This is what i do here (for glass and several other things)