IMarv's Sorting City
Mission statement: Inspire creative builds, share resources, reduce server load, visit neighbors, and have fun.
The plan: At the start of the next reset, the volunteers of this group will work together to build one massive automated sorting and processing complex. I can't force any of this on anybody, but I can inspire cooperation.
Each person will have a class of items to store and/or machines to process intermediate materials. Additional things that will need to be hosted include a power plant, sorting center and overflow, mob grinders, enchantment book writing turtle, Thaumcraft workroom, general work room, etc. The item classes include ingots, mob drops, dusts (final form or multiple-choice use), building blocks, colored wool and dyes, food, BC powered parts and stuff, EU powered parts and stuff, XyCraft items, other mod stuff, and anything else we can think of.
Ideally, the building housing your part of the system will be themed with its contents. The sorting center will send items to your build for processing, generally by enderchest, but other methods can be worked out. The building can be a dominant part of your plot, or just a small part.
Any major mining or other major resource gathering done should feed into the sorting center for processing. This is so ores can be ground for dusts which will then be sent to the appropriate furnace for smelting then sent on to storage.
Since this big system will be shared, we will not need to all individually come up with 40 chrome for a full-heat industrial blast furnace, not have to come up with massive power systems several times over, etc. We can instead do what we enjoy most, building, mining, exploring, chatting, etc. The upshot is, there should be fewer machines in each plot and better server and client performance.
The technical sorting system is currently planned to be pneumatic tubes over sorting machines feeding item tesseracts or ender chests. The storage systems should use routers and barrels with a special turtle program and two ender chests feeding the router.
Let me know if you're interested, and what types of things you'd like to do or house.
IMarv