My original post:

Great mod once you figure out how to use it. I figured I'd leave some notes/a little guide here for others looking to give it a shot, since I had to do experimentation to figure this stuff out. Current as of 26 MAR 2025.

I was tired when I wrote this and couldn't stop myself from rambling, so I just went back and marked the actually important bits with !!!!!!!!!!.

First up: Some quick definitions.

Energy, or 'e'. You won't find this mentioned in the mod, but you will find it when digging through discussions in this thread when trying to figure out how this mod works. One unit of 'e' I believe aligns to pretty much one 'battery' that you'd normally see a crew member delivering to a component.

Energy per second, or 'e/s'. This is the amount of energy a given component can output in any given second of game time. This is a very important one. In-game you'll see some components have a "Power use" stat. This is how much a given component requires to run continuously in 'e/s' or batteries/energy per second.

!!!!!!!!!!
Bandwidth. What the heck is bandwidth? It is one of the only stats shown on some of the power components from this mod like substations and cables, but do not be fooled. Bandwidth IS NOT the measure of energy per second. It is a misnomer in that it seems to actually refer to the maximum amount of energy that can be "stored" in that component at any given time (this could technically be considered total bandwidth, but its confusing to refer to it in this way, so I'm not going to).

Power converter. Currently appears in the game by this name, but has also been referred to as a transformer in the past. Transformer now means something else. The power converter is a 1x2 block that should be placed next to a steam turbine in order to extract energy from it. In the current implementation, the "floor" side (that can support a door) should be in physical contact with the turbine component on the side that actually has the turbine. The "wall" side outputs energy. The converter can also be touching just the corners of the turbine on the turbine side, leaving a max of 7 output positions that can be used to extract power from the turbine. At the time of writing, converters do not actually need to have the doors at all/be accessible.

Alright, so on to the guide bit:

!!!!!!!!!!
A single nuclear core is capable of supplying the equivalent of 24e/s in this pack (the OG pack. In Garagoth's rework of this mod, one can output up to 48e/s apparently, by having 4 turbines, but I have not tested this myself). In this pack one nuclear core can supply up to two steam turbines, which in turn much be connected to power converters to actually output energy to cables and substations and the like.

One nuclear core can be connected to a steam pipe which both turbines are connected to, or the turbines can even connect directly to the core, and can even be hooked up in serial for super compact builds!

!!!!!!!!!!
Each turbine is capable of supplying a maximum of 12e/s, but requires at least 3 power converters to do so. This is because power converters can only output/transfer a maximum of 4e/s. From testing, it appears as though every cable/substation/transformer also has a maximum throughput of at most 4e/s. I HAVE NOT tested HV cables, because they seem confusing/not worth it to me. Someone feel free to add notes on those. Regardless, what this means is you'll need multiple individual lanes carrying power from your reactor to your power hungry components.

!!!!!!!!!!
So how best to do that? TL;DR, use wireless substations *everywhere*, but be sure not to introduce "loops". Wireless substations project power outwards in a straight line 10 blocks. If you can avoid having power going in a circle or back towards the source, you'll get far better results. For the long version of this story, and to find out why this seems to be the case, read below.

!!!!!!!!!!
I first tested power transmission with a big block of cable tiles with no separation between lanes, and just made my big block of cables wide enough to carry the e/s I required. 24e/s means a 6-wide block of cables running to my destination. I do NOT recommend using this in your builds.

I'll get into the details of why exactly later, but suffice to say you actually lose a ton of throughput doing this. About 15 blocks away from my energy source/reactor, I started randomly losing energy/throughput in the cable lines. In short, you will not be able to power your power hungry component by doing this if it is more than a few cable blocks away.

6 separate lanes did not fair much better. Power could transmit a little further before mysteriously "running" out, but around 25-30 cable nodes away from the source, the vanishing energy problem once again reared its ugly head.

I even tried transmitting power with only regular substations, and this seemed to kind of work a little better. Their behavior is essentially just like regular cables, but with a larger connection radius of 3 (cable radius is actually 2, meaning it can skip a single block between itself and another MMCT power component and still be connected, btw).

My energy sink for these tests was a series of 40 mining lasers set to always on to account for a total energy drain of 24e/s. With the first and second block tests, I could not even power half of the mining lasers due to apparent energy loss. With substations I did significantly better at nearly all being supplied power, albeit inconsistently, so flickering on/off was a real problem.

So what the heck is going on here? Well, what appears to happen when using cables is that every update tick, the cables try to distribute their internal power into their neighboring cables. Cables do not seem to have any internal awareness of what direction energy ought to be flowing... they are "dumb distributors" in this sense, so sometimes they transmit power downstream towards consumers, but sometimes they transmit power upstream, back towards the source.

Now, a cable can of course only transmit its power into a neighbor if that neighbor has the "bandwidth" (read: storage) to receive it. Herein seems to lies the problem. The output of this kind of system is analogous to pump losses in a pipe... you lose pressure the longer the line goes, and past a certain point, you'll completely run out. This is the case for cables and substations alike... but there is a way around it.

!!!!!!!!!!
Introducing: wireless substations! These are as close to "pumps" as you can get in the given analogy. Each transmits 4e/s *away from itself only*. As long as you don't put it within range of a regular substation or cable that will feed energy back into the wireless station, and don't create "circular" power paths with them, these will actually allow you to transmit 100% of your generated power to your consumer components, since there is no "friction loss" or back pressure on the system with these components. They also have the benefit of transmitting power quite far, meaning you can more easily weave this kind of power distribution into armor, or in between your dense storage/housing arrangements.