Now that steam creation is pretty much All Good except for alternate sources (which are under progress; one alt source is awaiting a mod upload to Maven and the other is awaiting a Forge PR) and improved scanning code, I feel that I should add steam turbines/pistons/whatnot to make steam DIRECTLY useful without having to depend on another mod!
What needs to be thought about:

• What should the generation calculations be? How should the multiblock affect the calculations?
• What parts should the generator multiblock have?
• What material should the parts be made out of?
• What constraints should the multiblock have?

Thoughts on tickbox 1:

• Number of turbines affects fueltick rate, kinda like how fireboxes affect fueltick rate?
• 80 rf/fueltick, fuelticks/gametick rate varies
• more turbines = faster steam consumption, naturally
• possibly diminishing returns for having multiple turbines? Otherwise way too easy to get ultrahigh rf/t without much risk
• steam:RF ratio is universally 2RF:1mB, so need to up steam production rate accordingly if I want good coal efficiencies
• Typical rf/coal values are 32k-48k, so maybe having 64k/72k per coal through steam might be good
• if 2 rf from 1 mb steam, that would be 32/36 buckets of steam per coal
• Thermal Expansion dynamos w/ boiler conversion give ~27B so yeah that's about right
• 32/8 = 4 buckets per cycle, or 36/8 = 4.5 buckets per cycle
• 80 rf/fueltick = 40 steam/fueltick
• If 32 buckets per coal, have to slow the boiler way down, including coal burn rate

maybe we could add a few component parts, like Thermal Expansion has but a tad less needlessly complicated?

i'm no good with "balancing" so i can't help with that much

That's ok! I just need generals idea for now, I can crunch numbers to get a good balance myself.

Alright, I think I've got a good idea for tickbox 1. Now for the rest of the thing: how should the multiblock be shaped? Ideas:

• typical rectillinear thing, blocktype A for border, blocktype B for walls, turbines or other blocks inside
• more free-form thing like advanced generators
• something else? I really need help coming up with something interesting for this

Turbines are almost 100% done!! Just waiting on a couple textures from @insomniakitten and it's ready to release!