I guess this is sort of a request, but I can't find any documentation that explains various aspects of BigReactors.

I know it's still an early mod, but just some basic info would be nice. Things like "why are some of my control rods yellow, some are black, and some are the default grey color?" and explaining the mechanics of how control rods interact with one another (if at all), and how the control rod depth affects things.

So far I'm finding that, in general, the total lifetime output of a reactor on a per-ingot basis is unchanged regardless of the configuration (I have spreadsheets, lol), however configuration has drastic effects on the immediate output levels, which is very nice because it means you really can't screw up a reactor's efficiency, but can still tweak your output levels to perfection :)

The control rod coloration is a bug, actually, and doesn't mean anything.

As for the rest, some of that is due to incomplete mechanics or math errors. However, in general, I agree, some documentation is needed. I have it on my list of stuff-to-do.

Since twitter messages are short, and I don't see any other way to contact you, I'm gonna ask here. I've determined the number of fuel rod blocks I need to produce my required power amount (around 256 rods to produce around 20000 RF/t). I've built multiple test reactors with different layouts, mainly adding more cooling space around rods (using molten ender for cooling). Adding more cooling seems to have minimal effect on overall temperature. No matter how much cooling I add, the temperature still rises to well above 2500C, taking the power production to hell with it. Is there any way to make what I want (that is, a reactor that produces 20000 RF/t constantly and stays at the required heat level)? Control rods are out of the question. Applying them at low percentages does next to nothing, and applying them at high percentages lowers temperature, but also drastically cuts power output.

At the moment, there likely isn't a way of doing that with one reactor due to the way heat loss is currently modeled (hint: poorly).

Molten ender is rather special. It generates a large amount of bonus power and almost perfectly transfers heat from control rods to the reactor environment.

Given this, you're probably slamming into the problem that a reactor's ability to shed/convert heat doesn't scale up with size - it's fixed at about 1% of contained heat per second, meaning it'll always hit equilibrium around the same level for a given number of fuel rod blocks.

0.3 will give you more options, such as actively pumping coolant through reactors to lower its temperature, and converting the captured heat into additional power via turbines and heat exchangers. Until then, you may have to run two or three reactors in parallel.

Weatherman159: just curious, but do you really need continuous output at that level? Or is that just your max required output?

I've got dozens of machines setup and a single magmatic dynamo (80RF/t) is enough to power them all when run through an energy cell. When the machines aren't running, the energy cell charges up, that way when the system is under load they get power from the almost always fully charged cell.

20,000RF/t equates to 500 machines running simultaneously and most people don't have their entire machine network running simultaneously. How many of those machines are actually running non-stop, and how many of them are running at a lower maintenance level or out and out idle most of the time?

I've added a very basic tutorial and a quick flowchart visualizing a reactor's internal mechanics: http://wiki.technicpack.net/Multiblock_Reactor

I'll fill the rest out this week.