An important design question that must be considered is which pipes to provide. Here are the goals:

• Not too many pipes.
• Should be possible to combine any kind of item pipe with any tier of energy cable.
• Should be possible to combine any kind of fluid pipe with any tier of energy cable.
• Should be possible to add support for other types of energy such as MI's or IC2's easily.

The system

Support Pipes

• Pipe-like block that does nothing by default.

Item & Fluid Pipes

• Only two kinds of pipe blocks: opaque and transparent.
• Item pipes support "booster" attachments along their path to make items travel faster.
• Item pipes support "heavy" attachments that make some paths much longer.

Energy Wires

• Up to one kind of wire can be added to a pipe (support, item or fluid) to additionally transport energy.
• There will be different tiers of wires for the TR power system, exact tiers TBD.
• Makes it easy to support other kinds of power systems since we just need to add the relevant wire types.

There will be custom crafting recipes to automate adding upgrades and wires to pipes.

This is outdated and I have another plan now. More info soon... ;)