| Each IndustrialCraft² cable takes packets up to one size: tin 5 EU, copper 32 EU, gold 128 EU, glass fibre 512 EU, and the HV (iron) cable 2048 EU. A packet larger than the cable's limit melts it at once, but the number of packets is not limited, so a copper cable carries any number of 32 EU packets a tick and not one of 128 EU. | opening and "Cable Types" (last modified 18 April 2012) | Wiki |
| Every IndustrialCraft² cable loses energy over distance, counted per packet per block and rounded down, so a short run loses nothing: copper loses 1 EU every 5 blocks. Rubber insulation cuts the loss and the shocks a bare cable gives, and since the loss is taken from each packet, sending energy in fewer, larger packets loses less. Energy flows to a machine only if some of it would arrive after the loss. | opening, "Cable Efficiency" and "Cable Splitting" | Wiki |
| IndustrialCraft² kept IC1's energy units, cables, Generator, Macerator and electric furnace, all on the IC wiki by spring 2011 and all on its 2012 IC2 pages, and rebuilt how energy moves. Announcing IC², Alblaka wrote that a fellow modder was reworking the energy code; in 2018 the IC2 developer Chocohead described IC1's cables as whole blocks that ticked once a second, replaced in IC2 by smaller tiered cables. Tiered cables, packet sizes and transformers appear on the IC wiki's 2012 pages and in none of its 2011 revisions read here. | opening | Wiki |
| IndustrialCraft²'s cables are rated: each tier takes packets up to one size, melts under a larger one, and loses energy with distance, though the number of packets is unlimited. For Factorio's four poles, the Factorio wiki names two properties, the area a pole powers and how far its wires reach, and when a Factorio network has too little power, every machine on it slows by the same proportion. | opening | Wiki |