With the new IC cable loss, it should be possible to construct a fourth (256 solar panels!) iteration solar flower with zero loss.
320 panels, surely? 5 "petals" on each "bud", right? so 5*43.
5? MFEs don't accept 5 lanes
No, it's 4.
44 = 256
That, or, once again, that presentation style has made this guy a terrible person.
This means, you can effectively wire in up to FOUR cables
Some of the screenshots at the bottom of IndustrialCraft's first post showcase solar flowers, and they clearly have five solar generators around a single object, but I don't know what that is. It could just be a wire that's somehow feeding into the side of an MFE, or it could be an MFE directly: the recipe text file does say that MFEs can "accept electric current from all 6 sides."
There is a second (better) example a couple images above this one,but when I went to view the image itself for its URL to link here, it said the photobucket bandwidth for the image was exceed. I could still see it in the post but it may have been a cached image.
I see your flowers and raise you a solid solar panel.
Made of 417 cells (15 gaps at the edges), this should cover a modest fortress's roof.
The solar panel is seven layers tall, though you could reduce it by one (the top layer of cells) and reduce space efficiency by 20%.
It uses HV transformers and switch cables. Output is around 42000 EU/s
http://img638.imageshack.us/g/20110402221518.png/I can make the map available if people want it.
Q: "How do you plan on using that much power?!"
A: I don't. I just wanted to see if it was feasible to make a solid solar panel of an arbitrarily large size.
PROTIP: DO NOT FEED SOLAR PANEL OUTPUT DIRECTLY INTO ANYTHING.