Some questions, and looking for suggestions on which mods I should use now.

I think MineFactory Reloaded would allow me to automate breeding and killing cattle, but I discovered that it breaks the connected textures for glass panes, which was quite upsetting because I built the walls of my base entirely out of glass panes.

Edit: I experimented a bit in creative mode with the comparator output, and realized I don't need the exact values. For roughly below half, I can check when the redstone level drops below 8 (by using another comparator in subtract mode so that the level from the mfsu is subtracted from 8, since that will be more compact than using redstone length to test it) and for mostly full, I can check when the redstone level reaches 15. I think the RS-Latch is what I need, but using RedLogic (I considered Project: Red, but it had 6 separate downloads), I can't tell which side of the RS-Latch block is which. Design B from the Minecraft wiki page "Memory circuit" seems fairly simple and small, though.

Second Edit: I've tried IC2's electric boat, and it does go faster than a normal boat (at 14 m/s, it's actually faster than using the Fly gene from advanced genetics) by drawing EU from my energypack. However, it still requires me to hold down the forward key, and doesn't seem to be immune to the disappearing boat bug (as far as I can figure out, it's an entity, so it despawns after 5 minutes even if I'm riding it at the time, leaving no item behind; I'm not sure how minecarts avoid that). Now I'm wondering whether there's a boat (or maybe a land vehicle or a ridable animal) that can keep going hands-free once I get the direction set, or even one where I can specify X/Z coordinates and it would try to navigate there automatically.

I found where to disable MFR's changes to the glass panes, so I'm using it now. I had some trouble with the grinder seeming to not produce leather (it didn't show up in the adjacent chest or in its own inventory, but it dropped some when I used a pickaxe to collect it), so I switched to some water traps with hoppers behind another set of chronotypers.

Now I've discovered that the Railcraft Rolling Machine wants MJ, which I can't get from the Forestry electrical engines or from the Power Converters Mod (the RF producer is more convenient because I can put several Forestry/Buildcraft machines next to it and it will power all of them (as opposed to one per electrical engine), but doesn't work for the Rolling Machine). Any suggestions on how to convert EU to MJ?

The rolling machine was uber-slow with a hobbyist steam engine, even once the engine got up to max temp, so I tried a Mekanism universal cable (since even now, the expanded tooltip lists both EU and MJ as supported energy types), but it wouldn't connect to either an IC2 insulated tin cable or the rolling machine.

Edit: I thought maybe I needed to let the MJ buffers (of the hobbyist steam engine and rolling machine) fill up first, but neither completely filled up (the rolling machine sometimes lost an MJ from its buffer even when I didn't have items in it to indicate what to craft), and when they were close to full, suddenly the output of the hobbyist steam engine dropped to 0. Railcraft recipes don't take IC2 plates, so I'd need to get the rolling machine working with the hobbyist steam engine first before I could make a higher-tier steam engine or boiler. I've posted requests in the Railcraft forums for the rolling machine to support the RF-output bc/forestry engines and IC2 cables, and plates from other mods in recipes, but in the meantime, I'm not so sure Railcraft was such a good suggestion to go with IC2 and Forestry.

Also:

Quote from MauveCloud

1. Have an item (possibly from an IC2 addon, preferably other than GregTech, and at least as much capacity as an Energypack) that could recharge my tools without taking up the chest slot, so that I could just keep my hazmat suit on all the time. (e.g. that works while sitting in my inventory, or possibly uses an extra slot added by another mod like Tinkers' Construct)

Quote from Chocohead

1. There was an addon for that, but it was for 1.4.7

Actually, I found an IC2 addon for 1.7.2 that does what I described (I think I'd come across it before, but I didn't find it when I was making the post to ask about such a mod), though given that it's in the "outdated addons" section, I'm guessing it wouldn't work with 1.7.10 and the latest version of IC2:
[ADDON] [1.7.2] Aroma1997s Portable Recharger

I started a fresh game several days ago with some changes to my mod list (mainly removing Galacticraft, but I also made sure to re-download fresh builds of the mods I wanted and did some other adjustments), and I've got the automatation prepared for turning my reactor on and off based on the level of the MFSU (although I'm low on iron at the moment, so I haven't put any components in the reactor yet; I've got an MV solar array hooked up to it), but I decided to make an MFSU charge pad, and discovered that it affects the comparator behavior: when I'm standing on it, the comparators act like I've got a mostly full MFSU even when it's barely 1/8th full and my devices are already fully charged. Could somebody confirm whether that's the only difference with comparator behavior? Also, in case I encounter other problems with it, is there a way to convert an MFSU charge pad back to a regular MFSU? I'd be okay with losing the items that were needed to convert it from an MFSU to an MFSU charge pad, and maybe even the stored EU, but I'll be a lot more reluctant to switch it out if I have to build a new MFSU mostly from scratch.

So I see, but it seems to only have two states for the redstone button: "emit if active" and "emit if not active". I just tried checking the output of a comparator without anything subtracting from it, and the charge pad outputs zero that way even with about 9.9 million EU storage, meaning that my plan for turning the reactor on and off based on the charge level of the mfsu won't work at all with an mfsu charge pad . My non-chargepad CESU seems to default to "Nothing" as the redstone behavior, so I presume that's the default for other non-chargepad energy storage blocks as well. Now it's more important to find out if converting it back to a non-chargepad form is possible, and I'm curious: why doesn't the charge pad have a "Nothing" option?

I posted it as suggestion, and I went ahead and replaced my chargepad with a regular MFSU (getting most of the diamond dust I needed from processing iridium from the Iridium Mod v0.6), but now I discovered a new setback: I had tested my setup in creative mode using lapotron crystals, but now that I've got it set up in survival mode, the redstone signal didn't change when the MFSU became full, though it did once I placed a dirt block next to the comparators, which I presume means that it doesn't perform block updates when powered via cable. I've attached an image of what my setup looks like from above. Is there something I can set up to automatically force a block update every few seconds for those comparators?

Quote from Chocohead

A piston attached to a redstone clock, touching the side of the MFSU?

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried in creative mode, and a piston coming down from above to touch the MFSU didn't seem to work, but one sticking up from the spot between the comparators did (using an Extra Utilities redstone clock below the piston to power it).

One drawback with the Redstone Clock from Extra Utilities is that it's a pulse every second, and I don't think the piston really needs to move that frequently. Something like 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down, and repeat would be good. Is there a simple/compact way to do that?

Quote from Chocohead

You could make a hopper clock, with enough items to take as long as you need. Or if you have something like Bluepower or Project Red, you could use 2 of the really long timed repeaters.

I'm not sure either of those would be compact enough to avoid having to rearrange my already-placed blocks, and none of the hopper clock designs I see on the Minecraft wiki have as long an "on" pulse as I want, so I'd have to add a pulse extender. I think I'll use ComputerCraft and the redstone API instead. It seems simple enough (to me at least), and I think the computer would do what I want while only taking up one block.

New question: what are some good settings for the steam generator if I'm using it with an electric heat generator and a condenser to get distilled water (for coolant)?

I tried to check http://wiki.feed-the-beast.com/, but that's coming up blank for me at the moment, and http://wiki.industrial-craft.net/index.php?title=Main_Page doesn't have a page about the steam generator as far as I can tell.