It's great to still see IC2 alive, and some of the old timers like Choco are still moving it forward. You're doing god's work son. 
Nice for you to turn up to see my 6000th post 
1. Are these machines working as intended?
It sounds like they're working as intended, or at the very least the sort of way you'd expect. They've always been slightly unreliable, but always reliable enough to be used.
2. The rate at which lava is consumed in the Liquid Heat Exchanger seems very high. So high, that it might be impractical? If the only time heat is created is when lava is converted to pahoehoe, you can really consume a lot of lava very fast. What do you do with that much Pahoehoe when so much is created so quickly? Is this working correctly?
Lava was nerfed very quickly to avoid the nether being a near unlimited source of cheap heat. As a result lava is consumed in huge amounts and you end up with just as much pahoehoe lava as you had normal lava. It can be cooled into basalt, which is a nice building material, but there's no machine for it so it just has to be emptied out and left to cool in world. It'll instantly cool touching water though, so could be worse.
3. The Heat Conductors confuse me. I understand that you create more heat by adding in the Heat Conductor, but what exactly is the math here? One seemed to do nothing, but multiples of two did something. Any more than two didn't seem to give any benefit, as you can increase the temperature on the Steam Boiler regardless of how you have the Liquid Heat Exchanger setup.
They're just a way of changing how much heat a heat generator can output, it's not really steam setup specific, especially as normally you'll just want to transfer as much heat as you can generate.
4. I don't really understand how the Steam Boiler controls work. How do you make more regular steam? Increasing the water or the bars of pressure didn't seem to increase steam output.
You increase the amount of water input and it'll produce more steam, but you need more heat too. Pressure increases the amount of heat needed to heat the water without actually increasing the amount output, until you get to the magical boundary at 220 bars when it will suddenly turn into super-heated steam. I don't think Thunderdark had finished what he had planned at all, as pressure is essentially useless. If you're making super-heated steam (which you should want), set it to 221 bars otherwise leave it at 0. Theoretically it can allow finer balancing of heat output from something like a fluid reactor to use everything available, but because of float rounding with weird numbers, most pressures need non-whole numbers of heat.
5. Does super heated steam work? I tried creating it with 221 bars of pressure, but the Steam Turbines seemed to work exactly the same, and I couldn't chain two of them together.
You need double the heat per mb of water input for super-heated steam. So 200 Hu would normally allow 2mb/t of water to be 200mb/t of steam, but it could only allow 1mb/t of water to produce 100mb/t of super-heated steam.
6. The Steam Turbine constantly explodes regardless if it's alone, with a Condenser, or with another Steam Turbine. How do you prevent this?
You have have a condenser directly adjacent to it for normal steam, and either a condenser or another steam turbine for super-heated steam. This is one of the weirdnesses of the system that the code auto-ejects between them and will fire steam explosions if it can't eject everything it has. A condenser touching a turbine with normal steam in will get 90% of the steam, the remaining 10% condenses in the turbine itself and fills the tank with distilled water. You'll want to keep it pumped out otherwise the efficiency of the turbine drops. A super-heated steam turbine will eject all 100% of it's steam into the touching turbine, so there's no danger of distilled water building up there. You can have more than one touching, but it doesn't balance between them, instead ejecting as much as possible to each one in turn in order of down, up, north, south, east, west.
7. The Condenser doesn't seem to relieve pressure of the Steam Turbine. How do you do this?
Condensers only need to touch turbines with normal steam in (as mentioned above).
8. What effect do the Heat Vents have? It seems to be working in reverse where adding them makes the machine work slower and less efficiently?
They speed up the rate at which the condenser can turn steam into distilled water. You won't really need this unless you've got a lot of steam output or are directly outputting into a condenser (which you'd do if you wanted lots of distilled water quickly).
9. I used Copper Insulated cables from the Kinetic Generator, and they melted. The reported voltage was well under 128 EU/t, so that wasn't what I expected. Am I missing something here?
The kinetic generator outputs in tier 3 packets no matter the output it's generating. It's a reminents of 1.7.10 where there wasn't explosions or cable melting to avoid bottle-necking if it outputted more than 128EU/t (which it could do from windmills and turbines with lots of steam in). It probably needs to scale tier dynamically.
10. Given the complexity of the whole system and all of the machines and parts involved, I expected a lot more EU to be produced in the end. You can setup a single Wind Turbine in about 5 minutes with only basic materials, and make more power! Is this still being balanced?
I think it's just part of being unfinished, the wind turbines are very powerful (probably too powerful), and steam struggles to compete because it's so expensive, especially iron wise. The numbers still need tweaking, but at some point the whole steam boiler needs overhauling and mechanics changing. It would've been nice to at least know what Thunderdark was aiming for, right now it's a guessing game from what features were added. On the plus side, you can turn IC2 steam into Railcraft type steam for 1 HU per 10mb now, so it is still having related things added.
