Yes steve you are correct about the MH. I wasnt thinking about that when I said It, I was just thinking about the fact that the chamber in a MH bulb where the arc occurs is filled with a special gas.
I know that light radiate from all sides, ofcourse! Lol. Its like the sun in a box, hehe. However here is a dilema, your corals are not getting light from above as they would be with T5, and then there is the possibility of them being shaded from the light(but this is a pretty crappy arguement as you said you could put lower light corals there), but Also you need more bulbs and higher wattage/power comsumption to cover the same area as you would with T5.
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Having said that a reflector set up on a floressent T5 bulb can have the same effect by limiting the light out to the sides
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This is where I think you are wrong. A T5 bulb setup should span the length of the tank...no? So why should this limit the light on the sides? It should have the same intensity as that in the middle of the tank(well, the PAR readings should be the same, though the center of the tank may be ever so slightly brighter because of the light from the ends of the bulb some of it would spill to the center of the tank from both sides but on the ends it would only spill from the center and not from the other sides of the tank but this is such a minute difference and its beside the point, lol).
I have a question about PAR(PP something something....photosynthetic photon something something, lol). How does it relate to the intensity of the bulb? I mean, can you have a bulb that would be as bright as say a 400W halide, with 0 PAR? I know the ballast can affect it(ie: a 250W 10K XM MH bulb running off a standard PFO ballast has 800 and a few, whereas running of an HQI ballast, the PAR goes up by over a hundred). I havent done much reading about it. And also, am I correct to say that the reason trilinearmipmap had bad growth of his Monti frags was because though T5 may be very bright, and the PAR may be relatively high, each segment of the light does not have a very high ouput when compared to a segment the same length of a MH so therefore it cannot send that PAR intensity far enough down, though the bottom of the tank may still be very bright? That might explain what I was talking about earlier with those guys having too much light at the bottom of 24" deep tanks. I dont know how their growth was though? Maybe its that yes, they are bright bulbs and produce alot of light, but that light is not strong enough to push the PAR down?
Sorry bout the really long post. Thanks.
Chris