Power Overloading Issues

[Mecrow]

I haven't listed this as a bug as it seems to be intentional, but the current way the circuit overload system works is completely illogical.  If any part of a circuit exceeds the maximum rating, any other part of the circuit can overload and break.  This makes no sense as any individual wire will have a specific amount of power flowing through it, which will be different to other wires on other parts of the circuit.  I am assuming that the voltage across the electrical system is constant for all components, and that here power is analogous to current.  

 

An example is that I have a main power line that runs through my ladders and tile floors.  This was upgraded to Heavi-Watt Wire, but the cables connected to the rooms were just Copper Wire.  No room had a total load of over 1kW, the most was around 500W.  But even the wire that could only ever draw 120W was apparently strained by the existence of extra loads elsewhere.  This, along with no way of passing power between circuits short of sending a dupe to manually swap switches, means that Copper Wire is useless after a certain point and I dread the time I a system larger than 2kW.

 

My proposed change is to have each wire calculate and show the current power and maximum power that could be drawn by all loads connected to it.  This is very simple as it is just allocating which power source is sending its power to any given component and then splitting the power between all wire paths.  You then add up all the paths going through a wire and if that exceeds the wire's ratings, it can break.

 

Sorry for the wall of text but as an electrical engineer it seemed such an illogical and limiting system for a game which has many different intuitive and thought out systems.  I understand that this would be more computationally intensive, and apologise if something akin to this was your intent all along but it has low priority in development.

[Zugai]

As it is, it is very limiting. I can run a setup of 2 electrolyzers, 4 gaspumps, 2 gas filters, 2 H-generators, 2 Water Purifiers, a liquid filter and a liquid pump. If I wanted to run a second pump, air scrubber or a bio distiller I already need to use another circuit. So right now I have one circuit for the water/oxygen cycle, one for the production of clothes and food (and research) and the third one for Cooling.

And I'll need yet another one for any experimentation with the physical state of resources.

[Kasuha]

 

16 hours ago, Mecrow said:

the current way the circuit overload system works is completely illogical.

It does not work as one would expect from real world, I couldn't agree more. I was furious when I ran into it for the first time and I thought it's a show stopper for me. But ONI is a game and it uses game physics (tm). The implementation it uses was fit for the purpose (add overloading) and was reasonably easy to implement. Even marginally correct calculation of power draw in complex grid you propose and many of us would like to see gets extremely difficult when the circuit contains loops and parallel wires.

And it's possible to get used to how the game is implemening it. It's not all that great obstacle and it's not even the worst divergence from real world physics that's in the game.

16 hours ago, Mecrow said:

 If any part of a circuit exceeds the maximum rating, any other part of the circuit can overload and break.

Actually... if the sum of all consumers (pumps, electrolyzers etc, but not batteries) that are drawing power at the same time exceeds 1 kW, then any part of the circuit made of standard wire may break. If it exceeds 2 kW, any part may break (and I would assume those made of standard wire will break first).

But you can send any power to batteries. So if you have a lot of sources on the circuit you can charge its batteries very fast, then let it draw the power from batteries for a very long time. The only problem is the heat coming from batteries but that seems to be fixable using Wheezeworts.

My circuits are all on standard wire. I have more than 1 kW of consumers on each of them, but I make sure they never run all at once. I have five large batteries on each of them, cooled by Wheezeworts. And I have 1600 W of power generation on each for recharging. And it works well for me.

What I think now is, the game should implement hydrogen generators stopping automatically when batteries are fully charged. Because then it would be no problem to have main power generation done in hydrogen distributed to local grids fed by hydrogen generators.

[robsin11]

I mentioned some changes that could stabilize the power grid system the in topic bellow.

 

[Ted n Emily]

Yes I agree that a 5 watt light on a low scale wire connected to the larger capacity wire shouldn't over load the whole system, lol.

How about being able to research breakers?

 

[robsin11]

On 4/26/2017 at 6:38 PM, Ted n Emily said:

Yes I agree that a 5 watt light on a low scale wire connected to the larger capacity wire shouldn't over load the whole system, lol.

How about being able to research breakers?

 

I have mention a couple of possible additions to the game that could stabilize the current power issues with the game under the link to another topic I started a  little while ago.