Generator-to-battery exploitation

[Tonyroid]

As it is, a battery that is charging doesn't count as a power consumer on a circuit. This makes sense because it's natural to expect a 20kw circuit (for example) to operate 20kw worth of devices AND be capable of storing surplus power in batteries for later use.

But a consequence of this is that a 1kw wire (for example) can be used to deliver an unlimited amount of power to banks of batteries all over the asteroid. As convenient as I find that, it's circumvents the engineering-esque joy that makes the game fun and feels like a glaring violation of the fantasy-physics-rules that the game establishes. It gives me a sense that I exploited a quirk and not that I designed a solution.

A change would make the game better, but any simple change is problematic. Also, distributing power on a large scale would be extraordinarily difficult without exploiting this quirk. My personal brainstorm is:

• Change batteries so they count as power consumers
  • Perhaps make them automatically limit their charge rate so they don't overload the circuit.
  • or perhaps give them a setting for their maximum charge rate
  • or perhaps provide an automation sensor (below) that allows players to enable/disable a battery depending on the status of the circuit. 
• Provide an automation sensor for the load on a circuit so:
  • players can disable generators to prevent wasting power when the circuit is too saturated for their batteries to store it.
  • players can enable/disable devices based on whether the circuit currently has sufficient capacity.
• Perhaps increase the capacity of wiring so that all this power wrangling can be accommodated

[Lawnmower Man]

On 1/16/2019 at 2:41 PM, Tonyroid said:

As it is, a battery that is charging doesn't count as a power consumer on a circuit. This makes sense because it's natural to expect a 20kw circuit (for example) to operate 20kw worth of devices AND be capable of storing surplus power in batteries for later use.

But a consequence of this is that a 1kw wire (for example) can be used to deliver an unlimited amount of power to banks of batteries all over the asteroid. As convenient as I find that, it's circumvents the engineering-esque joy that makes the game fun and feels like a glaring violation of the fantasy-physics-rules that the game establishes. It gives me a sense that I exploited a quirk and not that I designed a solution.

A change would make the game better, but any simple change is problematic. Also, distributing power on a large scale would be extraordinarily difficult without exploiting this quirk. My personal brainstorm is:

• Change batteries so they count as power consumers
  • Perhaps make them automatically limit their charge rate so they don't overload the circuit.
  • or perhaps give them a setting for their maximum charge rate
  • or perhaps provide an automation sensor (below) that allows players to enable/disable a battery depending on the status of the circuit. 
• Provide an automation sensor for the load on a circuit so:
  • players can disable generators to prevent wasting power when the circuit is too saturated for their batteries to store it.
  • players can enable/disable devices based on whether the circuit currently has sufficient capacity.
• Perhaps increase the capacity of wiring so that all this power wrangling can be accommodated

I think the safest change would be to allow them to have dynamic wattage, but count as an actual consumer.  The default behavior would be to soak excess power on the circuit, but perhaps smart batteries could also have configurable min/max wattage so you can force charging rates for some applications.

What this means is that if a generator is on the circuit producing 2 kW, and there's only 800 W of building consumers and a battery, and all of this is running over 1 kW wires, the battery will draw 1.2 kW until charged and overload the circuit.  This will restore the need for conductive wire/etc.  If you put a Small Transformer on the circuit, then it will look like there is only 1 kW of power available, and the battery will only draw 200 W.  So basically, same semantics as today, except that battery load counts towards overload calculations.  Doesn't even seem like a huge change (famous last words, I know).

[Moonshade]

Well i made a bug report "exploit"  about it some time ago, here it is.

well in the past the same ting happened with transformers so i'm guessing they will do something about it? though the batteries might need a power intake limiter, since as it is batteries take all energy on the mains so as it stand we can't control power intake as "lawnmower man" said.

electric power in this game is a little bit dummed down cause you don't do anything with current, voltage and resistance, and that's good since it would take a lot to calculate that all properly but. normally you put a ressistance in front of the battery that limits the current intake and prevent overtaxing the circuit.

well they did change the power runoff from the transformers to 0j/c?
in the past it was more energy effcient to use this smart battery exploit since 1 transformer had a higher energy runoff then 2 smart batteries.

using this exploint now though means you lose more energy if the discription is correct. maybe they want to make the incentive this way from avoiding to use the exploit? well you'd still need a battery to keep the circuit up and control energy flow but you could lose less energy by building without this exploit. though energy doesn't tend to be a problem.