Not enuf power

[NanoD]

I have a interesting problem. I cant power a air pump and a Thermo regulator with a Coal power plant.

Power.sav

[brummbar7]

Solution: 2 coal plants.  Or coal plant and a hamster wheel.  Or create a grid backbone with transformers.

[NanoD]

51 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

Solution: 2 coal plants.  Or coal plant and a hamster wheel.  Or create a grid backbone with transformers.

Ahhh but you dont see the problem. 

The problem is that one coal power plant is not enuf to drive 480 watt consumption when a power plant puts out 600 watt.

[brummbar7]

11 minutes ago, NanoD said:

The problem is that one coal power plant is not enuf to drive 480 watt consumption when a power plant puts out 600 watt.

Oh gotcha.   Are you actually seeing the now power symbol?  Because if it's just that the machines aren't doing their thing, it could be you have them hooked up wrong.  What's your gas overlay look like?

[trukogre]

26 minutes ago, NanoD said:

Ahhh but you dont see the problem. 

The problem is that one coal power plant is not enuf to drive 480 watt consumption when a power plant puts out 600 watt.

I loaded that save, power was clearly being lost somehow, I tried destroying and rebuilding the gas pump and pipes and it behaved more normally; my hypothesis is that the lost power is due to some interaction of a gas pump and broken pipes resulting in increased power drain.

[chaos0720]

1 hour ago, trukogre said:

I loaded that save, power was clearly being lost somehow, I tried destroying and rebuilding the gas pump and pipes and it behaved more normally; my hypothesis is that the lost power is due to some interaction of a gas pump and broken pipes resulting in increased power drain.

I loaded the save ad everything was working fine...?

 

The water pump isn't working because it's not plugged into the power grid, but other than that its working properly. And I made no changes. Simply loaded the save and unpaused it.

[trukogre]

32 minutes ago, chaos0720 said:

I loaded the save ad everything was working fine...?

 

The water pump isn't working because it's not plugged into the power grid, but other than that its working properly. And I made no changes. Simply loaded the save and unpaused it.

so those batteries went up to 40 kJ in the appropriate amount of time and then stayed there?

[chaos0720]

2 hours ago, trukogre said:

so those batteries went up to 40 kJ in the appropriate amount of time and then stayed there?

No, but that's because of the way he had it set up.

He had the coal generator set to only supply power when the batteries got to 5% capacity, or 16kJ. (2 batteries = 80kJ total) 

His system only had a net energy gain of 120W (600 - 240 - 240). 

The maximum amount of coal that can be put into a generator is 500Kg, which results in a total energy potential of 300kJ. He's only storing 20% of that, so the batteries would reach 60kJ, and the dupes wouldn't put any more coal into the generator until the batteries hit 16kJ. So the most his batteries could ever store with how he has it set up would be 76kJ, therefore the batteries would never get full.

I'm not saying there isn't an issue with power drain in this game (batteries were depleting while I had the game paused while testing everything), but unless I'm misunderstanding his problem, the only reason his system is acting the way it is is because he has the coal generator battery threshold set to 5%.

 

Update: the 500kg of coal resulting in more than 60kJ of store energy. Not sure why? Unless I'm mathing wrong.

Also, the threshold is apparently for an individual battery not the entire system. My dups didn't refill until the power stored dropped below  8kJ.

[trukogre]

22 minutes ago, chaos0720 said:

No, but that's because of the way he had it set up.

He had the coal generator set to only supply power when the batteries got to 5% capacity, or 16kJ. (2 batteries = 80kJ total) 

His system only had a net energy gain of 120W (600 - 240 - 240). 

The maximum amount of coal that can be put into a generator is 500Kg, which results in a total energy potential of 300kJ. He's only storing 20% of that, so the batteries would reach 60kJ, and the dupes wouldn't put any more coal into the generator until the batteries hit 16kJ. So the most his batteries could ever store with how he has it set up would be 76kJ, therefore the batteries would never get full.

I'm not saying there isn't an issue with power drain in this game (batteries were depleting while I had the game paused while testing everything), but unless I'm misunderstanding his problem, the only reason his system is acting the way it is is because he has the coal generator battery threshold set to 5%.

No, the batteries in the save game are staying under 1kJ, and often hitting 0 kJ while the coal gennie is running, because there's an intermittent excess power drain coming from the gas pump, even though there's only 480w consumption hooked up to a running 600w coal generator, at least that what's I saw when I loaded it.  How charged up would the batteries get when you loaded it up?

[chaos0720]

8 minutes ago, trukogre said:

No, the batteries in the save game are staying under 1kJ because there's an excess power drain coming from the gas pump, even though there's only 480w consumption hooked up to a running 600w coal generator, at least that what's I saw when I loaded it.  How charged up would the batteries get when you loaded it up?

Batteries stored 42.4kJ before the generator ran out of coal. The dupes didn't reach the generator until after the batteries were completely drained. But they did refill it, and the batteries stored 62 kj before the generator ran out of coal again.

However, I paused the game after the generator ran out of coal and watched as the batteries continued to drain.

[trukogre]

Well, I would definitely say you weren't able to reproduce the bug then, interesting.  But you found a different bug perhaps?

[chaos0720]

4 hours ago, trukogre said:

Well, I would definitely say you weren't able to reproduce the bug then, interesting.  But you found a different bug perhaps?

The power drain bug has been around for awhile. I would be surprised if it's not been reported already.

[NanoD]

It looks like because of lag, the coal generator is not producing the expect amount of power. I did som test. Run the coal generator for 1 cycle on slow slow peed and on fast speed. 

On slow speed 346 kJ 

On fast speed 250 kJ

I did test it on a new colony with little exploring and there was expected amount of power produced on fast speed. 

[Sevio]

I agree that the lag in your larger colony is probably to blame for this. Some parts of the simulation use a fixed time step while others use a variable time step depending on the frame rate you're getting and this causes the coal gen's fuel consumption and power generation to run out of sync with each other and with consumers. This problem used to be more widespread, the devs fixed some of the issues in the Outbreak Update by switching some things to use fixed time step. Apparently the coal generator or some more fundamental part of the power system still uses variable time step.

[NanoD]

I did the same test with hydrogen generator and it to suffers the same. 

456 kJ at slow

347 kJ at fast