More Wires

[Risu]

There used to be an insulated wire, but it did nothing since heat doesn't travel down the wires.
 

[Saturnus]

I tend to think of heavi-watt wires as AC power cables and normal wires as DC cables but that's just me I guess. It's not really relevant in the game at the moment because wires are generally not well implemented yet. Wires should be sensitive to overloading both from consumers and producers, not just the former. The current way it's implemented means that you can have normal wires that easily handles  trillions of gigawatts of power as long as there's no consumers on the line.

[The Plum Gate]

22 hours ago, Saturnus said:

I tend to think of heavi-watt wires as AC power cables and normal wires as DC cables but that's just me I guess. It's not really relevant in the game at the moment because wires are generally not well implemented yet. Wires should be sensitive to overloading both from consumers and producers, not just the former. The current way it's implemented means that you can have normal wires that easily handles  trillions of gigawatts of power as long as there's no consumers on the line.

Transformers used to also be consumers - this was a pain, but it indicated that indeed those circuits were AC, as DC to DC is very complicated at that wattage. I like that they're not consumers anymore, merely having a capacity and acting as a bridge diode. I'm still on board with DC, since in small wires, the 25kg of metal that goes into a wire segment. Assuming a tile is 1 meter, a 25kg bar/rod would be 60mm in diameter and have an ampacity between 2300 and 2200 amps. The cross sectional area being ~2827mm2.

The small wire should be able to handle 2.3KW@1 volt, the large wire would have a cross section area of ~11,200mm2 and an ampacity of around 8,800 ot 7000 amps. able to handle 8.8Kw @1 volt. So the heaviwatt doesn't make sense in a bus bar topology. none of it does actually, but the masses can handle a lot of amps, and thus a lot of watts.

Since the wires have no resistance, joules cannot be determined as a measurment for these wires - so we have storage capacity in joules - and thus it doesn't matter how many joules goes through the wire because it is a wire of 0 resistance. I had originally proposed making all of the power producers and consumers be described in terms of joules to compliment the battery storage, everything in joules per second, everything. And just leave heat in watts. This would allow you the realism of dealing with wire segments, because the wire would have to have a resistance in order to determine a maximum load. So extremely long wires would have higher resistance and lower capacity.

This is all very hindering to say the least - I'm glad there is no system in place for this and that we have what we have. The original thought had stemmed from dupe performance on the manual generator as a a function of joules per second.

On a side note:

I have a tendency to build large banks of iron batteries off in the purple biome. I find they make competent heaters when placed just below the balm lilly in farm tiles - after 60 cycles, they haven't overheated in a chlorine / carbon dioxide atmosphere - but the heat is continuing to build up slowly - albeit very slowly.

I love having such a massive storage capacity, it lets me run the coal generator every other cycle, so I'm not burning through it and making a bunch of CO2. being able to handle any demand on the line within it's limits without worrying about how many producers could be overloading the wire is a nice, easy system.

[Nativel]

On 27.09.2017 at 6:55 PM, Lifegrow said:

I'd love multi coloured wires, or wire clusters that could be used within one tile space...

4 colors should be Green, Red, Blue, Ellow. 

[The Plum Gate]

52 minutes ago, Nativel said:

4 colors should be Green, Red, Blue, Ellow. 

I would keep the red and yellow for load status issues. I think having the circuit marked out in cyan or highlighted, perhaps even flashing or crawling dashes when mousing over or clicking on the wire would be better - something visually distinguishing about the circuit but not limited to just four colors.

[Cilya]

On 28/09/2017 at 3:41 AM, mdallicardillo said:

While I do understand where your coming from in terms of stark realism, technically the transformers in the game act as both capacitors as you say (because they store energy to be used should the batteries run out) but they do also transform 20kW to 1kW.

If you re talking about realism, a transformer should preserve the power, only loosing a bit of it into heat. This makes sense if the circuits do not mix wires and heavy watt wires : the heavy watt wires, additionnaly to larger cross section area, use high voltage and thus lower current for the same power which in turn means a higher possible maximum power than the basic wires. Transformers can be seen as converting the voltage of the heavy watt wires to the lower voltage of the basic wires. The only strange thing is that they are one way.

It doesn't make sense anymore when mixing different wire sizes. However, since this is not a very reasonable usage of wires, you don't have many reasons to mix them (it's more true since the last update) and you use this interpretation of transformers.

[Daikataro]

On 27/9/2017 at 11:06 AM, Lifegrow said:

I know there's an abundance of gold on the map too, but early game especially, Iron is far easier to get hold of than gold.

Really? Probably just my RNG then, since I was sitting on 5 digits of gold amalgam, before I got my first chunk of iron ore, given how abundant marsh biomes are, and how close they are to your starting position (at least mine). I'm also way less reluctant to crack open a marsh biome early, since the difference in temperature is not that high as opposed to igneous ones.

[Daikataro]

On 28/9/2017 at 1:39 AM, Saturnus said:

I tend to think of heavi-watt wires as AC power cables and normal wires as DC cables but that's just me I guess. It's not really relevant in the game at the moment because wires are generally not well implemented yet. Wires should be sensitive to overloading both from consumers and producers, not just the former. The current way it's implemented means that you can have normal wires that easily handles  trillions of gigawatts of power as long as there's no consumers on the line.

This makes perfect sense, as electricity will only travel from higher potential, to lower potential, until there is a balance. If there are no consumers, let's say, for argument's sake, that the batteries are holding a staggering 10 gigavolts, at 30 giga-amps/hour submerged in ideal insulator (so no electric arcs). if there is no power consumer, the difference in potential is zero, and anything multiplied by zero becomes zero, so even a 32 gauge wire would be carrying zero volts and thus, dissipating zero current and never fizzling.