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Portable power


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3 new buildings and items.

Charger, charges accumulators. Must be hooked into power network. Takes time to charge accumulators, power consumption dependable on number of accumulators hooked into it, charging. 3 slots. Maybe even Rapid Charger, twice the charging rate, quadruple energy consumption.

Manufacturing station. Used to craft accumulators.

Accumulator Housing. Housing unit for charged accumulators. Can house up to 3 at same time(maybe even 5). Used as power source for small local power grids.

Power Accumulator, Advanced Power Accumulator. High Capacity Power Accumulator. Items that are charged at Charger and then can be delivered and hooked up into housing unit.

I often find myself stretched a bit 2 far, especially in terms of power. Sometimes i need to build buildings quite far away from main grid, making building wiring either overly complicated or unfeasible. Sure, i could build coal generator there, but then again, id need batteries and whole infrastructure. Whole accumulator idea is meant for fast and temporary solution for power requirements in remote parts of map during initial stages of expansion, when required logistics may be lacking.

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It'd be pretty cool, to have dupes running around with portable batteries, like in the circled art-work. They could act like pre-pipes plumbing - dupes spend more time hauling batteries from charging stations to receptacles, but they save the need to have long wires running across the map. For simple / small areas, where you only need one or two small items (like a single massage table and oxygenator, for destressing miners), portable batteries would be really cool! :)

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I think it would be very useful to start up new builds (no need for the wheel or generator) or as a small backup in case of a power outage. 

Example: My electrolizers usually make enough hydrogen to power themselves, but if somewhere in the water delivery chain something fails (like the sieve not receiving sand) it will cause the whole build to halt and it needs to be restarted with a wheel. Put a battery in, done. 

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I like the idea in concept, but in practice, all I can think of is how much of a headache it is to micromanage.

We've had the means to bottle and empty liquids in one form or another since ONI first released, and it's ALWAYS annoying to micromanage bottles of liquid from mopping urine, food production water, flooding, condensation, etc. Moving liquid from one point to another in small quantities is micromanage intensive, setting up a water-lock is one example. There is no possible way to bottle a specific amount of a liquid for temporary storage without FIRST setting up a bottle emptier, and enabling auto-bottle.

Recently, we were given gas bottling as an option, and it's just as irritating to micromanage. To fill an AETN room with hydrogen to a specific pressure using gas bottling you must:

  1. Unlock refined metals. No easy task.
  2. Get a source of pure hydrogen, filtered somehow, and pipe it.
  3. Position both the bottler and emptier, and set them to autobottle.
  4. Make multiple trips to fill the room up to say, 5kg pressure. For the smallest AETN room (4x4), this requires minimum of 8 trips per 10kg bottle.

Assuming you haven't slipped in any tiles of non-hydrogen into your room of pure hydrogen, this takes a minimum of 1-2 days of constant monitoring to ensure your dupes don't screw up or get stuck somehow.

Translate that to power systems, which would require the same micromanagement investment, I just don't see the benefit of adding a whole new system when most people would just run a wire and be done with it. Early game, this would be complicated and unneeded, as most new players don't have satellite bases such as sleet wheat farms or ranches. Late game, it would be completely outclassed by even a mildly competent power network, and simply running a wire.

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46 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

I like the idea in concept, but in practice, all I can think of is how much of a headache it is to micromanage.

I feel like portable power would be much easier to manage than gas bottling. Gasses have the tendency to spread to areas you don`t want them to which makes them really hard to manage through manual bottling.

Now power would be simple. You would have a charger that produces a single portable battery (stops consuming power when it`s fully charged). The battery can be picked up and docked to a circuit via a dock building. When it loses all power a new one would be requested (or you could give it a treshold). The battery itself would be like a bottle so doesn`t have to be build just spawns at the charger. Attaching a new one to the dock wouldn`t remove the remaining charge so you aren`t losing anything. I think the game already has systems that can support this funcionallity.

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20 hours ago, Gwido said:

But according to the size of the accumulators we currently have in game, these small batteries would last very very very quickly ! :p

Not if they are higher tech. Maybe made out fo plastic. Polymeric batteries like those used in cellphones.

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6 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Not if they are higher tech. Maybe made out fo plastic. Polymeric batteries like those used in cellphones.

Initial idea was as early game feature, i guess.

Maybe better add non rechargeable batteries, just craft galvanic cell for one usage, recipe simple from copper ore/copper metal, will be fine for early game or for some uncommon cases.

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