Disabled Power Transformers draw 3.33 W

In my opinion, this bug largely negates the benefit of having automation on transformers. 

I suspect that transformers are disabled by disabling their output power port, which was fine until you added the power drain on transformers. 

If the automation disabled the input port instead, that would almost certainly resolve the issue.

The way I see it transformers don't even need to have drain.

The current weird drain mechanism (drain when disabled only) just means players use Power Shutoffs instead. There will always be the control freak aspect, the control freak isn't going to accept that drain when they can use a Power Shutoff after the outlet and not suffer that drain.

 

Anyway, I would find two solutions acceptable:

• Transformers never have drain, they just magically store their buffer energy forever even when disabled.
• Transformers always have drain, but their input is strictly limited to 1 kW or 4 kW and they should only have any input when enabled (drain applying only to the stored energy), so if say they have 3 W of drain, that means it would pull 1000 W from the circuit, consume 3 W, and export 997 W to the outlet circuit, the 997 number might look annoying, but it so happens that in ONI most buildings consume power in multiples of 60, so typically a fully loaded 1 kW circuit is actually pulling something like 960 W, it'd take something very precise like adding exactly 4 Shutoffs to get the exactly 1000 W that would make the 997 W mildly irritating (2 shutoffs and 2 lamps won't do the trick, as lamps are 8 W), and even if a player engineers an exactly 1 kW circuit, this would only result in a power stutter about once a cycle, and only if the player manages to make all the components draw power 100% of the time, which would be very unusual. If this solution were implemented, I'd say the UI shouldn't show the "997 W" number, it should still just show 1000 W because round numbers are great.

Edited August 16, 2023 by blakemw