Power to the people.

[necaladun]

 

Power! One of the biggest duties of engineering, is currently in a very weird state. There's a lot of sides of this, and I'd like some input about how terrible my ideas are, etc.

 

There's a few parts to this, but my biggest problem with power right now is that it is essentially binary. Either the station has power, or it doesn't. We have all kinds of systems around power drain, amounts used and generated, but that doesn't really matter, because if the engine is up, there's more than enough.

 

Power Storage:

3 Main Engi SMES.

1 Engine SMES.

2 in Electrical Maint, not hooked up by default.

4 Solar SMES.

1 in the Grav Gen

1 in the turbine.

 

That's 12 in total. If they're all wired up to the SMES, that's 2.4MW needed to keep them all fully charged.

 

Total load, once all APCs are fully charged, seems to be around...150KW. Enough for 1 SMES to handle.

 

Once all the SMES are fully charged, then you could probably turn off the power generation alltogether and be fine, as long as it isn't super early in the round. Even then, I wouldn't be surprised if all 12 SMES, fully charged, could keep the station going for 2 hours.

 

Power Generation:

 

Tesla: 5MW. Minimum. Maximum? Well, at the end of a shift with the PA on 2 the whole time, you're looking at 120MW+. Stupid amounts.

Singulo: ~3MW. There are all kinds of ways to get more, but there's no real point.

Turbine: Maybe 50kw, with work. Lol.

Solars: 45KW average I think, or might be 90. *4 is either 360 of 180. Just enough to power the station.

 

The Tesla is off from the rest here by -stupid- amounts. There's lots of other problems I have with it, which i'll bring up another time, but the problem here clearly is that it produces more power than every other method, combined, when it starts. By the end of the shift (let alone with a PA at 3, or multiple PAs), it's producing 30-50x the amount possible from the others.

 

Power Usage:

 

How much power the station uses is hard to get an idea of. The bridge for instance uses 5kw, 4.5 of that being for the 15 computers there, 500w on the lights. Looking at the "load" on the grid with all APCs charged seems about 150kw.

 

This comes back to the "binary" nature of power. There's no real use for it, except for avoiding a blackout.

 

A proposed change, mapping only:

 

Nerf the tesla power output for a start. 10x is the number I'm throwing out for a start.

 

Then, so that a better idea can be gotten of power usage, and how to tweak it - create a small elec maint room for each major area, with 1 SMES in it, that feeds the entire area. (Bridge, Sec, Cargo, Service, Med, R&D).

 

Main SMES units in engi would feed maint, main corridors, and then the department SMES. That'd be the "main" grid, with each other section being a sub grid. This would also allow for a lot more fun in sabotaging individual sources of power, rather than the whole grid at once. Powersinks could be tactically placed, and bombing the SMES for a department would have major effects for them.

 

It'd also be great so we could see what the load from each individual department is, then tweak it for individual machines.

 

If these values are all at the right levels, and there are some better uses for power (Shields, sci machines, cloning taking lots, etc), then we could get a cool system going with engineers rushing around to divert power to shields, etc, as needed. Sabotage becomes a lot more interesting, as does repair and customization for engineers.

 

Bigger changes:

 

This would be best to do after the above one. Create a limit on the amount of power normal wires can hold, and have a "main" loop grid with heavy duty wires, and have the departmental SMES units more like step-down transformers than actual batteries. Have engineering have a main (and maybe another backup?) SMES battery setup.

 

This is mainly to avoid the problem with departmental SMES, which is that you'd be better off just bypassing them alltogether, and wiring the dept into the main grid.

 

[Yinseng]

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Edited April 30, 2016 by Guest

[Toroic]

 

Would it be possible if the system could take into account server population? Power is already hard enough to maintain during the wee hours of the morning when there's barely any or no engineers.

 

...What?

 

One person can set up the tesla and then the station is powered forever. Or they can just wire all the solars.

 

If power is hard to maintain in weird hours, that's because there's not one competent player on to set up the engine/solars.

 

[Bigtimetripod]

 

Power is already hard enough to maintain during the wee hours of the morning when there's barely any or no engineers.

 

If no engineers, the duty falls upon Captain, if no captain, HoP etc. Some one on the station has to know how to set up the easiest thing ever, that is the tesla. I guess morning shifts are spears and flashlights then.

 

Tesla is... yes, childs play. Have tesla with 50+ balls orbiting, hotwire it and ye have the best weapon ever for Malf AI aka one shot kill unless insulated gloves are worn.

 

Tesla is too easy, needs no maint., too much power output, setup is basically done already and need to only remove singulo thingy and make activate containment field.

 

I remember when i started learning engineerning and Singulo years ago, i spent few shifts just observing and then one round i was the CE and only engineer. Thanks to dumb luck, was able to set up singulo and i felt proud. After returning to ss 13 and saw tesla, i was able to learn everything about it within an hour.

 

Nerf the hell out of the tesla! And morning spear people, LEARN TO USE PACMANS!

 

[FlattestGuitar]

 

Most of these changed don't really seem to impact the station that much. While they'd make engineering a bit more interesting when it comes to power issues, it won't really change much in terms of the power being binary or somehow make power a more interesting aspect of gameplay.

 

My proposition for nerfing the tesla would be lowering its power output to make it so that it starts out as a much less powerful engine, but with the PA on grows in strength to outpace the singularity about an hour into the round, making it somewhat of a long-term project. Possibly making it start out at an extremely low output, meaning more ways of generating power early on would be necessary.

 

[necaladun]

 

Atm, with 0 energy balls, the tesla seems to put out 3.5-5MW. Hotwiring has no real effect above 5MW, IIRC.

 

I understand currently it won't change power being binary, but it'll at least allow power to go down to individual departments.

 

One of the biggest problems is from what I've seen, there's really no effort to get a uniform idea of how much power should be generated and drained. I have no idea what areas drain the most power, and the amount various systems use seems random. Generation is the same, the difference between different engines is just weird.

 

Getting each dept on it's own mini powergrid is just the first step, but would not just be great for sabotage etc, but mainly so that we can start to get an idea of the drains on each place, and variations, such as when cloning is being used, prisoners are running on treadmills, etc.

 

Sadly there aren't that many things that use power in brief bursts that I can think of, except cloning. Recharge rates for chem machines, maybe?

 

[Doukan]

 

More things using more power perhaps? The chem machines requiring input to recharge make sense, how about sleepers/cyro pods being energy intensive if they're left on? It'd make sense for cyborg charges to transfer the energy from an APC to the borg (better parts = more efficiency?), have printing things off in R&D drain the APC a little perhaps? Same for those recharge stations that the brig has?

 

I really like the idea of departmental SMES', it'd finally make localized sabotage a thing.

 

[LightFire53]

 

Here's a thought: If the smes can only take so much power, why haven't they exploded, or at least fried, with so much power in the system?

 

I think the basic tesla should produce significantly less power than the singularity, but eventually puts out more than the singulo. It could balance out how often the singularity gets used v. how often the tesla gets used.

 

The departmental SMES is a good idea. Lady Tesla OP, pls nerf is a good idea.

 

 

[Bigtimetripod]

 

Each department having their own substation or mini-SMES would be a epic idea.

 

Having a power substation ( in this case SMES for each department ) would not only be better, but logical.

 

IRL you cannot plug powerplant right into the grid cause electronics are sensitive and will burn or blow. Thats why there are sub stations that convert the power into more suitable levels allowing electronics to function normaly.

 

You can say that as of now tesla/singulo is the power plant, SMES units as battery/ substations (4 engineering SMES for the whole station are iffy) and APC are the wireless power sockets that feed power in the room.

 

What i thinking is this.

 

Tesla/singulo makes raw power, this gets feed into a 3x3 or 2x2 converter/SMES that handles the raw power. Then from there, wires feed power to department SMES and each department APC gets their juice from department SMES.

 

This would not only make it more better and a bit easier, it would make it harder to take out power for the whole station. SMES units carry quite a bit and APC units also have their own battery before going dark.

 

[necaladun]

 

It'd be fancy and require coding, but one idea I've had is heavy duty cables, that take the "main" grid to the departmental SMES, which act as a step-down transformer of sorts. I then had crazy ideas about making volts and amps which define how much power is given vs how far it can travel up cables, with amps creating heat on the cables, but then I realized how much work that is.

 

What I think would be good is "mini-SMES" units, that act as step-downs.

 

The current problem I see with departmental smes is it's just too easy to bypass them entirely, and rewire things to the main grid.

 

Futher tests on power usage show me if I depower every SMES (except the main engine one), the total load is 450kw.

Tesla creates 3476520, + 1738260 per power ball.

So atm, there is no point to having any extra power balls (Unless hotwiring/releasing).

It also slowly creates extra mini balls by itself without the PA blasting it at all...

 

[Dinarzad]

 

It's worth noting on other servers, the Tesla is not an infinite power source either. If the PA is turned off the Lightning ball -will- slowly dissipate into non-existance. Compared to ours that never decreases in size ever. Even if you turn it off, it will forever exist.

 

So it seems to me, personally that one step of the solution would be to make the Tesla much weaker initially but have a build up time more or less. Then if the engine is sabotaged, it's more impactful because it'll take several minutes to get the engine back up to full output, which would make power sinks all that much more effective, because now your Tesla engine isn't gonna just fart out stupid amounts of voltage to fully charge things again.

 

And Singularity has no build up time (Aside getting to stage 3), but it's flaw is that it can get loose and devour the entire station.

It's not an easy fix to all Engineering problems ever, but it's a stepping stone imo.

 

[SpaceTimeNow]

The power situation is equaly as boring as atmos and from what i understand it's made like that by design. It's part of the long quest of Paradise to make the engineering department redundant and i think we succeed a while ago.

[monster860]

If I'm not mistaken, isn't this what bay does with the power?

[Allfd]

I really like the baystation power substation model, it gives you something to do as an engineer.

[Twinmold]

 

Right this moment, from local tests, which is why I started messing with Tesla power output code, Tesla, on start with 0 energy balls does 1.7-ish million energy. Energy balls add nothing to this number. It's start and instant all-the-power mode. The PR I have up will lower Tesla power by a factor of 10, but fixes the energy balls to increase the amount of power it gives. Still super easy to set up, produces a lot of energy (and can producing more power than all the other engines combined when it gets a large number of energy balls). This immediately makes it so that engineering has the option to maintain it so it doesn't produce too much power and better balances it to fit within the realm of the other engines, power-wise.

 

https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/4695

 

[BadApple797]

It would be cool if it was harder to make power and had more benefits to departments.

[BiberDark]

Could you not make it so that every machine type needs a specified value of power. This Equals in the different power requirements for the departments.

Power-lines can only supply a definite amount of power.

Random example: A Green small wire only supports 1 kw. If you request more the powerline will melt and burn --> damaging the interior. 

If a machine do not have enough power to operate (example only, 0.5 kw instead of 2)  it will a not work at all or all products are failures (crap). If it has 2 kw it will work fine. More then 3kw on this line an this machine will burn and even explode with all problems ( exploding chemmaster ).

Example:

You have a Chemmaster (2kw), a oven (5kw), an autolath (3kw) you need a line with a capacity of 10kw (maybe a red one). But you need to check that all machines are connected at once, so that there is no overload. Maybe we could integrate a power supplier where you can select the power supply level (to boot each machine seperatly "on step after another, like the failure of the american powernet) like the apc in the room.

Consequence is you need a technician to reboot a room in a safe way. ( Work for the Electrician ) Maybe they are provided with special tools to measure and improve the energy flow.

So each room has a powerconsole next to or integrated in the apc . This apc is connected to the department SMES. The SMES is handled in the same way to few power system is unstable and will cut power (powerdown) to much power and the security system makes a emergency shutdown, far to much power and the smes explodes with a possibility to damage and explode all connected machines due to a powershock in the department.

Highpowerlines are special wires who are isolated and cooled. 

 

Just my two cents.

PS:

This results in the need for an Powersupervisor in Engineering, who balance power production against power demand and controls amd adjust the powerlevels of the main powerlines.

 

PS II:

Maybe unused power of the engine results in heat, this heat has to be activly handled in atmos (cooled down). If not the systems overheats and the reaction fails. Dependent on his type. Maybe the temprature in the station depends on this heat. To much 40+++ degree °C to few the temprature drops below life sustainable values. --> Failure of Life Support.

Edited September 28, 2017 by BiberDark

[Norwest]

Perhaps before anything else, I think the first question to be asked is simply "what sort of gameplay are you trying to create?"

Do you want Engineers running around messing with SMES outputs? Do you want 'em having to tweak and fine-tune power inputs to ensure that the rest of the station is running? Ultimately, what sort of moments and incidents are you trying to create? Saying "nerf the Tesla to encourage people to use the singulo" is fine and all, but it doesn't exactly make for terribly stimulating gameplay one way or another, eh? Let me try and propose a change to illustrate what I'm talking about:

"Brownouts:" Rather than the massive Automated Grid Check, every shift a certain number of tiles with power cables on them will be pre-selected to have a brownout problem. Depending on ease of coding, this could take several forms: they only allow a certain amount of power to go through them, they periodically stop working, explode if too much power is in 'em, etc etc etc. Regardless of exactly how the issue arises, the point is that every shift the Engineers will have some bad power cables somewhere which will need to be fixed. In other words, they'll have to troubleshoot the approximate location of the faulty wire based on how many APCs 'downstream' of it are affected, then head out to find the thing and replace it. Much like faulty cameras or broken lights, a certain number of wires would brownout at shift start, and a small number would do so later in the shift as well. The desired gameplay here would be Engineers having to a) know the station's cable layout, b) know what the hell's going on when an area goes dark, and c) traipse around in Maintenance trying to find and fix the faulty wire.

Power surge: A negative random event, where the engine SMES cells quadruple their current output and essentially dump its whole power supply into the power grid in a short amount of time. This would lead to the usual power excess-related issues (APCs zapping people, lethally-electrified windows, etc.) during the time the surge is active, and would also lead to a power-supply problem afterwards. The goal here would be to provide a temporary, but nasty power issue that would require Engineering assistance, and also reward extra effort on their part. Engineering teams who went the extra mile to get the solars online and prepped Electrical Maintenance would be sitting pretty, while lazier ones would be in trouble.

While I like the idea of making SMES cells for individual departments, I'm also leery of putting that much work and effort on the coders. That's a lot of re-wiring to do, and I'm unsure if it would really affect the actual round-to-round gameplay all that much. Similarly, while I think the idea of having to tweak power levels might be fun in theory, in practice I imagine it'd be a lot of Spreadsheet Simulator without much interesting and engaging payoff for anyone who volunteers to handle the work.