How are we doing energy at the moment?

[Jim_Clonk]

What are the best power generator setups the community currently knows?
I've been designing some generator prototypes and wanted to know if they can even compete with what we currently have.

 

[therimmer96]

The community seems pretty focused on the huge ships at the moment, which just involves spamming power where power fits

 

[Mork2]

Generally I find its easier to setup your power generator depending on your ship. Usually long lines along the longest dimension on the ship is easiest to setup. You can add extras to that to generate more power inside the dimension limits of your ship it just complicates things. In really large ships I would just go for multiple lines down the length of the ship till you hit around 1.2mil e/sec then have a second set as backup incase of combat damage. After that due to the cap limit on energy regen blocks after a certain point only generate 25e/sec per power block regardless of dimensions and at that point large blocks of them in spare space works. I would still keep them away from the initial long lines though.

The generator prototypes you see are usually for cubes and usually only work well for something with a cube of room in them. If you can stack 3 cubes of those generators together at that point your probably better off with just a checkerboard pattern of lines down the length of those 3 generators.

 

[Jim_Clonk]

Generally I find its easier to setup your power generator depending on your ship. Usually long lines along the longest dimension on the ship is easiest to setup. You can add extras to that to generate more power inside the dimension limits of your ship it just complicates things. In really large ships I would just go for multiple lines down the length of the ship till you hit around 1.2mil e/sec then have a second set as backup incase of combat damage. After that due to the cap limit on energy regen blocks after a certain point only generate 25e/sec per power block regardless of dimensions and at that point large blocks of them in spare space works. I would still keep them away from the initial long lines though.

The generator prototypes you see are usually for cubes and usually only work well for something with a cube of room in them. If you can stack 3 cubes of those generators together at that point your probably better off with just a checkerboard pattern of lines down the length of those 3 generators.

Doesn't sound like there has been a lot of innovation on that subject... While of course a generator setup depending on each individual ship is probably best, I'm still trying to design a few generator setups. The problem I see on the "cube" designs is that if you want to stack them, you'll have to leave a one block space. Or at least this is true on the cube generators I am thinking of...

 

[Lecic]

There was a lot of innovation early on in reactor designing, but that's fallen away recently because the greatest designs have already been found (A 21^3 box reactor was the 1mil record last time I checked). Space isn't really an issue, because other components like hull aren't very expensive, so you don't need to save space with a single large reactor. Because of this, most ships just have long lines of power from the front to back of the ship.

 

[MrFURB]

As long as you remember the basic rules of how power generators work, you should only be a few ships away from being able to eyeball and guess the best way to place reactors in just about any shape of vessel without needing complex math or standardized designs... Although standardized designs are just as viable if every vessel you need to fit one can.

Here's the basic rules of setting up efficient power generators, mathematical complexities not included:

Each power block gives a base 25 energy regeneration per second, no matter what.
Power blocks receive bonus regeneration based on the total x, y, and z dimensions of a group added up. This is usually called the boxdim bonus.
A 'group' of power blocks is any set of power blocks connected by touching faces.
Once your bonus regen from boxdim bonuses hits 1,000,000 you no longer receive any boxdim bonuses for additional power blocks, instead just getting the base 25. This usually happens at the 1.2 million regen mark, as the base 25/block regen accounts for the extra 0.2 million regen.

There's plenty of other quirks about how power is calculated and it's calculation rate that one can figure out with some practice and experimentation.