Approx 9 million power generation in approx 70,200 cubes

[GRHayes]

Not sure if anyone tried this. Each of the rotating rings produces approx 1 million generation power and 4.5 million stored power There is 8 docked to the original ship which has its own ring.
It would have been nice had I figured a way to transfer power from the rings to the primary system.
It would have been nice if you could use a power transfer beam and send it to the main ship.

However, The rings can each have their own shielding and armaments. I am thinking 8 outer turrets on each and 4 inner cannons facing forward.

The dimensions of the ship as pictures is 136m long 65m high and 65m wide. Rings counter rotate every other one. The rings consist of 56 generators. Each quarter of a ring has 14 generators.

Anyway I was wondering what other means have people attempted to get around the power generation 1 million issue rather than put down large chunks of power blocks or lines of them.

For those that don't know. After the first million in power it takes about 320,000 blocks normally to get the next 8 million in power. Because after a million you get only 25 power per block.

 

[testkil]

It are called generators allot of people use them, put powersupply beams with cannon support on them and make them shoot your ship (use clocks to make them shoot by themself

 

[Mork2]

Docked generator/power cores/modules. There is a bunch of forum posts about them. What you have there put use a power supply beam on the docked modules aiming at the mothership. It wastes some power but transfers power back and is 4 to 5 times more efficient than 25e/sec/block. The power supply beam has a 0.5 sec tick rate for 2.5seconds then a 2.5 second cooldown. Most people use one or two alternating on logic.

 

[Tunk]

Not really many options if they are rotating unless you plan on putting stuff on rotating sections.
You can draw power directly or use supply beams to send it back to the parent ship.

Power travels down the docking chain naturally, back up the chain via supply beams.
Careful of cascade power failure with directly connected systems.

 

[GRHayes]

It are called generators allot of people use them, put powersupply beams with cannon support on them and make them shoot your ship (use clocks to make them shoot by themself

Just worked out the clock support myself.

Wish I seen the forums on it before hand. Guess it is knowing the right term to look up.
[DOUBLEPOST=1443929765,1443927504][/DOUBLEPOST]

Not really many options if they are rotating unless you plan on putting stuff on rotating sections.
You can draw power directly or use supply beams to send it back to the parent ship.

Power travels down the docking chain naturally, back up the chain via supply beams.
Careful of cascade power failure with directly connected systems.

Well there are a number of ways it can be used.
As the two above point out one can always send power from each unit back to the main shaft of it.

As you said mounting stuff on the rotating parts is possible. You can even mount weapons on their and fire them via wireless.
You can also put turrets on exterior.

That said nothing say it can be enclosed all it takes is connecting to the shafts at the end.
That would leave the vast amount of the interior of it to be used for pretty much anything.
In short you end up with a huge space savings over dropping in a junk of blocks it would take to create the same amount of power.

On could build a capital ship and put a shaft in it that ran from stem to stern for power and put a primary weapon system down the shaft of it. For every distance of 9 blocks you go you get 1 million power approx. In a 1000 meters that would give you about 111 milion e/s generation. Plus 500 million e stored. If you can't create a big enough weapon with that to do some damage you are playing.
Considering that shaft size can be modified and give a larger diameter a lot of space could be saved and allow of a large weapon to fit in the center of it.

 

[Mork2]

There is a couple of tricks to it though as it generates some lag plus some other issues.

One when something is rotating and firing a beam the beam stays where it was when it fired and the rotating object just continues you moving. This can even if aimed a centre point your rotating around may cause misses while strafing.

You can get around rotating sections if the output of the power supply beam is on the axis of the rotation.

To reduce lag you don't want to many of them either depending on your computer or server. To help cut down on lag most power cores are stationary. Have a space around it to reduce collision calculations or use a speed controller on the rail set to zero speed. This also helps even if its just a one block rail as it still does some of the calculations for checking to move.

With all of this in mind most people use long thin power cores that are stationary, built deep inside the ship. Also if you use 2 alternating power supply beams you only need a little over half a second of power storage on the power core. Using a single beam means you have to store around 3 seconds worth in total. I don't use the power supply beam/cannon slave to cut down on the number of shot and hopefully lag. But if you just have a couple it would give you a smoother power feed and you could have less energy storage on each power core.

If those rotating sections don't have spokes you can put some long power cores parallel and around the central axis as well.

Note if the power core runs out of power it will suffer a power drain even though it gets the remainder of the power from the main ship its generators go offline for a second or two. This is a known bug. If this happens to all your power cores in can result in a power core setup that drains the mothership power due to a cascade of power failures and drawing more out than putting back in. Power supply beams have some wastage.

Some of the logic running the power supply beam fails on single player loading the game so I assume the same is possible in multiplayer. So I have a button through a series of wireless connections so I can reset all the power cores. I actually have it broken into two groups. One to give enough power to startup call it reserve power core group then a second set of power cores with a separate logical switch. That way you can leave one set off if its to much for the server etc....

Power to mass ratio is can have a huge effect. Power cores can give a 4:1 or 5:1 power to mass ratio compared with just blocks of power generators after the softcap. This extra available power can make a titan far more dangerous than a normally build ship. With power cores setup you can make a couple million block titan with perma running ion shielding 60% and perma radar jamming. So your titan can fly around not showing on radar and missiles have a hard time hitting you.

The one I've been working under 3million blocks has 100million shields and 1.2mil shield regen. With ion shielding that's an equivalent of 250million shield damage you would have to do to drop the shields. That requires 2.5billion energy converted into weapon hits or 1.25billion energy worth of ion hits. Shield regen is effectively 3million effective shield points per second out of combat. Which is between 150k to 300k shields damage per second during combat. So if don't have 3million e/second of weapons hitting it (half for ion) it can tank you indefinitely.

 

[Tunk]

That comment was mainly based around what looked to be multiple rotating generators
Normally generators are mounted static so you can protect them easier and don't need to work around movement, for example you can't dock something on one rotating segment that might intersect with another so you are basically restricted to the segment itself unless you enjoy working around that kinda thing (though it would look cool).

Anyway for the super weapon, that will work for weapons with reloads > 2 seconds, otherwise you are restricted to a single generators output with weapons/turrets that have reloads < 2 seconds as a general rule, or need to use power supply generators to inject additional power.

If you put any of the generators into power failure (by exhausting their power reserves) they'll temporarily stop producing power and require a second or two to come back online as Mork said.
I do not view this as a bug however, its just the power system working as designed.

 

[testkil]

Just worked out the clock support myself.

Wish I seen the forums on it before hand. Guess it is knowing the right term to look up.
[DOUBLEPOST=1443929765,1443927504][/DOUBLEPOST]

Well there are a number of ways it can be used.
As the two above point out one can always send power from each unit back to the main shaft of it.

As you said mounting stuff on the rotating parts is possible. You can even mount weapons on their and fire them via wireless.
You can also put turrets on exterior.

That said nothing say it can be enclosed all it takes is connecting to the shafts at the end.
That would leave the vast amount of the interior of it to be used for pretty much anything.
In short you end up with a huge space savings over dropping in a junk of blocks it would take to create the same amount of power.

On could build a capital ship and put a shaft in it that ran from stem to stern for power and put a primary weapon system down the shaft of it. For every distance of 9 blocks you go you get 1 million power approx. In a 1000 meters that would give you about 111 milion e/s generation. Plus 500 million e stored. If you can't create a big enough weapon with that to do some damage you are playing.
Considering that shaft size can be modified and give a larger diameter a lot of space could be saved and allow of a large weapon to fit in the center of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxgfEOR6r5c

 

[GRHayes]

Guessing this is a bug. When doing shield transfer a single beam block transfers 1200. Assuming like power then it is supposed to use 1500.
However, I noticed that to keep up transfer of just 1 beam it took over 4000 something. To keep up with two alternating beams it was a bit better and only took 5098 to keep up with the transfer rate of both beams. That means you transfer 2400/5098 or about 47%.

Was it supposed to be that bad or is that on purpose?
If docked systems are not effected by the primary carriers battle damage do they continue at normal rate if so. If so at least during a battle this
would be better than the 1/10 normal rate primary shields get put under.

It would however be nicer to get the 1200/1500 ratio 80% would be a lot nicer.

 

[Mork2]

If I remember correctly using a shield supply beam both makes the supplier and the target to be considered in combat with reduced shield regen.

Between that and the whole greater than 50% shields will protect docked entities further down the chain. I haven't figured out a way to make them useful in a solo situation yet but if there is a way I would like to know. If you have a team mates in different ships though its useful for spider tanking like in Eve-online. Let the turrets do the shooting. If your behind everyone you can supply the team mates in front of you.

You could setup a system along where you undock so that when you do undock you have shields transferred to you for a limited time encase you get ambushed while undocking from a capital ship or a station/home base.

 

[Tunk]

Last time I tested it can cause a shields to receive charge multiple times a second, and isnt effected by shield failure.
This potentially makes it useful against cannon combo weapons and allows primary shields to always have at least some recharge.

 

[GRHayes]

Last time I tested it can cause a shields to receive charge multiple times a second, and isnt effected by shield failure.
This potentially makes it useful against cannon combo weapons and allows primary shields to always have at least some recharge.

Thanks, good to know.

Hope it is still that way. But I'll run some test to check it and see. Guess I could go park out side a pirate base and let them throw stones at me.

 

[GRHayes]

Went ahead and tested it to make sure but from what I seen Any enclosed docked power supply that does not directly take damage does not suffer the attack damage debuff on shield recharging.

I built a 21 K ship with two power and shield supplies. Then sat it in front of pirate station alpha. The one that used to fire the big red nukes at you now they are fire crackers. My shields dropped to 75 when it with the nukes and instantly recharged the rest of the time they sat at 99.8+%

So yep even on a relatively small ship that can be a good bonus.

Just wish we were getting the 80% from them rather than the 47%.

 

[Mork2]

I guess I'll have to do some testing. A shield module docked to a main ship and supplying shields. A logic activated weapon on the main ship firing at a target to simulate shooting at something. Will test the mothership is under combat for primary shield regen then. Use a test ship to test that shield and set it up with logic so I can keep it firing and jump into the shield module and check the regen rate.

If it works I'm going to have to do some large scale redesigning of my titan. Good think I left a lot of spare room. Make one large shield recharger core with some shield storage and a large shield transfer beam. If it really works in combat then its at 47% of transferred at full recharge is far better than 5-10% normal, minus the extra mass for the transfer beam.

 

[GRHayes]

I guess I'll have to do some testing. A shield module docked to a main ship and supplying shields. A logic activated weapon on the main ship firing at a target to simulate shooting at something. Will test the mothership is under combat for primary shield regen then. Use a test ship to test that shield and set it up with logic so I can keep it firing and jump into the shield module and check the regen rate.

If it works I'm going to have to do some large scale redesigning of my titan. Good think I left a lot of spare room. Make one large shield recharger core with some shield storage and a large shield transfer beam. If it really works in combat then its at 47% of transferred at full recharge is far better than 5-10% normal, minus the extra mass for the transfer beam.

The best logic I found for this so far
activator 1-> 4 timers -> not -> activator 2 -> 4 timers -> not -> back to activator 1
Use the two activators to power each of two beams toggling back and forth.

The trick is calculating the number of barrels for shield and power.
Power is fairly easy to calculate from what I seen so far. Just divide the amount of power you can produce safely by 1500 that will give you the amount of barrels you need. The safe bets is don't draw more than 75% or so of the power. Beams are 2 seconds. So there is refresh going on while it is being drawn. You will also need adequate storage of what you intend to use. Test the power system not attached to your main ship to ensure it refills without drawing from the main ship. If your PS is below 50K no storage/capacitors should be added.

Shields well they have a supposed amount you will need storage for Put at least 110% of what you intend to draw. The beam will transfer over 1200 but it cost a good bit more. See my notes above. It seems to be cost less per module the more transferred. You may have to do a bit of testing shooting at a large shield stack on a powered down ship to see how it is working. Its what I have had to do.

Maybe I'll do some more testing and put up a rough chart on it. The more I find out the better I can make my own ships also.

 

[Mork2]

I don't bother with the cannon slaves on the power supply beams. Two alternating power supply beams with 2.5 seconds apart. I need more power storage need a little over the 0.5second power requirement, but I'm firing a beam every 0.5 seconds instead of every 0.1 might reduce lag slightly. Also its slightly more lag tolerant. If you get a lag spike from to much stuff, the individual cores power hit power drain. I think its suppose to be a 2.5second cycle time but now I'm not sure.

Logic is:
Wireless input (any other run power core logic) linked to Button1
Button1 linked to Actuator
Actuator linked to power supply beam1
Actuator linked to Delay1 then chain the delays up to 2.5seconds so 5 of them.
Delay5 linked to power supply beam2
Delay5 linked to Delay6 then chain the delays up to Delay10
Delay10 linked to AND
Wireless input to AND
AND linked to Actuator

With this circuit the power supply beams will alternate till the wireless input is deactivated. Might take up to 5 seconds to stop.
I have an additional circuit added since sometimes when the ship is loaded in on login some of the logic is deactivated. The logic circuit deactivates all linked power cores for 6 seconds then turns on again. Clearing the logic faults from login.

 

[GRHayes]

I don't bother with the cannon slaves on the power supply beams. Two alternating power supply beams with 2.5 seconds apart. I need more power storage need a little over the 0.5second power requirement, but I'm firing a beam every 0.5 seconds instead of every 0.1 might reduce lag slightly. Also its slightly more lag tolerant. If you get a lag spike from to much stuff, the individual cores power hit power drain. I think its suppose to be a 2.5second cycle time but now I'm not sure.

Logic is:
Wireless input (any other run power core logic) linked to Button1
Button1 linked to Actuator
Actuator linked to power supply beam1
Actuator linked to Delay1 then chain the delays up to 2.5seconds so 5 of them.
Delay5 linked to power supply beam2
Delay5 linked to Delay6 then chain the delays up to Delay10
Delay10 linked to AND
Wireless input to AND
AND linked to Actuator

With this circuit the power supply beams will alternate till the wireless input is deactivated. Might take up to 5 seconds to stop.
I have an additional circuit added since sometimes when the ship is loaded in on login some of the logic is deactivated. The logic circuit deactivates all linked power cores for 6 seconds then turns on again. Clearing the logic faults from login.

I don't use the cannons found it seems just more efficient without them.
The power supply beam is 2 seconds long actually a hair just short of 2 seconds. That is why I am using 4 delays.
That way there is almost zero time between the beams. Right now I have a base running 4 967K systems on top of the original system.

I left room and a access port on the current base I am making to adjust the timers. That way if someone isn't on as good a system they can adjust it to help out.

 

[Mork2]

I did some testing of docked shield modules with shield transfer beams. Unfortunately the shield module shield regen is nerfed as under combat either because the mothership is being hit or you are firing the shield transfer beam besides for it to be useful it would have to work under both conditions.

I have a gun setup on a second ship with a logic clock constantly firing it. 50 damage per second. The shields with a regen of 205/sec or so wasn't keeping up so while the camera was saying 205/sec regen that was false. I slowly increased the shield regen to around 1000/sec and it was running pretty even around then. That's around the 5% normal regen rate for in combat.....

I then docked a shield module and transfer beam. The module had a shield capacity of 2.5k and a regen of 2.2k/sec. After firing the shield supply beam it took over 10seconds to regen. I also increased the total shield capacity to over 40k and it wasn't regenerating anywhere close to 2.2k/sec. Though if you looked at the display it said 2200+. So as far as I can tell the shield modules to regen the main shields isn't really viable. Your better off putting more shield rechargers on the main ship.

I'll check if its already posted in the bug tracker if not I'll add it.

 

[GRHayes]

Here is the setup I just got done testing with.

I then test cannon 4cannon+4cannon+4ion effect. Didn't take it down at all jumped up to 8 and it did take it down.
It held even about 6 cannons with a slow loss. That being a pair of 3 cannons = 6 plus the secondary and effect

I used the shield drain to figure out more closely what it was putting out. As you know shield drain looses 50% of the amount it takes
thus if you gain 25 it took 50. It fell even at 22 modules per beam. 25*2*22 = 1100 what shield drain and it kept up.
That though only comes to 550/sec. the beam lasts 2 seconds.

It doesn't seem to take the combat debuff. If it did the speed of regen would pick up greatly after 60 seconds.
So while it may only be getting the 550/sec that would be better than combat limitation.

After which I removed the primary ship and just attached the shields directly to the shield generator without the beams you can see it in the image below. In it lost more than 2 times the shields in the same time frame.

Even though the Docked shield module is only providing 80% of the power it is out performing the direct system. The reason has to be that as a docked module it is not taking the debuff.

In 1 minute having the same system firing at each of them their shields dropped.
The modules system dropped to 87.1% The direct system dropped to 65.1%.

Also since the module doesn't come under attack debuff you aren't stuck with the has a near 1/1 cap vs shield balance you don't have the big 10X power issue to the same extent. Which is why it doesn't drop as fast.
https://starmadepedia.net/wiki/Defense_Systems#Shield_Rules

I added a zip of the module i used below. Feel free to compare it to find the difference between yours and mine.

 

[Mork2]

I think shield recharge modules with shield transfer beam's is not useful is because the shield rechargers on the mothership is more effective.

While under fire the main ship only regenerates at 5-10% normal level I assume the worst 5% which is when your almost fully recharged.

Now while a shield transfer beam can transfer half the shields it consumes. The problem is using it as a constant recharge is it too suffers the same under fire penalty while the while your recharing the main ship being shot. So over the long term for the same mass the idea of using a shield module with a shield transfer beam is not as effective for your shield recharge rate. Your better off just to have more shield rechargers on the main ship. So from the shield regeneration point of view there is no point to try to use shield modules with shield transfer beams to increase shield regeneration. The same thing would apply to shield drain beams as the target your draining has reduced shield regen for under fire.

There is a bug in for getting a under fire penalty while using a shield transfer beam on another ship while both ships aren't using anything else. If the fix for that means that a module docked on a mothership doesn't count as under fire while supply shields to the main ship that is under fire then its possible for shield recharge modules to out recharge normal shield recharge setups.

Either way I'm leaving the room in my titan build for the possibility of 1 happening. Just pull out the shield cap and shield recharge blocks reshape them into the spare space to give me room to put the shield modules in.

For the 10x power use for normal non combat recharge. Its not normally a problem for a combat ship. Normally most ships will have enough power left over from not firing weapons to power the x10 shield recharge. Though it is a good idea to have the ship setup to power that anyway as when you login the ship starts with 0% shields and needs to do the full shield recharge anyway. I think that's also in as a bug as the ship not safing power and shield levels when logging out.

Ignore the shield recharge ratings in the GUI and in build mode ship data for under fire penalty as it doesn't show it. It only displays your full normal recharge rate.