Alternative Power: Battery Cells

[Viridis00]

Thread title says it all. The idea is an alternative to power reactors and mostly to help small craft gain an edge with an alternative weakness to it.

Battery cell specs:

• Cannot be used in conjunction with a power reactor on a single entity. (Lore-wise, let's just say the two technologies are incompatible with each other. )
  
• Provide a flat power generation rate for each grouping (let's use 10000e/sec as the base)
• Additional groupings add additional power generation, but the amount added on additional groups is halved after every power of two after two groupings. For example, if the base flat generation for a single group is 10000e/sec, 2 groupings give 20000e/sec, 4 groupings give 30000e/sec, 8 groupings give 40000e/sec, etc.
  
• Additional blocks in a single group add Operational Time to the max operational time of the battery, not additional power generation.
• Each additional block in a group adds more time, but time added is calculated based on a logarithm so eventually adding more blocks will be useless. I think the maximum soft-limit would be somewhere around a half hour for the strongest of batteries.
  
• Total Operational time is the average of all the Operational Times of each group so each group must be the same size to maximize Time per Group.
• When Operational Time runs out, power generation becomes zero, and unless you have Power Capacitors all power is dissipated slowly at a random rate in addition to whatever is being used by your systems.
  
• When you are left with 1/10th of your time, the ship will warn you with a message next to the power bar.
  
• Depletion of Operational Time turns the blocks from Battery Cell to Battery Cell (Depleted). Battery data would have to be unique to the ship entity itself due to the logarithmic nature of additional cells. Adding more battery cells to a group while they are active simply increases additional time, but adding cells to a depleted group will not increase the total time left. Removing blocks from an active group will yield depleted batteries until Total Operational Time is equal to Remaining Operational Time. For fractions of time left that is less than equal to the cell taken but not zero, an active cell is yielded for error handling purposes.
  
• Recharging can be done when docked to an entity with power reactors, but not from entities docked to the ship itself. Time to recharge will depend on how large the group is. Or, depleted blocks in the inventory can be recharged as an astronaut by an NPC for credits possibly.

This idea theoretically would result in more short range player fighters that would be reliant on a mothership, A power system that benefits small player ships by leaving more space for other systems but cannot be abused by larger ships with powerful weapons nor for small drones that would have a very limited operating time or only be useful for burst attacks, more player options, and a useful credit sink.

Thoughts? Criticisms? Additional input? Though the idea may have its flaws, I thought it would be a waste not to share the idea with the forum since it might possibly have some potential.

 

[CyberTao]

Docked Reactors, probably the biggest issue with this idea. The next update more or less eliminates the minimum docking space, so they could be tiny, and they would also always be docked, thus giving them 'infinite' operational time in theory. High power output for a small mass is basically the goal of all docked reactors, and this fills that pretty well, making them incredibly overpowered as a reactor for a large ship (which could potentially hold many).

The only other issue is with my experience in a fighter. Fighter versus Fighter? 30 mins is nothing; especially with Jamming and multiple fighters. Pre-weapons update, I had a 2 hour long fighter battle, ending only because I conceded (Minimal damage, but hands were cramping). There was also an old VT fighter practice which lasted over an hour, and a recent 3-way fighter/corvette showdown that I had on NFD server that lasted ~40mins as well (bit of a lag caused the final blow to be premature).

Fighter battles are long as hell. "30mins" makes sense for scouting and running around I guess, but in actual combat (where the extra power is needed), it doesn't sound like a very long time to me, at least in fighter or small scale battles. With larger ships, you'd probably die due to Missile/Beam turrets and their abusive AI.

 

[Viridis00]

Docked Reactors, probably the biggest issue with this idea.

My wording was a little ambiguous I guess, but the intention is for the battery recharge to occur only when the ship with the batteries is the entity being docked, not when the entity with the battery has entities with reactors docked to it. I think that the game can distinguish between the two.

this fills that pretty well, making them incredibly overpowered as a reactor for a large ship (which could potentially hold many).

The more groups one would have to raise the power, the less potential for operating time it would have since under this system, lots of small groups is lots of power with low operating time, small groups of large cells is not a lot of power compared to what you can get with reactors for the same space and with no time limits to boot. Big ships would have no reason what so ever to use them, but corvettes and small cruisers could benefit.

30 mins is nothing; especially with Jamming and multiple fighters.

Yeah, ,just a ballpark I threw out. If the idea were to be entertained seriously I think players with more experience than me could better determine the actual values on time limit.

 

[Megacrafter127]

My wording was a little ambiguous I guess, but the intention is for the battery recharge to occur only when the ship with the batteries is the entity being docked, not when the entity with the battery has entities with reactors docked to it. I think that the game can distinguish between the two.

I think cybertao was referring to have the docked "reactors" be made out of batteries, and to have the ship use standard power-reactors.

 

[CyberTao]

I do a lot of playing with docked modules and the like, I've even moved to using main weapon systems as separate docked ships to gain the power efficiency and dodge the multiple output nerf (traded for weaker defenses). As such, things like this are of much interest to me. A ship that is merely a Gun with a very powerful reactor setup would be ideal, but a block that is outright very efficient and powerful seems a bit overpowered.

When you extent that to a docked reactor using said system to power a large ship, the problem is just more obvious.

 

[NeonSturm]

The problem I see is:

Cloaking currently is the greatest power-sink
Followed by jamming + charging jump + maybe passive effects
Then weapons followed by thrusters​

With your suggestion both cloaking and using weapons or ion-modules to boost shields might be too easily OP and completely make reactors obsolete.
Also : How would you charge depleted cells again? Replacing blocks is dumb.


Personally, I would like some kind of power-storage which stores enormous amounts of power and is more efficient than reactors or current capacitors in power/second and total-capacity but worse in the other (gives not as much as capacitors/second, no infinite regeneration).


Something like operational time is stupid, if you can't extend it by not consuming as much power.

 

[jayman38]

To me, this suggestion simply sounds like using capacitors instead of power generator blocks, and then giving a huge boost to grouping bonuses.

I see it being workable if the grouping bonus multiplier is inversely proportional to ship mass. That way, you have gigantic, logarithmic grouping bonuses for fighter-class ships, and conventional grouping bonuses for capital ships.