Hi,
I'm asking because I'm making a medium-large ship (320, 110, 80) and since rail mass enhancers alone eat 40k e/s I expect to hit the softcap pretty fast once I install other systems.
Do power generators still work with power transfer beams or is the child>parent power transfer automatic now?
I'm thinking about putting two 30*20*20 generators in my ship.
Any advice on how to get the most out of those dimensions?
Some random notes based on my (recent) research on large ship design... Note that none of this applies to small ships.
The problem is thrust - specifically; getting enough power regen to sustain "barely acceptable" manoeuvrability. Because of the cripplingly retarded turn speed of "medium or larger" ships you need to compensate by building ships with a huge amount of thrust, and then adjusting the thrust settings so that it's more like "75% thrust for turning, 25% thrust for lateral movement".
Thrusters have "diminishing returns" - more thrusters on an entity (ship) means worse thruster efficiency and worse "thrust per power per second". To reduce "thrust per power per second", you want to use"docked thrust" and multiple entities/ships; ideally (but not necessarily) balanced across all (so there's the same number of thruster blocks on each docked entity as you have on the mother-ship).
Even with 100 "docked thrust cells" (plus the mother-ship's relatively insignificant built-in thrust) it is impossible to get enough power regeneration for thrust. You must also use docked power generators. You have no choice.
This leads to conclusion #1: You want docked "cells" that provide both power (via. power supply beam) and thrust.
For the power supply beams themselves, with a single power supply beam and no cannon blocks, you get 4 ticks of supplying power, then 6 ticks of nothing (where 1 tick = 0.5 second). This means that (assuming 2.0 million e/sec regen) you generate 10 million e in 5 seconds and have to deliver that 10 million e in 2 seconds (with a "2.5 million e per tick" power supply beam), and you have to store a minimum of 12 million e in power capacitors. This is a bad idea (a lot more blocks for power supply beams and power capacitors than necessary). Also, multiple cells all tend to end up synchronised when you log in; so this causes "lurching" power supply in the mothership.
Using cannons as a secondary slave to the power supply beam is broken. It gives you faster reload and halves the power consumed/supplied per tick, but the additional cannon blocks don't contribute to the power consumed/supplied by the beam at all. The end result is that you need twice as many blocks to deliver the same amount of power.
Instead; put 2 power supply beams on each cell, so that you get 4 ticks of "beam #1", a 1-tick gap, then 4 ticks of "beam #2". In this case you only need to be able to store a minimum of 1 million e in power tanks (enough to cover 1 tick of 0.5 seconds) and you do get an almost constant supply.
I've gone through the maths, and the breakdown for a cell ends up being (approximately):
- 6665 power supply beam blocks, which consume an average of 2.0 million e/sec of power and deliver 1.6 e/sec to the mother-ship
- approximately (it depends on layout) 4200 power generator blocks to achieve about 2.1 million e/sec power regen
- a minimum of 720 power capacitors to store 1 million e (more to cover lag bursts if necessary)
- About 12 blocks of "misc. stuff" (2 power supply beam computers, logic blocks, ship's core, whatever)
- As many thruster blocks as you can.
Without any thrusters, this adds up to around 11600 blocks; which means that 30*20*20 is close to the bare minimum size (nowhere near large enough for an adequate amount of thrust). My cells are 19*55*302 (enough for about 302 thousand thruster blocks, but still nowhere near large enough for ideal thruster block balance).
For the logic; I use "or ->delay block->delay block->delay block->delay block ->delay block->inverter->" where the last delay block is connected to "power supply computer #1" and the inverter is connected to "power supply computer #2".
The other thing I should point out is that jump drive works on the total mass (including all docked entities) and is the second biggest challenge. Scanner/antennas only works on the mother-ship's mass (excluding all docked entities) and usually isn't a problem.
EDIT: Miscounted the delay blocks earlier - you need 5 of them (not 4).
