internal reactors

[marcus87]

I am currently working on a new ship.

It is planned that it will use internally docked reactors to bust its power regeneration. But I just docked the first reactor and tried the power drain beam.

And it did not work, not one bit of power

Has anyone tried this with the new build?

 

[Jaaskinal]

Unfortunately, as far as I have heard, this system of getting more power on larger ships no longer works. It's good to see you back on the forums, but sad to see a lot of your ships broken.

 

[marcus87]

I had a lot to do, so I had not much time building. But I will of course continuou :D

But if this really does not work anymore than my flagship that was almost finished is now obsolete -.- I will see if I rip the reactor out and fill it with power blocks instead.

 

[Cirdanoth]

Go the powerstorage route, and use the powerdrainers to restore your ship's power reserves from 'power-outposts'.
Pretty much large shielded stations with vast energy reserves and high power-gen.

 

[Claru]

A lot of the 'tricky' things were removed it seems. Not precisely a bad thing, but it does make the change rough on certain designs.

 

[NeonSturm]

I agree Claru.
Can docked ships not make at least 25 per generator instead?

I would like same to apply on turrets too (only 25/generator) to create more strategy in ship building rather than 1 mille dps turrets over the whole hull.

If then power-supply and -drain beams transfer up to 1000 power per block (500 movement in both directions per block), it could be essential for turret-ship-turret power-level equalisations.
* And make docked ships a poor-man power-storage But I don't care about this that much as large weapons need storage in one entity.

I would also like thrusters from docked ships be useful for the ship carrying the docked ships

 

[Trafalgar]

If you need more than 1 million e/s regen to run the ship and all its turrets, it'll be more efficient to give each turret its own power generator system anyways, just to run itself without having to rely on the ship's power.

 

[marcus87]

It is not about the turrets but about the main weapons. Instead of using enormous power storage I preferred many internal reactors to fill my storage again

 

[marcus87]

Go the powerstorage route, and use the powerdrainers to restore your ship's power reserves from 'power-outposts'.
Pretty much large shielded stations with vast energy reserves and high power-gen.

that is possibly but in a battle probably not really doable.

 

[NeonSturm]

that is possibly but in a battle probably not really doable.

With new activator blocks, you can enable drain beams automatically. I have no idea how much they drain or how much of their efficiency is used by only 1 activation each 500ms though.

 

[Trafalgar]

It's not possible to send a constant signal or toggle them instead of pulsing them?

 

[marcus87]

Wait just that I understand this correctly. It is not possible anymore to drain power from internal reactors right?

Then what should I do with the activator blocks? is it just to drain from your enemy?

 

[Trafalgar]

If that was the case, who would be aiming them at the enemy? And if they were being aimed already, why weren't they being fired already?

 

[NeonSturm]

Because you need to hit a reactor or storage block with drains (on supply it is not that important).

That means that you have to kill the enemy shield first - if you can do that, you would coredrill instantly rather than waste time aiming for a power block.
Another problem is that some weapons may draw power before the beams do after an reactor output event.

I don't know how much they drain and if they drain if your storage is already full.

 

[Dragleones]

Since i'm currently building a pretty huge ship, i messed around with drain and supply:

As you already mentioned earlier, the ship can't drain a docked target.
But a docked module can supply power to a ship. With the upcoming automation block. Therefore it might be possible to build automated dockable power generators supplying the ship with power in the upcoming patches.


For now you could build an manuell version consisting of 3 modules:
1. The actual ship
2. Dockable power generators (1 million) with a few million power storage
3. A "collector". A dockable turret or ship with either one or several drain arrays, a huge power storage (preferable the sum of the amount of storage of all docked power generators) and a power supply array.
Would work best with another person controlling the collector, while one person controlls the ship. Said person would just switch constantly between drain and supply to give the ship its power.
Edit: Look this thread for the actual prototype

 

[ltmauve]

Or just use the logic blocks to activate powersupplies on a massive internal battery. Will see how that goes.

 

[marcus87]

that sounds quite cool. And I would love to try this. But I think before I start another ship I wait till these mechanics are implemented and stable.

And many thanks to Dragleones for the useful intel.

 

[Winterhome]

inb4 schema sees this thread and pre-nerfs using activator block supply generators.

 

[Ithirahad]

I don't see why he should nerf this... I actually hate massive ships, believe it or not, but this is a neat trick for powering them that actually kind of makes sense.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

I don't see why he should nerf this... I actually hate massive ships, believe it or not, but this is a neat trick for powering them that actually kind of makes sense.

It's kind of a catch 22, you want your powerdrain beams to be able to hit docked modules but you don't want AMCs or Missiles from your own ship destroying docked ships. Schema would have to program in an exception from the hit protection for powerdrain beams. The original reactors are all broken because the bug that let you blow off your own turrets got fixed.

Honestly if they wanted to specifically program in ways to get around the soft cap, I would think they would just adjust the power equations first. The soft cap is currently the only balancing factor for huge ships, at least until we need shipyards making building larger and larger ships increasingly impractical.