New Power DEV Thread

[beeez]

I'm actually not allowed to place stabilizers if the efficiency is less than 100%. I guess it works if i place them first and then build a reactor, but how do i know how much stabilization i need unless i've got a reactor already?

If i'm placing efficiently, i can get a 5x5 flat panel reactor at the front of my ship, with 4 more sticking out into the "nose" in between my mining modules. Then a 5x5 flat stabilizer panel sits as close as possible, right in front of my engines in the back. The ship itself is 50 meters long and 5 meters wide/high. The only systems are the harvesting beams, up front in the traditional waffle pattern. I can run half of them constantly, or i can alternate them both on cooldown for about 2-3 turns before i'm stopping to refill again. No shields, no other systems - just a box with a layer of thrusters at one end and a 5-deep layer of mining modules at the other. Empty inside except for 2 mining computers, a core, 29 reactor blocks, and 23 stabilizers.

I was also having an issue yesterday trying to load ships with chambers. I logged off with a ship docked to the starter store, and it was gone when i logged back in. Tried to load it from blueprint and the game wouldn't let me. I decided to hold off on experimenting with them until after i've got at least the basic power system figured out.

I think part of it is i don't yet understand what i'm doing with regard to regen, chambers, and stabilization. Does anybody have any tips? Any examples of ships made with the new system? Should i have enough power to run all of my passive systems and 2x my weapons? What's the best approach here?

What benefit is there to increasing reactor level? Or is that meant more as a limiting factor to force larger ships to use more internal space on systems chambers?

I know it's not the stable build yet, and everybody's still boo-hooing over the upcoming change, but i figure i'll be better served working at learning new methods rather than continuing to build ships in a deprecated format.

~~~

Question for the devs which has probably already been asked (i apologize), but is there any reason we can't have multiple small reactors? I think having individual reactors scale up geometrically would incentivize larger ships to lump into one reactor, while smaller ships could stick to a number under the "needs stabilization" level and stack a few of them (scaling linearly by adding each reactor group together) to squeeze more power out of the space without needing to stretch the ship to accommodate stabilizers.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Finally trying out the new power system, and i realize i'm late to the discussion but is anybody else having trouble making reasonably shaped ships? I'm not getting enough power out of the reactor for the size ship i want, but bumping up the size means stretching longer to accommodate stabilizers, which then gives me tons of extra room, which leads to me overexerting my reactor again by putting in more shields or something.

Even if i fill the space with cargo or something, i'm ending up with an extremely long stick of a ship.

Can capacitors be a thing again? I'm fine with outpacing my ship's regen, but my capacity is so low that making a small miner just isn't working out unless i want to crawl through each asteroid. Might help if i had enough energy storage to catch excess in between asteroids?

ALSO! I don't have textures for a lot of the new power stuff, and my options don't save from one run to the next (though i think the latter is most likely a linux bug rather than a power update bug). I'm running dev build 0.200.167

I just got finally to the systems stage of building my Millennium Falcon replica. I wanted a bigger reactor than the Danube since it's much larger and will have three weapons systems, so I built bigger than a min-sized reactor. Naturally, the only place I could put decent stabilizers was in the Falcon's mandibles, and to keep at 100% stabilization with the limited stabilizers I could fit, I had to cut the reactor down a tad.
There's a problem with a reactor system if a mostly-hollow circular ship with a tiny relative-sized reactor far in back can barely fit in sufficient stabilization in stuff that protrudes from the front. If I packed this thing with full systems instead of a cozy interior, the reactor would not be sufficient at all.

... I think having individual reactors scale up geometrically would incentivize larger ships to lump into one reactor, while smaller ships could stick to a number under the "needs stabilization" level and stack a few of them (scaling linearly by adding each reactor group together) to squeeze more power out of the space without needing to stretch the ship to accommodate stabilizers.

The old system had power scale exponentially, it just meant you wanted a big ship (but of course there was an asymptote, so you wanted a ship that was at the limit).
I don't think having scaling like that plus multi-reactor would be beneficial for what they're trying to do, which is to get players to not pack ships full of systems. Really, I think that at the end of the day, the only way it'll ever be non-optimal to in some way pack in systems is to make packed-in systems a combat weakness.

Not a big fan of the stabilizer system. It on the surface should be encouraging ship-building similar to what I'm doing of having ships be oversized for their reactor so that there's a reason to put in stuff like interiors, but a ship like a Millennium Falcon replica isn't really meant to be combat viable and if I had chosen something with a rounder shape, I'd be up a creek without a paddle for power. Plus, you can just have a big stick on the front of your ship with the stabilizers in and that will always be better.

 

[Jojomo]

Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW could you give us a few numbers for your falcon? What dimensions did you use, how much power do you need?

 

[Non]

Without decloaking is a bug.

Oh, nice that I'll at least get the chance to see the ship that one shots me.

 

[Jojomo]

Finally trying out the new power system, and i realize i'm late to the discussion but is anybody else having trouble making reasonably shaped ships? I'm not getting enough power out of the reactor for the size ship i want, but bumping up the size means stretching longer to accommodate stabilizers, which then gives me tons of extra room, which leads to me overexerting my reactor again by putting in more shields or something.

Even if i fill the space with cargo or something, i'm ending up with an extremely long stick of a ship.

Can capacitors be a thing again? I'm fine with outpacing my ship's regen, but my capacity is so low that making a small miner just isn't working out unless i want to crawl through each asteroid. Might help if i had enough energy storage to catch excess in between asteroids?

ALSO! I don't have textures for a lot of the new power stuff, and my options don't save from one run to the next (though i think the latter is most likely a linux bug rather than a power update bug). I'm running dev build 0.200.167

As Dire Venom said, don't place your stabilisers at 100% efficiency distance.
Put them where you want them (within reason), then increase the number of stabilisers until you're getting 100% reactor output.

 

[RB101]

Universal power storage shouldn’t come back in my opinion, as it allows you to mostly mitigate all the downsides of ridiculous alpha damage. Specialised power storage however may be acceptable and only being allowed one speciality per ship, much like chambers, would preserve game balance.

All i seem to see in this forum are kids wanting to build massively op ships without regard for game balance, strategy or other players fun...

 

[Non]

Universal power storage shouldn’t come back in my opinion, as it allows you to mostly mitigate all the downsides of ridiculous alpha damage.

What?

 

[EricBlank]

Cant say i agree with any of that assessment, really. I cant see how power capacity was strictly related to alpha damage, and the new system just allows the weapon to store the power necessary to fire internally, so in terms of the weapon being capable of a degree of damage i dont understand the difference. The big change there is that now you dont need a huge capacitor bank to support a bigger weapon because of the power being stored in the weapon itself, so theoretically the same weapon should perform just as well (if you assume no other balance changes) and you can strip out that power capacitor and replace it with shield capacitors or something.

Speciallized power storage for different systems sounds like an interesting concept.

And while I agree this community can become pretty vitriolic during arguments, i dont think immaturity is strictly the cause of the desire to pack as much power into a ship as possible for its size. Thats just being efficient for dedicated warships, as ridiculous as the extremes to which people will take pursuit of it become.

 

[beeez]

The old system had power scale exponentially, it just meant you wanted a big ship (but of course there was an asymptote, so you wanted a ship that was at the limit).
I don't think having scaling like that plus multi-reactor would be beneficial for what they're trying to do, which is to get players to not pack ships full of systems.

The old system had a soft cap and diminishing gains on power generation, not exponential growth. There was also no downside to building bigger power systems other than said soft cap. You may be thinking of capacitance.

In the current system, having increasing gains in reactor size would be offset somewhat by the need to pack in increasingly more stabilizers, and also (as it seems? unless i'm misjudging) the need to have ever larger chamber sizes to enable chamber functions.

I get that presumably the goal is to make all ships "balanced" in that power is relatively fixed in relation to mass, but currently it seems like i'm unable to build a small ship with enough power to run even a basic set of systems. Perhaps the difficulty extends to larger ships, too. I don't know yet.

But mathematically, having upward scaling reactor strength (and stabilization) would mean that for a large ship, trying to stack mini-reactors would give less net power for the same space taken, while small ships up to a certain size dependent upon minimum "requires stabilizers" size could squeeze out more power without needing to take up a lot of space.

Alternately, they could (and probably will continue to) tweak the stabilizer/reactor specs so that people can build reasonable craft in reasonable shapes.

As Dire Venom said, don't place your stabilisers at 100% efficiency distance.
Put them where you want them (within reason), then increase the number of stabilisers until you're getting 100% reactor output.

Right, but then i'll need to place stabilizers first and reactors later, because the game will not currently allow placement of stabilizers at less than 100% effect.

Not that that's necessarily a problem for me right now, since i'm building only small ships to try to get a feel for the system. It's not a problem to yank a small reactor and put it back in a little bigger after adding stabilizers. However, building a larger ship would require a great deal more pre-planning than i'm used to, and might even necessitate serious redesign late in the building process depending on power demands. I used to be able to set the size of the ship with my reactor, then put up a rough frame, figure out placement of major systems, and shell it all in. Now i'm getting midway through and realizing that i need a bigger reactor, which means i need more stabilizers, which means i need to start erasing ship parts and rebuilding.

Maybe i just haven't yet worked out a process that makes sense to me. Will continue hacking at it.

Universal power storage shouldn’t come back in my opinion, as it allows you to mostly mitigate all the downsides of ridiculous alpha damage. Specialised power storage however may be acceptable and only being allowed one speciality per ship, much like chambers, would preserve game balance.

Perhaps instead of reintroducing ways to abuse power demands, they might eventually massage the requirements for various weapons so that (for example) a miner can still be effective without allowing whatever was OP about other ships.

I'm not sure exactly what that is, because i was still in the mining/warehousing stage of learning the game when i found out the power system was getting scrapped. I didn't want to learn to optimize for something that was temporary, so i took a little break.

What?

I think he was saying that having a gigantic power reserve allows planet killing one-shot weapons. Your regen didn't really matter as long as you could store enough energy to fire your laser once. You could destroy whatever was in front of you, and at that point you were free to take a break and handle cleanup at your leisure.

Or so i've read.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW could you give us a few numbers for your falcon? What dimensions did you use, how much power do you need?

The reactor size I went for generates 2000 e/s (twice that of the Danube, which almost hits its 1000 e/s limit when moving and flying simultaneously). I'm not sure whether it will be enough yet as I haven't yet built the turrets and haven't decided on whether the Falcon needs a shield generator or not. It's probably going to come close, but the big problem is that this is on a ship that is 90% hallways, a "normal" combat-ready ship of this size would definitely need more than twice the Danube's power.

 

[Non]

I think he was saying that having a gigantic power reserve allows planet killing one-shot weapons. Your regen didn't really matter as long as you could store enough energy to fire your laser once. You could destroy whatever was in front of you, and at that point you were free to take a break and handle cleanup at your leisure.

Power reserve is exactly what limits super alpha. In a recharge based system that differentiates between power upkeep and weapon recharge power usage rates, I will have more alpha, because if I can power 3x the guns at upkeep levels as I can at full recharge levels, why shouldn't i just load up on alpha? Any dps weapon would be limited by recharge power usage rate, whereas alpha is limited by upkeep rate, which is much lower, so therefore I can use more guns. (this is assuming there is still a difference between resting and weapon recharge rates.)

 

[Jojomo]

Right, but then i'll need to place stabilizers first and reactors later, because the game will not currently allow placement of stabilizers at less than 100% effect.

???
I'm not in front of SM right now so can't check - is this a bug introduced in a very recent dev build?
There certainly shouldn't be anything stopping you placing your stabilisers closer than 100%.
[doublepost=1510797454,1510796892][/doublepost]

The reactor size I went for generates 2000 e/s (twice that of the Danube, which almost hits its 1000 e/s limit when moving and flying simultaneously). I'm not sure whether it will be enough yet as I haven't yet built the turrets and haven't decided on whether the Falcon needs a shield generator or not. It's probably going to come close, but the big problem is that this is on a ship that is 90% hallways, a "normal" combat-ready ship of this size would definitely need more than twice the Danube's power.

I'm certain you can get plenty more than that.
You didn't mention dimensions, so I'll post this link (which you may have seen before): STAR WARS: The Millennium Falcon
(TLDR: floorplan here, dimensions here)
By far the best MF analysis ever, bar none, whether officially paid for by LucasArts or not.

I have a rough MF hull somewhere (see the image in my sig) I'll see how much power gen I can put in it tonight.
[doublepost=1510798175][/doublepost]

Power reserve is exactly what limits super alpha. In a recharge based system that differentiates between power upkeep and weapon recharge power usage rates, I will have more alpha, because if I can power 3x the guns at upkeep levels as I can at full recharge levels, why shouldn't i just load up on alpha? Any dps weapon would be limited by recharge power usage rate, whereas alpha is limited by upkeep rate, which is much lower, so therefore I can use more guns. (this is assuming there is still a difference between resting and weapon recharge rates.)

I guess the point was that with power storage you might put way more weaponry on your ship than your power generation could keep supplied, because you could charge up slowly beforehand and alpha.
You're right though - if the new system has cheaper upkeep it looks like alpha will still be viable - you can keep large weapons full and ready to fire with a power regen that wouldn't be enough to fire them continuously.

The old system had pretty much no limits though - you could just keep adding more capacity and bigger weapons to the same power gen, and keep increasing your alpha as much as you wanted.
With the new system there will be a limit, which will depend on the ratio between weapon recharge and weapon upkeep costs. If your weapons get too large/numerous you'll need to increase your power gen to be able to upkeep/alpha them. That's an effective improvement over the old power capacity system.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

???
I'm not in front of SM right now so can't check - is this a bug introduced in a very recent dev build?
There certainly shouldn't be anything stopping you placing your stabilisers closer than 100%.
[doublepost=1510797454,1510796892][/doublepost]
I'm certain you can get plenty more than that.
You didn't mention dimensions, so I'll post this link (which you may have seen before): STAR WARS: The Millennium Falcon
By far the best MF analysis ever, bar none, whether officially paid for by LucasArts or not.

I have a rough MF hull somewhere (see the image in my sig) I'll see how much power gen I can put in it tonight.

I had actually forgotten to make it the correct length until now, was focused on the turret over the mandibles. They definitely have more room for stabilizers, but it's kind of a quirk of this design that it has such large forward protrusions. What is a saucer design supposed to do?
Here's it in build mode showing the power setup and the stats (note that all dimensions are shown as 2 meters more than they actually are due to a bug in the dev build). It's not complete, needs more work on the skin, a bottom turret, and I need to finish up the mandibles.

 

[Non]

you could just keep adding more capacity

you'll need to increase your power gen to be able to upkeep/alpha them

Exact same thing basically, either way its adding more mass to power more weapons, why does it matter if its recharge or storage?

I guess the point was that with power storage you might put way more weaponry on your ship than your power generation could keep supplied

I have never seen a competent ship builder do that under current power, however several high level pvp players have independently come up with methods of taking advantage of the recharge system in the manner I suggested. Lets math. So say I want to power a 200k bbi array, in current power that is 300 mil power to fire, and to fire every 15 seconds reliably I need 20 mil e/s. Now I'm not familiar with the numbers in the new system yet, so I can only use a variable. Lets say I need x recharge to run that weapon continuously in the same manner as the old power weapon array I just described. The last dev build version I played (quite a few builds ago, I'd expect the difference to be less extreme now) had like a 1:3 ratio of upkeep:full recharge, so I can add 400k more bbi (40k mass) and power it fine for alpha and be stable at upkeep levels. If I want to do that in current power, I have to add not only the 400k bbi, but also another 600 million power storage, a pretty considerable amount of extra mass (roughly an extra 32k). You are saying that the capacity system is worse than the new system, but to get the same initial alpha (the extra 400k bbi) with the same sustained alpha afterwards (the 200k we started with), I need 40k extra mass in new power and 72k extra mass in current power, there is a big fucking difference there, new power is possibly the most alpha favoring a dev could think of.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Exact same thing basically, either way its adding more mass to power more weapons, why does it matter if its recharge or storage?

I have never seen a competent ship builder do that under current power, however several high level pvp players have independently come up with methods of taking advantage of the recharge system in the manner I suggested. Lets math. So say I want to power a 200k bbi array, in current power that is 300 mil power to fire, and to fire every 15 seconds reliably I need 20 mil e/s. Now I'm not familiar with the numbers in the new system yet, so I can only use a variable. Lets say I need x recharge to run that weapon continuously in the same manner as the old power weapon array I just described. The last dev build version I played (quite a few builds ago, I'd expect the difference to be less extreme now) had like a 1:3 ratio of upkeep:full recharge, so I can add 400k more bbi (40k mass) and power it fine for alpha and be stable at upkeep levels. If I want to do that in current power, I have to add not only the 400k bbi, but also another 600 million power storage, a pretty considerable amount of extra mass (roughly an extra 32k). You are saying that the capacity system is worse than the new system, but to get the same initial alpha (the extra 400k bbi) with the same sustained alpha afterwards (the 200k we started with), I need 40k extra mass in new power and 72k extra mass in current power, there is a big fucking difference there, new power is possibly the most alpha favoring a dev could think of.

This is an aspect I'd love to test at some point, but it's fairly obvious as a problem and the test builds would be really quite boring as basically just massive guns.
I think the ideal build is one big max alpha weapon (probably a giant supermissile spam specifically) to strip a target's shields, then some spammy stuff (cannon-cannons probably) that perfectly matches power usage to your regen to drill the reactors or stabilizers out of the target.

 

[beeez]

???
I'm not in front of SM right now so can't check - is this a bug introduced in a very recent dev build?
There certainly shouldn't be anything stopping you placing your stabilisers closer than 100%.

Maybe it's another bug specific to the linux version?

I'm not able to place any stabilizers at less than 100% ever, which includes when there are no reactors present. Right now, redesign of power system means deleting reactor blocks (leaving at least one) until i'm able to place stabilizers where i want at 100% - and then going back in to re-add the reactor blocks.

So is my inability to load chambers with set specifications (whether from blueprint or entering saved worlds) also specific to me? I just assumed it was broken for now.

 

[Jojomo]

Maybe it's another bug specific to the linux version?

I'm not able to place any stabilizers at less than 100% ever, which includes when there are no reactors present. Right now, redesign of power system means deleting reactor blocks (leaving at least one) until i'm able to place stabilizers where i want at 100% - and then going back in to re-add the reactor blocks.

So is my inability to load chambers with set specifications (whether from blueprint or entering saved worlds) also specific to me? I just assumed it was broken for now.

I use Linux too... Haven't seen this problem.

EDIT: confirmed that there's no problem for me, 200.168, linux.
[doublepost=1510809810,1510808906][/doublepost]

Exact same thing basically, either way its adding more mass to power more weapons, why does it matter if its recharge or storage?

I have never seen a competent ship builder do that under current power, however several high level pvp players have independently come up with methods of taking advantage of the recharge system in the manner I suggested. Lets math. So say I want to power a 200k bbi array, in current power that is 300 mil power to fire, and to fire every 15 seconds reliably I need 20 mil e/s. Now I'm not familiar with the numbers in the new system yet, so I can only use a variable. Lets say I need x recharge to run that weapon continuously in the same manner as the old power weapon array I just described. The last dev build version I played (quite a few builds ago, I'd expect the difference to be less extreme now) had like a 1:3 ratio of upkeep:full recharge, so I can add 400k more bbi (40k mass) and power it fine for alpha and be stable at upkeep levels. If I want to do that in current power, I have to add not only the 400k bbi, but also another 600 million power storage, a pretty considerable amount of extra mass (roughly an extra 32k). You are saying that the capacity system is worse than the new system, but to get the same initial alpha (the extra 400k bbi) with the same sustained alpha afterwards (the 200k we started with), I need 40k extra mass in new power and 72k extra mass in current power, there is a big fucking difference there, new power is possibly the most alpha favoring a dev could think of.

It's a valid point, but you can also think about it like this: under the old system you could drop your ship's power to 1 e/s and still alpha fire the weapon.
Under the new system anything under 6.67 mil e/s (assuming the same 1:3 ratio) won't be able to alpha fire that weapon.
I don't know if that's the point of removing energy storage, or if there even is a point, but if I had to guess why, that's what I'd guess.

 

[Jojomo]

I had actually forgotten to make it the correct length until now, was focused on the turret over the mandibles. They definitely have more room for stabilizers, but it's kind of a quirk of this design that it has such large forward protrusions. What is a saucer design supposed to do?
Here's it in build mode showing the power setup and the stats (note that all dimensions are shown as 2 meters more than they actually are due to a bug in the dev build). It's not complete, needs more work on the skin, a bottom turret, and I need to finish up the mandibles.

I had a play with my hull. It's larger than yours: 33m diameter (27m from the link I posted above, plus 6m allowance for having to build with 1m thick walls at ring corridor inner and outer walls, and external ships side, x2). Hull is 8m deep at centre, 4m deep at edges (roof + floor + 2m walking space), mandibles 2m deep.

Admittedly a bit easier for me to generate more power than you with my dimensions....

This one has a central reactor, 5000 e/s. Stabilisers are mostly in the mandibles (would be slabbed over in a finished build), but stabilisers at outer edge of saucer are viable too (I have a few there). I put thrusters in just to check that a 2.5 tmr would be reasonably achievable.




This next one is more extreme: 10,000 e/s, reactor aft just inside the outer layer of thrusters, stabilisers fwd, none in the corridors or the main room we see in the movie.
I haven't put thrusters in here - will be a tight squeeze but still possible without encroaching into corridors, and space left over for weapons etc. This one wouldn't really be viable for carrying cargo. Systems would fill cargo space, but corridors would be left open.


If you were willing to combine the two designs (5000 e/s from the first with reactor located aft from the second) you could save a lot of space and mass, if that was desirable.



EDIT: Below's a quick mock-up of the "correct" size: 27m diameter, 35m long. Pretty easy to get 5000 e/s here with an aft reactor. Could get more with a more extreme power system.

 

[Snowtiger256]

Well, I have an update I actually want to do now. Yesterday, I started tinkering with scaling down the salvager array I used in my main miner, and after a few trials I found out that I could scale down the array to about 20% of it's size, and not lose any mining efficiency. So, with this in mind, I actually spawned in my Nexus, and started pulling out systems to rebuild them.

After taking a few hours to rebuild the array and other primary systems, I ended up with the systems taking approximately 40% of all available hull space, and most of the functionality of the systems was the same (Mining array runs well, still eats things at a pace of 25,7 blocks/second, uses about 20% of the power it used to(200k of new power instead of 800k), weapons are somewhat weaker, but still able to punch out isanths in mere seconds).

I am very happy about this, because this is exactly what I wanted, to be able to continue using and tinkering with a ship that has been my favorite miner since I built it a few months ago.

Here's a screenshot from within the hull, I went in and added a mining bonus chamber, and a couple of FTL chambers (Power Efficiency 2, Jump Charge Time 2) this morning, and I'm thinking of rearranging the interior, because I have more room for it...

 

[beeez]

I use Linux too... Haven't seen this problem.

EDIT: confirmed that there's no problem for me, 200.168, linux.

Do your settings save between loads? I always have to toggle fullscreen off then back on to get full screen mode. Every time i start up. Changed keyboard settings are also forgotten between instances opening the app.

Are you playing via Steam? I gotta narrow down what's causing this issue for me, or maybe i should look around for a bugs/support subforum. I was willing to tolerate them when i figured they were just bugs that would be ironed out in the long run, but if i don't have to suffer these inconveniences, i'm suddenly eager to be rid of them.