Stacked power systems 100% power transfer

[GRHayes]

The image below is 3 identical power systems stacked on top of each other the cores are just off set.
Each produces 741 e and has a little over 1 million power cap.
The missile system on the top requires 3.1 million power to fire.
The auto cannon system is 200x4x4 x 2

While this will not work for everything if you have a large high power weapon system that needs power rather doing power transfer to the ship you could create a set of stacked power supplies and dock the system to them.
Also rather than useing a dozen docked system each having their own power transfer system. You could use a multitude of stacked systems then do a power transfer off the top system only. This should cut down on issues with running to much logic, also and increase efficiency. Those systems that are docked to it directly will get a 100% power transfer rather than the partial transfer.

 

[GRHayes]

Here is a small version of power. This is 500M long power blocks. 2 per each power module 48 modules.
It generates a bit over 1 million per each one. There are 48 modules in series. Notice it is saying there is 67 million power.
That is the combined capacitance value. The generation value in more on the order of 52.8 or so.

I created rings that go around the power supply. Anything attached to those rings gains full power of the power supply including all generation.
That means if you attach the ships hull, shielding and weapons there you have that entire power supply to work with without any loss.

If you look the starting power supply is in the bottom right corner with the docker sticking out. In truth if you did what I said above you would need to control the ship from that core. However, that core technically doesn't have to be in that location it could be some place else if planned ahead. If you need to use weapons that aren't fired remotely a similar power-supply could also provide power back down to the first level using the power transfer beam. to make sure a capacitive bank is filled.

Also instead of having many small power supplies that are docked building a large one like this and using beam transfer then would allow you to reduce the amount of logic and beam firing thus making it more stable.

it is possible in a single row to get around 1600 per block of power. Add that to using this method to reduce the number of blocks for transfer and so on. Well you can figure out what can be done with that kind of power.

 

[Tunk]

Last I tested power arrangements like this are great for pulse power, but not constant draw when its greater than the reactors generation.

If you empty out a inline reactor it will go into power failure, which will then cascade to the next and so on down the line until bam, mothership starts getting pelted with power demand and you sit there wtfing yourself.

[edit]
Or in other words, to use the generation in a way to make it more efficient than power supply reactors, you need a weapon/device with > 16 second cycle times and enough capacity on each one to hold that amount of power.

 

[Crashmaster]

At only 4 sec cycle time the reactors would be in power failure for 1 sec then charge for 3 sec so 75% reactor efficiency no? I can't remember power supply's efficiency though.

 

[GRHayes]

Last I tested power arrangements like this are great for pulse power, but not constant draw when its greater than the reactors generation.

If you empty out a inline reactor it will go into power failure, which will then cascade to the next and so on down the line until bam, mothership starts getting pelted with power demand and you sit there wtfing yourself.

[edit]
Or in other words, to use the generation in a way to make it more efficient than power supply reactors, you need a weapon/device with > 16 second cycle times and enough capacity on each one to hold that amount of power.

might want to retry them just used it for both missile firing that sure as heck drained all the caps down and then firing the cannons.
In short at least for me it doesn't seem to be an issue any longer. I even doubled the cannons so it would draw it down and provided good feed.

 

[Az14el]

This is more like it, weaving power supplys into your power grid so you have high efficiency face touching reactors just feeding up the line is something thats been on my mind but I just never bothered much with it (still cheaper by weight to put those reactor blocks directly on a turret base or shield injector and skip the supply/cannon slave/capacity/extra docked dinglebob middle men.)

Now that collision detections are a little nicer I might even have to give this a try in favor of regular PSUs, even on something smallish just to see if the consolidation of systems is worth it.

 

[Tunk]

At only 4 sec cycle time the reactors would be in power failure for 1 sec then charge for 3 sec so 75% reactor efficiency no? I can't remember power supply's efficiency though.

Looks like you are right, just rechecked the configs and power failure time is down to 1 second now.
So that makes it good for a lot more things.

 

[Mork2]

You might run into some issues with the multiplayer servers. There is in the server.cfg a setting to limit chain docking in some way. I'm not sure if its implemented. MAX_CHAIN_DOCKING mine is set to 25.

This works pretty well with weapons with low reload times. Just with long reload times you need a large amount of capacitor in each module eg. each 750k e/sec module required to fire a 15second reload weapon will need 11.25mil storage on each module chained.

 

[Batavium]

Perma cloak for all ship sizes firing it's massive turrets while staying cloaked is comming to a server near you real soon! :D

 

[AtraUnam]

You might run into some issues with the multiplayer servers. There is in the server.cfg a setting to limit chain docking in some way. I'm not sure if its implemented. MAX_CHAIN_DOCKING mine is set to 25.

This works pretty well with weapons with low reload times. Just with long reload times you need a large amount of capacitor in each module eg. each 750k e/sec module required to fire a 15second reload weapon will need 11.25mil storage on each module chained.

It theoretically defaults to 25 docks and should default to ON but it doesn't actually do anything.

 

[GRHayes]

I still have some more testing to do. You can see the new very efficient PS built that I am testing.
You can also see the weapons tested on it.
Right now each module on it produces 130K more than it can store a second. The blocks are 898 power blocks producing 1660 power each block. There are 128 docked modules in series.

While the smaller power supply showed me no issues this one does show me some lagg in recharging. It may be that I need to add the full 1.5M caps to each module. I suspect the system drains from caps first then refills after. I also suspect there is a number of sequential things that can happen only before it does other stuff then comes back to it.

Also other issues seem to be going on. The 100x100x10 cannon system fire fine at first then started stuttering. I let the entire system recharge and the stutter continued.

Firing the 113 Me missile drained the system down below half. It would jump up to about 80% or so then rise slowly which made no sense at first. Then I thought about it. Think of it as each power system as a bucket of water filled with a tap. The residual power runs down stream or in this case goes to the far power system restoring as much as it can. This leaves only the lower half of the reactors to start filling and it probably cycles through them the way the current system works. Being there is only one path it probably slows things down.

I may rebuild the system tomorrow to use multiple paths to create the power recharge system. I should be able to create about 16 paths into the upper layer.

 

[Az14el]

I suspect 100 docked generators may be the source of your problem
Can you test it on a smaller design with say 20 1.6-1.8m/s "gens" feeding the main entity?

 

[Mork2]

Just so the others are aware this design isn't using a power supply beam to backfeed power back to the main entity. So cloaking doesn't exactly work. As the main entitiy doesn't have access to all the power regen and that's where the cloaking module would have to be. What it does provide its aggregate power to is the end of the docked chain.

I suspect the limitations your running into is based on the game engine. The same thing happened with the 5th tick of the power supply beam which doesn't happen, which we investigated all those months ago.

The problem with a ship is you need the power on the main entity for cloak, radar jam, thrust and aimable weapons. This would require a power supply beam to backfeed it into the main ship. But it illustrates a way to power AI or logic controlled weapons or anything else that requires power that doesn't have to be directly controlled by pilot on the main body.

I have a large number of fixed forward weapon systems built under the external hull piece each has there own power supply built in. If you needed more than the softcap you could stack fixed power generators to supply the fixed weapon on the end. Another use is I built a mounting plate with 6 hull down turrets with large sections under armour. To pack more damage into a limited area I connected all 6 turrets to a fixed plate with the power generators and power capacity to fire all the turrets on the plate. This allowed me to make the turrets so they were compact and didn't draw power from the main ship. You want to hope the shields don't drop though as one hit on a rail will cause a collision lag fest.

However this would be awesome for the core of a battlestation. All the stuff you normally have to power off the main body doesn't apply. So you can stack the generators then build your battlestation around it.

 

[Madman198237]

The main ship needs to power any and all player-aimed weapons/abilities. That's it. You can then get 2 million energy's worth of constant firepower, while the next shell houses 2mil of its own power and contains thrusters (Mothership using inherit thrust will run just fine with this)
Next shell contains 2 mil's worth of shielding, perhaps, plus capacitance. This is the hull's layer, as well. A shell imbedded in/just beneath the shielding layer should contain power just for turrets. You may need the turret shell to be broken up to adequately supply each turret. That said, nothing but the turrets themselves is exposed to fire unless it has full shielding.

This design does negate your ability to use armor/shield effects, however.

 

[Mork2]

Using docked thrusters doesn't draw power from what the thruster it is built into but from the main entity. I was hoping to get around this as the power requirement for mine was around 13mil e/sec.

The ion shield effect, if place on the main entity, its effectiveness is calculated on based on the mass of that entity and everything chain docked on to it. It also provides its protection should the hit go up the chain to main entity the shield damage reduction is applied. They fixed a bug for it a while back.

Not sure about armour though.

 

[GRHayes]

Using docked thrusters doesn't draw power from what the thruster it is built into but from the main entity. I was hoping to get around this as the power requirement for mine was around 13mil e/sec.

The ion shield effect, if place on the main entity, its effectiveness is calculated on based on the mass of that entity and everything chain docked on to it. It also provides its protection should the hit go up the chain to main entity the shield damage reduction is applied. They fixed a bug for it a while back.

Not sure about armour though.

Ouch, just verified you are right. Ok, so the most this is allowing is building a more efficient power supply but that is even hosed up because the group ungrouping issue I just figured out and filed bug report on.

Pretty much building anything worth a damn is hosed until the ungrouping issue is fixed.
From what I can tell it is the cause for bad performing power supplies, weapons systems, power and shield transfer and more.
Got to wonder how many issues it is causing just hadn't realized till now.

I was thinking putting two of these into a 1Km plus ship. Docking them on a sub frame. Then attach the hull to the power systems.
The only problem is the sub frame would be the control point and because the control point doesn't have its own power then as you just pointed out thrusters wouldn't work.
Can't use enough power transfer modules to dump power back to the sub frame to power it because the grouping - ungrouping issue kills that process.

Shields and so on will draw from whatever they are connected to.