Uses for Power

[lutrin]

Currently, pure roundstart SM + Solars is enough to pretty much completely cover the station's power needs. The only incentive to try and get other power options online/start running riskier SM setups is curiosity, bragging rights, and boredom.

I'd be interested in seeing some "power sinks" added into the game, that give some powerful effect but use enough power that you either need a souped-up generation setup or you'll have rolling blackouts stationwide.

Gas miners are kinda like this in that the give a useful effect (infinite gas) at the cost of power but they're obviously far from an optional megaproject.

The main ways you might go about doing this would be either adding decent "utility" items to various departments with high power drain/increasing power drain of certain existing machines, and/or having massive, high impact structures that themselves require massive amounts of power (that may or may not be built at roundstart)

Thoughts?

[Kel-the-Oblivious]

Food fabricators: Far too often Botany or the Kitchen do fuck all, and the crew is forced to rely on expensive junkfood to sustain them through the day. Add a not!Replicator research project that is a MASSIVE power drain, but allows you to produce any food item in the game. Have the cost in energy just be based off how much stuff is in the food item. No Gatfruit or Cherry Bombs, you get a meal, not the bits to make a meal.

Kinda makes botany useless, but when was the last time any of you saw a botanist grow actual food?

Particle Accelerator: Because sometimes all the miners die at round start and no one has any materials for anything. Use the particle Accelerator to make precious minerals out of a FUCKTON of power and a lesser material. Have the "This to this" list be based off the mineral worth from the ORM. Want to go from iron to bluespace crystal? This is gonna take a LONG time and a LOT of power, but it lets people still have materials to make toys with. It makes miners useless? Nah, it's enough for a slow, pitiful trickle of materials, instead of the metric fucktons that a skilled miner can bring in.

Security Hologram: Ever been an AI, and just had to watch as someone got beat to death? Well no longer! Upgrade hologram projectors to give you a hardlight avatar, complete with shocking touch to disable assholes. Costs a powersink worth of power to remain operational.

Anomaly Generator: Doesn't actually generate anomalies, but causes RNGesus to get his ass moving, and causes a fuckton of random events to happen as long as it's online. Make the station the Zone, Stalker.

[BeeSting12]

Add the power transmission laser.

[Cobby]

I'm closing all PRs that reward excess power usage when power isn't balanced to begin with.

[CDranzer]

Excess Power -> More Money For Cargo Somehow?

[cedarbridge]

Excess Power -> More Money For Cargo Somehow?

Why would engineering work harder for cargo to get more toys?

[SpaceManiac]

I'm closing all PRs that reward excess power usage when power isn't balanced to begin with.

There's literal "free power from nothing" exploits in the code right now, fixing them requires reworks to the APC/SMES relationship.

[MisterPerson]

There's all kinds of problems with power distribution and generation. I'mma go over a few of them off the top of my head.

a) Power needs are determined by how much stuff there is. Thus larger maps take more power than smaller ones. This makes balancing power generation vs usage difficult.
b) Changing how much power common stuff uses has wild changes on power needs. There's a lot of lights on the station, so if you double how much power they all need, you change how much power the station needs by quite a bit even if each light is only going from 50w to 100w. This makes balancing power generation vs usage difficult.
c) Wires exist only to be sabotaged. There's nothing interesting engineers can do with wires themselves except repair problems. This makes wires boring, uninteractive, and frankly unnecessary.
d) APC's have such large buffers that there's a long delay between the act of sabotage and power actually going out. This makes sabotage pointless when it could be powerful and fun.
e) Because they're area based, APC's are extremely fiddly to replace if they've been moved to maint like on Box. And they require adding new areas if you're building new rooms, which would ideally not be necessary. This makes construction needlessly complicated for no benefit.
f) The whole concept of "knotted wires" is stupid and confusing to begin with. This makes construction and repairs much more complicated than necessary without adding anything in return.
g) The way SMES input-output works is extremely unintuitive. This makes them needlessly complicated for no benefit. Off the top of your head, is the knotted wire the input or the output?
h) SMES are prone to power duplication bugs. This obviously is an issue with power generation vs usage balance.
i) SMES themselves ALSO have very large storage capacity, which makes sabotage even worse.
j) Setting up every single engine is boring because you just have to follow a checklist. Why do we make people do it?
k) Somehow setting up the solars is even more boring and less rewarding to boot.
l) Wiring is incredibly shitty and boring to the point there's a tool to make it easier. Nobody thought to just... make wiring not suck?
m) Power monitering is horrendous. You know why nobody notices power duplication bugs? Because the readout of power input-output doesn't make it clear that duplication is happening, that's why. Better access to information would enable players to have fun with more complex power interactions.

I agree with Cobby that powernets, APC's, SMES, wires, and everything else about power is terrible and needs to be rethought before we can do anything interesting with power. There's lots of fun things we could do with power though. I mean jeez, just look at FTL or literally any spaceship game from basically ever. Do you divert power from the shields to your weapons? That leaves you vulnerable but you do more damage. Interesting decision making. And our system has none of it.

[Tlaltecuhtli]

make high tier machines consume exponential amount of power instead of decreasing it

[Farquaar]

make high tier machines consume exponential amount of power instead of decreasing it

Would definitely be interesting, though power would have to be balanced properly for this to have any real meaning.
I'd also hate to see neglected workplaces like the kitchen not getting upgrades because some dillweed Research Director is too paranoid about power consumption to boost anything outside science and medbay.

[cedarbridge]

make high tier machines consume exponential amount of power instead of decreasing it

This would make more sense if power production also had a ramping stage through the shift but it doesn't. Engineering produces a steady amount of juice from the second the engine is on until the second it blows up. The only way you get more is optimizing the system (if it wasn't already done at setup) or building more engines. Preemptively the station is designed in a way where /the engine/ is the station's engine and additional sources wouldn't be needed.

[CDranzer]

c) Wires exist only to be sabotaged. There's nothing interesting engineers can do with wires themselves except repair problems. This makes wires boring, uninteractive, and frankly unnecessary.

I'm gonna have to pick on you for this one. There's a ton of stuff in SS13 that only really exists so that it can be fucked with. That's kind of the point. Like, you could make it so that every machine draws from and feeds into a single universal power source, with each device having its own internal power storage. It wouldn't be hard. Fuck, it'd probably be simpler and easier from an implementation standpoint. But the same could be said about atmospherics, or disposals, or telecoms, or the ore silo, or literally any other form of infrastructure you care to name. That's the whole point of infrastructure. It's either invisible or it's broken.

You're right about pretty much everything else, though. Power probably needs an overhaul.

[MisterPerson]

I should probably be clear, I'm not specifically saying "lel get rid of wires", I just think Engineering's focus should be less on keeping the wiring setup fixed or starting the engine and more on figuring out how to distribute a limited power supply, imo.

And hey, if wires stick around as the way to transfer power around without any additions or anything, that wouldn't be the end of the world. Just as long as Engineering gets the tools necessary to play around with power, the wires themselves don't really matter.

[Tlaltecuhtli]

there are ways to improve power production out of roundstart, like putting more emitters, build more solars(lol), switching to o2/co2 sme, building a teg or singlo, tesla which are all easly possible for enginneers

[Screemonster]

Security Hologram: Ever been an AI, and just had to watch as someone got beat to death? Well no longer! Upgrade hologram projectors to give you a hardlight avatar, complete with shocking touch to disable assholes. Costs a powersink worth of power to remain operational.

ngl this would be a fun thing to run into in a lavaland ruin, something like the sierra madre holograms that are completely unkillable unless you break through to the projector

[terranaut]

Security Hologram: Ever been an AI, and just had to watch as someone got beat to death? Well no longer! Upgrade hologram projectors to give you a hardlight avatar, complete with shocking touch to disable assholes. Costs a powersink worth of power to remain operational.

Yes, gimme!
Holopads have lasers, right? Put that shit in for T4 lasers or something, and upgrade the stun to give a nasty burn when you're on Malf and hack your holopads for some processing time