cedarbridge wrote:1) Probably a refactor of power use and power consumption based on machines per room, lighting used in room, charging devices including borg chargers, (hell, lets make the lights flicker when the chef turns on his microwaves)
2) Set up power exports for engineering that feeds into the station coffers in the vault. This opens space for either engineering to demand that the surplus they're paying into cargo comes back to them in the form of more engine parts, special engineering crates for more, different or bigger engine setups, etc. Could factor later into departmental budgets or economics when and if that ever gets off the ground.
3) Probably a look at how APCs work currently. Whenever engineering fucked up, even before the SM, and station lost power to anything but a power sink, I could just print super power cells at a protolathe and slap them into every APC and keep the station running on pure battery power for hours.
1) Power consumption is already loosely related to actual use by machines. The biggest offender here is cell chargers, which charge the cell at something like 500x (IIRC) the rate they drain the APC. It hasn't been fixed because it would either mean charging cells is either extremely slow or drains the whole room. Working around this by always upgrading the APC first means scientists would either need their APCs to start unlocked or the engineers to cooperate if they want to get anything charged. A full rebalance of relative energy costs could ameliorate the issue, but I doubt solve it.
1b) A system for easing power to lighting briefly when high-powered equipment kicks on on could be pretty entertaining.
2) I don't hate the idea but it would be hard to balance, and the general trend seems to be away from Cargo receiving tons of money for "normal" stuff (removal of mineral and tech export).
3) Power cells from science are not fully-charged when printed anymore, and must be charged via a cell charger (see #1) or by placing them in a charging APC.