Power Management
I’ll post some general power management tips and tricks here.
Tip 1: Suit Charging
At the moment it seems your suit can only be charged from:
- A solar panel during the day
- The power output INSIDE the rover
- The power output in the cantina (possibly also garage, don’t thing I’ve tried)
Charging from batteries / transformers does not work
Tip 2: Extensions
Both batteries and transformers can be extended multiple times. Took me way too long to figure out the “multiple” part.
Tip 3: In Most Cases Low Power = No Power
If your base requires 100 kW and it only gets 99 kW nothing will work. Airlocks won’t automatically open, plants will wither and storage / benches will stop working.
Main Tip: 24h Power And Reduced Transformer Reconfiguring
There are (at least) two ways to add batteries in your grid. On the producer side (solars) or the consumer side (base). When I started I went for consumer side batteries connected straight to my base. This required tinkering whenever I added something. Mid game I grew tired of this and realized I could also put batteries straight after the solars. So much less hazzle. This is what I ended up going for (note that my numbers are from a maxed out electrical tech tree)
A battery with all extensions can hold about 1920 kWh. Assuming 12h darkness this will support 1920 kWh / 20h = 160 kW, so set battery output to 160 kW. To both charge the batteries and provide the output I need (at least) double that to 320 kW from solars during the day.
A medium solar provides 42 kW so 8 of those gives me 336 kW. Close enough with a little extra production capacity for sand storms. I consider this a power production module. Solars -> Transformer -> Battery -> Distribution
My distribution is 2 tiered. Major and minor. The major receives all power from the solar modules and splits it up to my main structures as well as a couple of minor distribution transformers. The reason for the minor ones is that (afaik) you can’t set fractional percentages in the transformers.
To work around this i provide the minor ones with around 100 kW because then I can pretend that I configure the minor ones in kW. The well gets 15% (so 15 kW), the big grinder 20% (so 20 kW), the antenna 4% (so 4 kW) and so on. This makes it easy to reconfigure when adding more power. I just have to keep the minor distribution transformers at at least 100 kW and they will do the rest. Previously I tried to remember that yeah, this one requires X kW and this other Y kW. Nope, always 100
I wanted to post a comment about this article because this guy did things the hard way and if anyone else reads this you’ll be in a world of headache. Im no electrical engineer.. however… you have to look at things as resource production. And that is also sunlight. BY around 630 on the clock to 1830 on the clock, you’ll be a 10 minute interval producing electric beast. That’s 12 hours to collect, store, and utilize power. I dont recommend putting your base altogether in one spot. You want branches. And you want multiple “input” spots. You don’t want to rely one one, as your risk factor of a catastrophic failure greatly increases. The system the author provides in order from solar panels to distribution is limiting in nature. Why? Because of the single output of the battery. Which will lead to needing to create WAY MORE batteries than you really need. Sadly.
So let’s analyze this correctly.
Look at what all the structures are that you can build. And thier power requirement. If you wish to also expand your base over a larger area, this will require tunneling, which will draw even more power. 160 kwh is nothing. You’ll only run a few structures with this. You’ll have to set a goal of what structures you can build first. What their power requirements are. Say, 200 KWH draw. (thats 200 per hour for all 24 hrs) totaling 4,800 KWH to run for 24 hours. SO when you reach this conclusion, you know you need 4,800 KWH to basically run all night, and have another night supplied in case of anything. At 1920 KWH per battery with full extension, thats 2.5 batteries to store backup power this base. So we now know the distribution backwards to the battery installation and now we need to know what we need for input in power. if you run a 200 KWH base, at medium panels, which run 40 KWH but this might vary based on location on mars and altitude, then thats roughly 5 medium solar panels to meet demand and offer 0 charging for reserves. Next you have to think, just how many weather events occur and how often? You can generally count on them in every 3-7 SOLS. So then you pick a goal on how fast you want to be charged and ready for a problem. 1 day? 2 days? 3 or less than 1?? Let’s just say 2 days is safe. By day 3 you want to be ready to go. So next you have a 4800 KWH system that needs to be charged in 48 hrs. Thats 100 KWH Excess of Demand (200) So this system requires at least 3 more solar panels to need the charging goal (Producing 120 KWH Charging from 3x 40 KWH Medium Solar Panels). IF you want to charge fast you’d need 4800 KWH in 24 hrs, or 200 KWH charging. Then again, “doubling” the charging speed and increases the additional medium solar panels to 5. THATS YOUR CHARGING SYSTEM IN A NUTSHELL.
Now we can talk about actually setting up a grid that is effective.
If you put all your inputs in a nusthell, and that shell implodes, you’re out of everything. So you have your resource accumulation (panels) and then you need to allocate those panels simply (via a ECU with multiple inputs via extensions) to then process power to storage (battery) to then distribute. If you connect a battery to a structure your risk of losing power is 100% in a critical system failure. Why? Because this system only has 1 single output. Meaning you’ve connected this to the base grid at one site location and your access point to this power system is from 1 singular port. If your structure connection port is compromised, your stuck at 0.
SO YOU MUST TAKE YOUR BATTERY Being you main power supply for the base, and further connect this to yet ANOTHER ECU. Therefore on the backend, from collecting sunlight, you can actually extend the first ECU up to 6 times at 4 connections per extension meaning you can build one single farm of up to 24 medium solar panels. Thats 24×40 meaning you can have a maximum of 960 KWH OF Power Collection. In 12 hours of sunlight that is 11,520 KWH and that is able to be stored in 6 battery banks connected in series. Why Series? Because batteries are 1 input 1 output. And again, if you only have 1 connection port to this power supply, you risk 100% loss in a critical system failure. So You Connect the last battery chain from series to another ECU, In a totally different location then from collection, (and hopefully not putting all 6 battery banks in one spot) so that 1 meteor can’t wipe out the entire system. AND THEN you may release the access to this power via the ECU which you wont need extensions on really, and already have 4 access ports for distributing all the power that ecu has access to. If you choose 4 different structures all connected together from each other or tunnels, then the risk factor of losing power went from 100% from one connection to 25% overall because the only risk you run at this point is a critical failure of the ECU itself which you can further mitigate by using another partial solar farm setup the same way but divide your full power requirements across the two “solar farms”. So When one goes down, the other is still active. So in the case of running a 200 KWH Base you’d want one solar farm to be setup to collect store and distribute 100 KWH and the other to do the same, and since the inputs are only half, if one should go down, the other should be able to charge and store power twice as fast as the one main system we originally talked about. And you’d want the battery storage to be hold however many hours you want for backup (24 recommended) So each one should be 4800 still. So at full capacity you’re really running 9,600 reserves. So if one doesn’t go down off the grid, you have 48 hours of backup power.
Thanks for reading.
Oh buddy, thank you so much!