Equipment and power consumption

Wurmish · Tue Jun 09, 2009 11:29 pm

In my most recent game, I had the pleasure of running very low on fuel in hostile space with the bad luck of no nearby stations and extremely low cash.
Fortunately I found a Corporate Trading post and got some Xenotite rods, AFTER I finally figured out that turning off EVERYTHING really saves power.

But in the course of my stupidity I noticed that weapons et cetera simply being active consumes a certain amount of power. I assume all nonarmor equipment does this (except powered armor of course), but my question is thus - how much power does equipment of X MW take as idle time? E.g. a 30 MW weapon, does it take 3 MW as idle power consumption?

Furthermore, how much power is required when using your thrust? I'm going for about .5 to 2 MW based on my observations.

Just curious.

Wed Jun 10, 2009 10:08 pm

I know adding a drive affects your thrust energy usage, but I don't know if that's in addition to what your default engine does or a replacement.

I think it would be neat if we had an engineering screen that showed the amount of energy being drawn by all the systems. It would be useful, too.

Thu Jun 11, 2009 12:24 am

That actually shouldn't be too hard to do for items, but from a modder's perspective, it would be hard to get the powerusage for all the default systems on the ship (just drive and life support though I think). Unless of course the poweruse is stored somewhere that I don't know about...

Bobby · Thu Jun 11, 2009 12:46 am

an "idle power use" would be a great addition to the ship configuration screen.

I think it would be a good idea for the ship to automatically turn off power to a weapon unless it is currently active(selected by "W"), except for capacator weapons, even then the turret component could be disabled, it would only need power to maintain the capacitor. the same could be applied to armor patchers, if no damage, and missile defense turrets, if no enemy is near, though I would probably want my missile defense on all the time.

Thu Jun 11, 2009 4:33 pm

Bobby wrote:an "idle power use" would be a great addition to the ship configuration screen.

I think it would be a good idea for the ship to automatically turn off power to a weapon unless it is currently active(selected by "W"), except for capacator weapons, even then the turret component could be disabled, it would only need power to maintain the capacitor. the same could be applied to armor patchers, if no damage, and missile defense turrets, if no enemy is near, though I would probably want my missile defense on all the time.

I think of the low power drain of enabled weapons as a kind of standby - beam weapons and rail-gun type weapons having the next shot already charged up in capacitors and ready to go, replacing power leakage as it occurs. I'm not sure what the justification for the power drain on keeping a missile system on standby is, though, unless the missiles are propelled by something provided by the ship reactor. It might be realistic to have a brief charge-up time before a weapon could be made ready if it had been disabled completely on some weapons, but I think the delay involved in having to turn them on is probably sufficient considering the time compression in the game.