Show total maximum power, and drive power, used by ship.

Post ideas & suggestions you have pertaining to the game here.
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Fleet Admiral
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 2570
Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2010 12:54 am

Since devices are scattered across multiple screens, it can be difficult to figure out how much power your ship can use if everything draws power simultaneously. It would be nice to know total power use to make it easier to avoid installing or running too many devices and cause reactor overload.

Also, since API 29, default drive use varies by ship. It would be nice to know exactly how much power a ship's default drive draws. I just added an Aquila playership, with standard stats, and discovered it used 452 MW for its default drive. (Later, I installed a Titan drive and power used lowered down to 30MW as used by Titan drive.)

Wolfen default drive now draws 4 MW. With total powerUse at (maybe) 10 MW (4 from drive, 3 from dual laser, 2 from shield, 0.5 from launcher, 0.5 for life support), it needs a reactor upgrade almost immediately.
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Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
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NMS
Militia Captain
Militia Captain
Posts: 569
Joined: Tue Mar 05, 2013 8:26 am

I agree with the proposal. But the Wolfen player ship has drivePowerUse= "20". If you've been flying a Wolfen with a 4 MW drive, it's because some mod creator failed to copy that over.
gunship256
Militia Commander
Militia Commander
Posts: 451
Joined: Sat Jul 25, 2015 11:41 pm
Location: repairing armor

Yes, it would be nice to know the total POSSIBLE power draw as well as the CURRENT power draw. I would like to make a mod that disables devices in a custom order when the reactor is close to overloading, but this isn't possible unless I know how much power is drawn at each moment.

It looks like George did give us a way to get drive power use:
You may use ~~(objGetProperty shipObj 'drivePowerUse) to determine the power used.
https://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=8048

EDIT: But I agree that this information should be available to the player and not just to modders.
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Fleet Admiral
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Posts: 2570
Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2010 12:54 am

Current power draw is given by the HUD at the upper left, though as a bar instead of a number. Having current power draw on a dockscreen is probably not helpful since powerUse could spike at any given moment (e.g., patch spider repairs a bunch of armor at once), and many dockscreens do not refresh for updates.

George added property 'drivePowerUse, but it does the casual player no good since none of the standard dockscreens feature this information. (I have updated the custom ship screen in PSD with this stat, for now.)

@ NMS: I found it after the second examination. I totally missed that when reading 1.7 alpha's PlayerShips.xml the first time. (I have updated the PSD overwrite of official playerships.)
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!

Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
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