It looks like fuel is taken from the cap/fuel tank based on current usage. It is done as a separate step from the calculation of how much energy to put into the cap based on the current input from the panels. Once the cap has plenty of energy this is not an issue... however I think this is causing a lot of the strange behavior people sometimes seeing with fuel being used in stead of cap energy - especial y on newly placed bases or newly converted bases. Make it all one step. Its a little bit more complicated but not much. edit: So i don't have much to do... playing around in creative and it looks like the power in the caps is lost every so often? Possible every time i spawn a new base. or maybe that's just coincidence. edit 2: so I just sat here in creative in space doing NOTHING (while i did chores) and at somepoint the energy in the cap reset back to zero.... and its not just one base, its all of them.
Bring back the ability to place more then 20 solar panels in falsee mode really a game killer when you guys did that 20 solar panels is restricting for large bases
No I was looking into it is because I was seeing strange things happening survival . Sorry about the slow response. I am on vacation.
I've noticed the same thing in creative mode. Since the release of 7.5 I've been sticking with creative mode till I get a somewhat large base just right with Solar panels and all the trimmings. But yesterday I noticed that fuel was being drained, even though the statistics tab claimed my Solar panels were producing 480 kW with a consumption of 317 kW. Once I removed all Solar panels and placed them again they started working normally again for a while. I didn't notice any drain again till after I logged out and back in again, at which point the panels weren't working again even though the statistics claimed them to be. The only thing of note I did that day was spawn a blueprint of a ship to explore it, and then use the "Destroy #" command to remove it again. After that I manually constructed a second base (Still in space) to have a ready blueprint. That base had Solar panels also but seemed to work fine. After saving the bluepring I destroyed the base, and went back to the big base and at that time the panels weren't working again. Note I made an effort of staying out of the line of site between the star and the big base when constructing the second base. I think it may be linked to either having multiple cores/capacitors in the playfield, or it has something to do with the spawn blueprint function or the destroy command.
Noticed a couple things in the Control Panel (CP) info & wording that might warrant a look; CP Main: 'Battery' displays a Percentage along with the tank cylinder filled graphic. Imo displaying X kWh (kilowatt hours) would be more useful. Also, the graphic already does a nice job for a quick, scan the gauges, is everything okay? check. -Useful if say a BA's base load is 50 kW, and less than average Solar production. If Battery showed 600 kWh you'd know you could run a constructor for at least an hour and still have a couple of in-game days base load reserve. -And if in the future we'll be able to have various numbers of Batterys then kWh is definative while percentage is relative. CP Main: INFO pane: "Current Output" is shown. For the same value in the Statistics tab, POWER/FUEL pane uses "Max Output"; which is clearer than 'current'. CP Main & Statistics: use of "Consumption". Not inaccurate but either "Current Load" or "Current Draw" would be more common. CP Main: POWER pane: don't have a clear idea but I'd prefer to see details of how many kWs generators are putting out, seperate from solar, and how much charge is going into, or out of, the battery. All the info is available or computable but it's a bit scattered. Beyond the scope of this thread, but since I was looking at it... Personally I'd prefer the CP to display number values rather than percentages, like the lower left Player stats for HP/Food/Stamina/Air where the leftmost number is current and the rightmost is maximum. So Hitpoints might show top -> 2,000,000 and bottom -> 1,999,900 instead of 99%. Helpful too since I'm not concerned about 100 HPs but 99% could also mean there's 20,000 HPs damage.
Honestly, I didn't read this thread, but decided to leave my suggestion here. Sorry if I'm repeating someone, but, why can't we have solar energy on CVs? Lots of great sci-fi vessels use Solar energy. It's clear in my mind the image of that great industrial / colony ships flaunting that great solar sails or array of panels. And the solar appartus is already ingame, so... please, enable its use on CVs too Thanks!
Solar panels are at present huge practical looking devices. They take up a lot of area... and eye-sight. I'd really like some different shapes, especially when they are added to CVs and/or SVs. Some circular shaped models (1 X 2 X 2) or (1 X 3 X 3) Oval (1 X 3 X 2) Curved panels (1 X 3 X 2) - currently possible today by the way. These would not be airtight. Another idea is to be able to make more advanced Panels that use more advanced materials and tech (rather than replicating what we can do in real life), perhaps later in the game.... maybe using many of the window shapes and sizes and sort of see through (OK that's CPU intensive but having really beautiful customizable solar sails on ships would be nice).
I checked it out in survival mode just now (7.5.8) default scenario. It does not occur on planets. It DOES occur in space - or at LEAST in omicron space. Given the timing I'd say its due to something like the Day/night event - that should have no effect in space...
Difficult to know what kind of panels that are best to use, and directions to place them. No batteries to add, or put in several capacitors. Restricted amount of panels. No way to take out energy surplus (anymore). At lest could be able to "link" (close enough) generators for Oxygen, Hydrogen, Water, etc.
Couple questions regarding solar panels and such... 1) Does the Solar Capacitor actually act as a generator? It seems that if you slap a capacitor and a fuel tank into a base, it'll consume fuel (I think...) and output 5Mw of power. 2) Does solar power override generator power? In other words, if I can supply my entire base on solar power during the day, does the generator still consume fuel, or does it only start doing that once the generator has to supply power? Thx!
The solar capacitor does act like a generator, with a maximum output of 5MW, and is first in the priority list for supplying power; thus, conventional generators will only consume fuel when the solar capacitor is empty.
Can the solar capacitor generator thingy also run off of conventional generator fuel? In other words, for backup power, we don't actually need to have a conventional generator in addition to the solar capacitor (generator), just a fuel tank? Also, in the control panel for Solar, I see current output and average output, and below it is consumption. There is no indication that it's current consumption or average consumption. To add to the confusion, as long as the consumption is below the average output, power left will display infinite, which isn't true.
No; you need both a fuel tank and a conventional generator to provide backup power. The solar capacitor should be considered a battery rather than a kind of generator (and shouldn't really have solar in the name either, in my opinion). Correct. All we get right now is the total consumption of the structure, rather than a breakdown of where that power is coming from. The time remaining indicator assumes the current load is continuous (which is a decent assumption most of the time), and thus indicates infinite time when the battery system is charging. I agree it takes a bit of getting used to, but I haven't managed to come up with a better way of representing this yet. Perhaps the indicator could show the time remaining assuming the solar panels stopped delivering power right then? But then it would be harder to gauge how many panels you need to store enough energy to keep your base going through the night. . . .
Hmmm... I get infinite power displayed anytime consumption is less than average output, even at night when current output is 0 and batteries are depleting. I see what you're saying though, I guess there would have to be some sort of projection, but yeah, I don't know how you'd do that either.
Oddly enough, in creative I spawned a starter base I wanted to modify, remove the generator, added the solar capacitor instead of the generator, and suddenly the base had power. Power remaining actually indicated a time, and removing fuel from the fuel tanks (that I hadn't removed yet) actually decreased this time, so I'm guessing that's either a bug, or it does run straight off Promethium if there's no solar panels present.
Personally I would prefer that; or rather I guess that power remaining should be the time I can run things off the battery (since in essence solar panels charge the battery up to it's full capacity, and then it drains when power need exceeds power input); keeps it in line with power remaining display for normally fueled/powered structures (they also indicate time to depletion). Treat the whole thing as an auto-fueling fuel tank I guess. My random 2 cents
That's probably definitely a bug; the solar capacitor seems to have been modified from a conventional generator, so it's possible that a line or two of code giving it the ability to draw from fuel tanks got left in somehow.
Okay, I've made a note to report it as a bug - unless you can do that, I can't do it until tomorrow. (Although I'm tempted to say make it a feature, not a bug... )
I think other issues need to be addressed before the panels can be effectively balanced. I did some experimenting today in creative mode, 7.5.9 stable; Omicron orbit. Here are a couple notes: At +510 Kwh over consumption, the battery charged +1% @every 1 min 45 seconds. That means it would take 9 game days to fully charge. Since the capacitor holds 800 "fuel", 500Kwh seems to translate to about 1 "fuel" every 13 seconds I placed the station flat to the orbital reference plane pretty much over the equator. Using setrotation, I determined that peak efficiency occurred when the flat panels were aimed about 10 degrees starboard yaw of the sun's visual location When placed fresh, panels began producing after about 20 seconds; when the station was spawned as BP, panels did not begin producing at all unless the panel was disassembled and replaced On a side note, I was surprised to learn that ventilators draw 20Kwh each... that's like 20 microwave ovens running each hour- that seems a bit excessive. I think it was Geostar that suggested fractional power usage; I think that really should be looked into- each light in the game consumes 62 times as much energy as one of the LED lights in my living room which produce about 100 lumens per watt. Maybe consumption could be tied to the "intensity" slider as well?
