Vehicle battery won't hold charge anymore

[c.bundy99]

For some reason my battery in my rover is ♥♥♥♥♥♥ or something, it's running off solar power which isn't much but before I could drive around mars without running out of power. Just got back on and now I can't even drive 10 yards with out it going dead. I let charge for a bit in the sun but still dies almost instantly. Any suggestions? I was going to try hydrogen power but the bloody tank is to big for the poor thing.

[Dagon M Dragoon]

panels wont recharge batteries unless they are set to recharge.

[Botji]

Im 99% sure dagon is wrong about panels not recharging batteries, unless they changed it with the update any extra power should be added to the battery.

Im not sure if you are aware of it or not but when you build a battery they come with a bit of energy already charged. My guess is that you have been running the rover on that power and now it has run out and the solar panel(s?) are just too slow to recharge it.

If you have a base with better power generation like wind turbines you can connect the rover to the base grid and recharge the battery that way much faster.

[Dagon M Dragoon]

they changed it in the update, built a base with wind for the main and batteries for rovers and back up then added some solar cause the wind was not charging the batteries fast enough for my liking. looked at the solar panels at about mid day in-game and they where outputting 0.00 watts. the wind was putting in about 500 watts across each battery when they where set to auto, but when I flipped them to recharge only it jumped to about 3k watts input each.

[RoofCat]

Originally posted by dagon000:

they changed it in the update, built a base with wind for the main and batteries for rovers and back up then added some solar cause the wind was not charging the batteries fast enough for my liking. looked at the solar panels at about mid day in-game and they where outputting 0.00 watts. the wind was putting in about 500 watts across each battery when they where set to auto, but when I flipped them to recharge only it jumped to about 3k watts input each.

Your batteries are just removing power from other batteries. Probably in loops. You can't have more power from solar or wind generator than it can provide. Solar sucks compared to wind, but wind can't be used on vehicles or rotors. Also wind has to be at least 7 blocks above the ground and 5 blocks in between. On ground it will have 50% or even less power. Too many too close will also reduce performance. It should state Optimal performance and 370..390kW in control. As for solar panels, they have to target sun (surprise, surprise) to actually have top performance, which still sucks compared to wind turbines and doesn't work at night. Use Solar panel blocks on rotors at bases. Ctrl click the rotation speed number on rotors to finetune rotation speed so it fits your daylight cycles.

As for rovers - all is sort of bad due to constant moving. You can still quick charge at docking from windmills and other batteries or use ice drill where there is plenty. Game has tiny issues with melting ice just to produce more hydrogen which it then burns to melt more ice. A trivial how to reach infinity challenge. So in case you use hydrogen cycle with no load, you might want to shut it off at some point.

You don't need hydrogen tank to run generators. They have internal one and can run straight from ice converters.

Reduce antenna range to reasonable minimum. You don't need to see resources that far and probably aren't using remote control either. Use beacon marker if anything for ID. Shut down survival station while not used. etc, etc. The game is called space ENGINEERING.

Just check battery state in controls. If there is no power left, that's it. It is probably low and charging very poorly for days. Rovers don't need much energy, but then you probably have all the cool stuff and some refinery or even worse - assembler with speed boosts running occasionally.

[Dagon M Dragoon]

ok i admit i exaggerated the gains from the solar panels, but that still doesn't change the fact that if the batteries are set to auto or discharge solar does nothing.