How do you keep big planet based bases powered?

[NorfolkDave]

Solar gives too little.
Wind turbines seemed great at the start but now i am sticking them EVERYWHERE lol
Hydrogen engines seem to use fuel even when they are not required and eat fuel
Reactors I am assuming eat fuel when not needed too but are a mute point as I have yet to get to space.

My rather large base is now completly out of power.
96mw input
96mw output

I have actually gone round shutting down lcd's, lights, refinaries, assemblers...
Docked vessels have been sucked dry of energy
I have one pressured room i can go into when its night...i dont have power for my suit lol

[°•.SeñorFlipFlop]

Had a similar problem I recommend the uranium ice and cobalt mod, ill send it here in a sec, that helps with reactors if u have some, I like running off of solar panels either using a mod or script, ill also send those, and ofc batteries. I bassicaly have a giant solar farm powering a giant battery if I just came back from a huge mining trip I have h2 engines as back up power with them being off, and having a button panel for them

[Spaceman Spiff]

Unlike hydrogen engines, reactors only consume fuel as power is required. Reactors also provide the most power for the least space and fuel requirements, so they're my choice for everything needing power. From what I see by your power requirements, a single large reactor would work well.

When playing a survival game on a planet, I always build an off-world refinery station inside an asteroid for the express purpose of refining uranium into ingots. (Sure, it can be a pain in the butt to find asteroids with uranium, but the payoff is big. I recently played a survival game in space where I found four asteroids with uranium, all within 10 kilometers of each other! But do you think I could find iron!?!) I set up a dozen or so refineries inside a warhead excavation (i.e., the spherical void created by detonating a warhead) using a small reactor for power. I typically use my Pathfinder II utility ship to haul up materials to get the base started, then build one of my Super Sprite space miners to collect the ore and leave it docked at the station while I'm carrying ingots in my utility ship back to my planetary base (although the Pathfinder works as a miner, too). Once you're up-and-running, you could probably automate the ingot collection process with a drone shuttle ship. Anyway, that's what I do.

[°•.SeñorFlipFlop]

here are the mods/scripts
Choosing between the rotor and script for solar pannels is a personal preference
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1671252507&searchtext=uranium+colbalt+and+ice

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1728457223&searchtext=solar+rotor

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=699142028&searchtext=solar+alignment

[herrschaftg35]

Wind mills work great. This is a 200 meter tall "power" pyramid comprised mainly of solar panels, but can easily hold hundreds of windmills.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2432528727

[NorfolkDave]

Originally posted by °•·.SeñorFlipFlop:

here are the mods/scripts
Choosing between the rotor and script for solar pannels is a personal preference
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1671252507&searchtext=uranium+colbalt+and+ice

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1728457223&searchtext=solar+rotor

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=699142028&searchtext=solar+alignment

Life saver!

Thank you!

Originally posted by herrschaftg35:

Wind mills work great. This is a 200 meter tall "power" pyramid comprised mainly of solar panels, but can easily hold hundreds of windmills.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2432528727

What better way to worship the sun? :)

[Husker_85]

It seems a little odd to me that your base is consuming that much power but you haven't been to space yet. Most players will reach space long before they advance enough to require so much power.

[NorfolkDave]

Originally posted by Isaac_Clark:

It seems a little odd to me that your base is consuming that much power but you haven't been to space yet. Most players will reach space long before they advance enough to require so much power.

Been playing around with drones, and buggies. Since the game only has one solar system we havent been in a rush to reach space. Everytime I think to start making a 3 stage rocket etc...I get distracted by something else lol.

[Phatboy45]

Wind is the best all around option if you're on the Earth-like or the Alien planet. If you manage to find a large supply of uranium, going nuclear is also a viable option (the only option if you're on Mars🙄😖). If you're up in the mountains on Earth, like I was with my first base, you'll probably be surrounded by tons of ice and snow. An O2/H2 generator, some batteries, and a hydrogen engine (make the batteries first ) is the best option. Same goes if you're in the lowlands by a lake (ice or water).

[°•.SeñorFlipFlop]

Originally posted by David "TheDave" Eastwick:

Originally posted by °•·.SeñorFlipFlop:

here are the mods/scripts
Choosing between the rotor and script for solar pannels is a personal preference
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1671252507&searchtext=uranium+colbalt+and+ice

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1728457223&searchtext=solar+rotor

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=699142028&searchtext=solar+alignment

Life saver!

Thank you!

Originally posted by herrschaftg35:

Wind mills work great. This is a 200 meter tall "power" pyramid comprised mainly of solar panels, but can easily hold hundreds of windmills.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2432528727

What better way to worship the sun? :)

NP
Solar Panel Gang

[Spaceman Spiff]

Originally posted by Phatboy45:

Wind is the best all around option if you're on the Earth-like or the Alien planet. If you manage to find a large supply of uranium, going nuclear is also a viable option (the only option if you're on Mars🙄😖).

Um-m-m-m...wind works on Mars.

[SpeedDaemon]

Originally posted by David "TheDave" Eastwick:

Originally posted by Isaac_Clark:

It seems a little odd to me that your base is consuming that much power but you haven't been to space yet. Most players will reach space long before they advance enough to require so much power.

Been playing around with drones, and buggies. Since the game only has one solar system we havent been in a rush to reach space. Everytime I think to start making a 3 stage rocket etc...I get distracted by something else lol.

I'm still curious as to what's using the bulk of that power. The only time I've ever come close to that is charging jump drives, the defense shield mod, or giant ion-powered ships.

A few things to consider:
- If you have batteries, remember that they incur a 20% pentalty when charging, so power goes generation->battery (-20%)->base load, meaning your 96MW load actually needs almost 120MW of production. Set all docked vessels' batteries to "recharge", and consider shutting off base batteries if you have enough power generation to run things consistently (and *definitely* shut them off if you start using reactors!)

- Refineries are a big power sink. Power efficiency modules are better than speed modules on a base. Generally on a base, space is cheap. 5 refineries with 4x power efficiency is what you should be doing for stone, Fe, Si, and Ni (5x speed for power of 1 un-moduled refinery). Use sorters or some other method to split off U, Au, Mg, and Pt into 4x yield refineries. Ag and Co fall somewhere in the middle, so send it one way or the other based on your situation.

- For docked vessels, turn off lights, *especially* H2/O2 gens, thrusters, etc.

[NYVS]

I think what you require is to balance the overall power input per consumption time frame.
For example say you play in a 24 hour day. You'll want all the power expended in that 24 hour time frame to be less than the power input for that same time (can balance power control throughput using batteries).

Applying this, one can start creating facilities to last indefinitely.

[NorfolkDave]

Originally posted by SpeedDaemon:

Originally posted by David "TheDave" Eastwick:

Been playing around with drones, and buggies. Since the game only has one solar system we havent been in a rush to reach space. Everytime I think to start making a 3 stage rocket etc...I get distracted by something else lol.

I'm still curious as to what's using the bulk of that power. The only time I've ever come close to that is charging jump drives, the defense shield mod, or giant ion-powered ships.

A few things to consider:
- If you have batteries, remember that they incur a 20% pentalty when charging, so power goes generation->battery (-20%)->base load, meaning your 96MW load actually needs almost 120MW of production. Set all docked vessels' batteries to "recharge", and consider shutting off base batteries if you have enough power generation to run things consistently (and *definitely* shut them off if you start using reactors!)

- Refineries are a big power sink. Power efficiency modules are better than speed modules on a base. Generally on a base, space is cheap. 5 refineries with 4x power efficiency is what you should be doing for stone, Fe, Si, and Ni (5x speed for power of 1 un-moduled refinery). Use sorters or some other method to split off U, Au, Mg, and Pt into 4x yield refineries. Ag and Co fall somewhere in the middle, so send it one way or the other based on your situation.

- For docked vessels, turn off lights, *especially* H2/O2 gens, thrusters, etc.

We added the Nanite v2 mod, and started to use it. This I believe was the initial cause of the power loss.
We have removed items and plan to remove the mod (on our server it was causing some strange issues, pauses, sudden movement that isnt in the direction you were going etc. but we have a lot of mods so it may of been an interaction...

So all ships attached to the base were drained of power, this included the massive ship that some faction had totally abandoned and left to drift over our airspace...man this game needs NPCs... which we rescued.

Now once we removed the nanites I believe the docked ships began to lap up the power, didnt think of this at first, and since we have some batteries that can output at high rates it meant the base just didnt get to use the power.

All is stable now and the reactors are on but not actually using power (awesome)

For inventory management we are actually using a script (think its ISY's inventory one) as far as i know I can not specify which reactor gets which ore, need to look at the guide again for that. Our refineries are in a crater together with our assemblers (a warhead was used to make a small cave.....it made a crater...we used the crater :)

The base is a bodge job, it was built as we are learning how the game works (hence the lot of questions asked of late) but we love it. weirdly despite drones and encounters being on we are yet to be attacked so the damage to the base is all on us ....
Exploding crane
Turret that actually hit the base it was attached to lol
The "warhead incident"
A massive over 32km drop that was meant to be a tunnel (the automated device that made it must be out of power by now but every attempt to reach it ends in disaster lol)

But each one gives the old girl character :)

Now docked vessels, if we kill the thrusters would that not make them snap off the connector?
If not I wonder if we can set up actions on the ships connector. If connected trigger a timer block that shuts non essential systems down, if disconnected trigger a timer that instantly turns them on.... at work so can not check at mo. may be able to do it with scripts, though I am unsure how many scripts you can have running on a base before it starts to upset a server.

[Husker_85]

Originally posted by David "TheDave" Eastwick:

If not I wonder if we can set up actions on the ships connector. If connected trigger a timer block that shuts non essential systems down, if disconnected trigger a timer that instantly turns them on.... at work so can not check at mo. may be able to do it with scripts, though I am unsure how many scripts you can have running on a base before it starts to upset a server.

I do this for all my ships. You just need two timer blocks. Label one of them "Startup" and the other one "Shutdown". Now set the startup one to

• disconnect the connector
  
• switch batteries to auto
  
• power on any reactors
  
• turn on primary thrusters
  
• turn off hydrogen/oxygen stockpile
  
• turn on spotlights
  
• turn on programmable blocks

And then set the shutdown to do the opposite. Then you can just set them to 1 and 2 on your toolbar or up and down on your toolwheel and you've got a fast and easy way to startup and shutdown your ship without having to worry if you're forgetting something

[xx]

Another option for power assuming you are happy with mods, use fusion power plants, given you more bang for your buck compared to hydrogen engines.

If you use the water mod, just drop a collector in the water, add a h2o gen and reactor and you have a unending power supply. Just remember to have them on a dedicated convoyer network so your cargo is not filled with ice. Does need a bit of power to jump start it, but once its running it will run for ever.