Power/Battery help

[Xenosbreed]

Me and my friend are first time players and we have some of the basics down but one of the biggest things we're having a hard time with is powering ships. With solar panels and a full O2/H2 container of ice and hydrogen engine we can't manage to get a minute out of engine power. We have a solar farm with 20 panels and it generates usually at least 1mw of power at most times, but it takes an hour to charge a battery with a storage of 3 mws of power. It feels like we're missing something very obvious so thought I'd ask

[Spaceman Spiff]

I'm assuming you're in space. If so, your options are limited to solar, hydrogen engines, and/or nuclear. Hydrogen engines require a source of power (yeah, go figure) and an O2/H2 generator, but produce a reasonably large amount of power; ice is fairly plentiful in space, so HEs are good for charging batteries. Nuclear is best, and it's *always* what I strive to acquire in space. Finding asteroids with uranium is somewhat difficult, but made easier if you have a ship because the ship's ore detector has greater range (I often use an ore detector mod that pushes the range out a bit). Solar just sucks because it requires so many panels to provide enough power. My opinion: aim for nuclear.

If on a planet or moon (with the exception of the Earth's Moon), wind turbines are the way to go. A dozen or so set 9 or 10 blocks above the ground and spaced at least 6 blocks apart will generate plenty of power to recharge a couple batteries. Again, however, my long-term goal is to always go for nuclear, so I head to space as soon as reasonably possible to set up an off-world processing facility for uranium, platinum, and usually gold (since the ore deposits in space are pure and easily extracted).

That's my 2¢ worth...

[herrschaftg35]

If you don't want to cheat and look up the cords for uranium, then hydrogen engines are your best bet if in space.

You need to have hydrogen tanks, adequate storage for ice and several O2/H2 generators. Spend a session filling up a large cargo container with ice and let the generators slowly fill the tank. By the time you fill a cargo container you should have enough hydrogen to charge several batteries. Hydrogen engines eat through fuel rather quickly so you only want them on when you need them.

[Xenosbreed]

Thanks for the responses, I'll suggest to my friend we restart on a planet, I think starting in the pod in space tricked us into thinking we should be on large grids, which, from what I'm seeing, we should be on a much smaller scale to start. And then aim for Uranium after we're started

[Spaceman Spiff]

I started playing this game exclusively using large-grid builds. It took about a year for me to see the great advantage to small-grid ships, especially for mining and just getting to space. The resources required to build a small-grid ship are significantly less, as are the power requirements. The only downside is that small-grid builds, without mods, will not include refineries, assemblers, jump drives, and an assortment of other large-grid-only blocks.

[frag2k4]

So one thing not mentioned here is that charging batteries loses a portion of power around 20% of what is used to charge the batteries, this is less an issue with solar and wind but with uranium and ice stocks having other uses can be a problem.

While as others said ice is fairly easy to find in space hydrogen engines are typically bad anyway for output to consumption. You either need large tanks full of H2 or one or more O2/H2 gens, then you start seeing a loss of power.

Note info based on default settings, mods and changes to values can alter capacity and other factors.

Large grid hydrogen engine
Output 5MW
Fuel consumption 500L/s
Capacity: 100000L
Run time on full tank: 3 minutes 20 seconds

O2/H2 Gen
Power required: 500kw
Fuel output:
H2 500L/s if only H2 produced
O2 250L/s if only O2 produced
250L/s H2, 125L/s O2 if storage for both has room.

So from this the O2 gen is already taking a tenth of the power and if you are not creating O2 will only just provide enough fuel for a single engine, when you take into account that a single hydrogen thruster either requires 2 or 4 gens to function depending on production and a large version requires 10 to run so hydrogen isn't really the best solution and likely why you are only get a minute out of an engine.

Solar panels in large grid provide around 120kw-160kw of power max at 4 green lights, however they are also top priority on a power grid so the energy from them will go to whatever else is in need of power.

A large battery has the following stats.
Capacity: 3MWh
Output: 12MW
Input: 12MW

So this tells us that at max input or output a battery will take 15 minutes to either charge from empty to full or discharge from full to empty. So you need around 100 solar panels all facing the sun with no blockage to get a battery charged in 15 minutes.

Generally an idea to have early mid game is to create a solar charging satellite, which basically amounts to 30 odd solar panels, a couple of batteries, an antenna and a connector. You can fly up to this when needed and drain it of power in a pinch, adding solar farms and O2 tanks too with a piped network can give small amounts of free O2 too.

[d_d_c_95]

im rocking 2 solar 6 wind turbines at poor performace and a back up hydrogen my ship runs 2 o2 gens a gyro ore detector antenna and spot ligh i have a single regular batt . all i have to charge in space is 2 sml grid solar and ive yet to run into an issue with power as long as im concious about it and try to keep having the solat facing the sun during travles and unnessacery stuff off in mind . on that note i ask what thrusters are u using ? im rocking pure hyrdogen atm all i can suggest is sml bat are useless without a proper generator and dont go ion thrust or atmo thrust till u find uranium (them power hogs) other then that yea turn stuff off antenna ore dectector lights all stuff that adds up without noticing

[Super.Skirv]

Build more batteries. Once you build a batteries, you can get 1MW of power from it. Set the battery to discharge ONLY. Once empty grind battery completely back in to parts. You will get all the components back MINUS the 80 POWER CELLS. Place battery down again and weld. Make sure to have lots of POWER CELLS for this, as you need 80 new ones. And you will have another 1MW of power.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Each 80 power cells cost you...
Iron Ingot: 266.4
Silicon Wafer: 26.4
Nickel Ingot: 53.6
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Or just under 32K Stone in a Basic Refinery.

This is due to nickel. If you have another nickel source it will be 1/3 less stone
-----------------------------------------------------------------

You can get all that from stone, which is readily available everywhere, except maybe europa.

Getting stone should be easy, you can refine that much stone in seconds if you have the stone, which you can do with a piston/rotor arm attached to base, or with a ship. I recommend you set more than one battery to discharge at a time. I usually do about 10, so about 800 power cells needed every 5-10 mins, depending on your power requirements. I also have the main base batteries set to "Recharge" so they suck the "discharge only" batteries out very quickly.

Basically when setting up your base you need to have 1 dedicated assembler pumping out power cells, and one refinery crunching stone for this to work. If there is more than one of you it helps to have the other watching stone and gather it as required. Once you get the batteries in your ships full, most power will be consumed by refineries and assemblers.

Remember to set ship batteries to a group on a hotkey bar and toggle them to recharge mode while docked, and toggle them before undocking, or you will crash in gravity.

[Boooom! that Jus Happened.]

Originally posted by Spaceman Spiff:

I started playing this game exclusively using large-grid builds. It took about a year for me to see the great advantage to small-grid ships, especially for mining and just getting to space. The resources required to build a small-grid ship are significantly less, as are the power requirements. The only downside is that small-grid builds, without mods, will not include refineries, assemblers, jump drives, and an assortment of other large-grid-only blocks.

untill you get into space and then small grids for mining are just a joke, they dont carry much at all compared to there large grid counterparts, also small grid thrusters are not the same as large grid thrusters, small grid ones dont have the oompf of there large grid counter parts

[Spaceman Spiff]

Originally posted by Boooom! that Jus Happened.:

untill you get into space and then small grids for mining are just a joke, they dont carry much at all compared to there large grid counterparts, also small grid thrusters are not the same as large grid thrusters, small grid ones dont have the oompf of there large grid counter parts

I'm talking about space. I have several high-capacity small-grid miners that perform well, with far less resources required to get built. I also have some large-grid miner designs that I rarely use nowadays. I have an off-world base with 36 advanced refineries that I keep loaded with a single small-grid miner. Yeah, maybe it's not quite as fast mining as a large-grid version, but it sure is a lot easier to burrow in to evade hostile forces.
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