Do radio backpacks affect weapon's electricity consumption?

[Angela·Ziegler]

Like fire spear or arc emitter?

[MechWarden]

They should.
...
Though I just assumed so.

Ok, fine, I'll test it here in a while.
(I need high tier CPU cores anyway.)

[Sepherix]

Yeah. pretty noticeably too. You'd usually run out of juice and still be at 60% durability left, it runs out at about 20% instead. Its decent.

[MechWarden]

So... my first test made me question if it did.

I used the Electro-Thrower on a bot in the lab sector and used 165/300 charge on it without the radio backpack. I used the radio backpack and used 166/300 charge. The difference is pretty much the same, within the margin of error.

I tested it with a flashlight, timing how long it would take to lose 10 points of charge (and after finding out the UI doesn't auto update when mousing over ) I found it takes 16 seconds for it to lose charge with the radio pack and 10 seconds without.

The Thermal Mallet is also affected, using 2 charges per hit without the pack, but only using 1 charge per hit (tested up to 5 swings). Is it feels like there is a bit of rounding going on.

I haven't tested the Vacuum yet, mostly because I want to have lunch first.

Edit: Did a more detailed shot for shot test on the Electro-Thrower and found that it only uses one charge at a time. So any discount to 1 rounded up to the nearest non-zero integer will always be at least 1.

[Jerick]

I did some testing on this myself. The total time you can use the vacuum continuously is around 58-56 secs. Radio backpack doesn't seem to have an effect. 1 click power consumption is 3 with or without the backpack.

Now testing the arc thrower on robots has proved to be difficult. The robots have a critical hit location in the eye and the arc throwers random nature can make it difficult to either aim for or completely avoid (since they're actively trying to get in your face) meaning the tests tend be more variable than they should. Still I can reliably kill lab secruity bots using around 110-105 charge with the arc thrower. 1 click tests showed the same output regardless of backpack.

Here was I using the radio backpack because almost all the stuff I was using was charge based. Turns out it doesn't do much for most of it. I seriously thought and felt it significantly reduced the power drain on the arc thrower. Well this is why science is superior.