Azic’s Shipyard Crewed Power Distribution

The problem with starships is power. While batteries solves an issue of not overloading cables and causing burning rooms, the alternative is to use crewed rooms to manage the distribution to prevent overloading.

Crewed power distribution comes in small range requiring less crew, or whole ship requiring more crew per reactor.

Each Reactor size comes in two variants: radius and whole ship power.

Small Crewed Reactors are 2×5 and hold 56 power. The area ones provide power in a 10m radius.
Medium Crewed Reactors are 3×6 and hold 152 power. The area ones provide power in a 20m radius.
Large Crewed Reactors are 8×8 and hold 324 power. The area ones provide power in a 30m radius.

Equivalent single vanilla reactor with capacitors to the same floor space (including half values for fairness) for power storage are:
Small +1.5 capacitors = 35
Medium + 2.5 capacitors = 61
Large + 12 capacitors = 240

This mod should in theory work even with future updates like nebulas.

After large reactors go live, I’ll work on command costs before I release the companion mod for this and ETTM by SirCampalot.

Update 07/31/2024: icons for whole ship powering reactors has been removed for reducing lag spikes. Should help many people.

Update 08/04/2024: Large Crew Reactors and command costs have been added.

08-06-2024: Reduced LCR Whole ship command cost by 100. Also added in new difficulties that will eventually get starter ships to go along with them.

08-10-2024: More economies and a few starter ships.

08-17-2024: Gold Coil Factories and Gold Coils introduced. These will be used in the future weapons mod.
Added editor groups. Increased the power output of large reactors and their UE used in construction. Rebalancing of reactor material costs using actual formulas. ETTM Companion mod is alreleased

08-24-2024: For those of you giving feedback on power here, discord, and PMs, thank you. This took a long time to work out due to myself working over 70 hours a week.
New part: Shield Substation for providing power to shield generators, point defense, and any other items classified as defense.
Added new icon for defensive structures getting power when separate from main power.
Fixes: Fixed a typo that caused the original substation to not have its description show up.
Adjusted how the buffs worked.

11-14-2024: Introduced kicker units to help power parts that the mini-core has issues with. I’ve reported the bug, but its a bit weird how it works.
Also … a work in progress for storage is in this update. If you have too many resources drop at one time from one of these getting disassembled, you might crash your game.

To address the problem of shields getting too much power, I first started from the direction of power production. This was the wrong place to start, but it was a very reasonable starting spot. Next I started messing with transfer rates. After much work, I discovered that once you reach a certain point, an excess of power provided by sending the same power as the larger batteries of the ALR is wasted on many parts, so I decreased the amount, but increased transfer rate to compensate. It took a very long time to hone in on transfer rates that work with heavy engine builds. As I continued working on this, I discovered that there is an issue with whole ship buff and had to revert to grid buff set to 900. Please let me know if this is too small. This also had the side effect of removing the lag spike from hovering over the large reactors. While it was lessened by removing a lot of the sprites, I decided to leave the references to them out from the files, but they should still be there for you if you want to reference them back in. This reworking of the buffs allowed me to have two sets of power transfers. Power to normal, weapons, and engines are set to a higher amount more often (except for vanilla large which feels mostly ok, but code is in place for me to more easily adjust later.) This lead to powering shields with just a ALCR not enough to go sundiving. It took many hours of testing to find an amount from one reactor that would keep 4 shields working at a decent rate. I finally got to a point where the ALCR would not make a ship a replacement for fort knox. My tester ship took some damage from 7 rank 10 ships when I just flew it in and parked it. a fleet of 12 or 18 (I should have counted) did sevear damage and took out 50% of the ship. So I felt like I almost had it right, so I made up some shield substations to address people who make ships as big as a world. This is for you and myself Cade.
Now power generation.
Some people won’t like that the generation rates for the large crewed variants are higher than their counterparts. I increased the EU and EL needed for them by the math other reactors used. +8EU/L = 3x more power. I did not do this with the ALCRs because that is a stupid large amount of power. I also build ships that need 4 or more ALCRs set up to give the juice needed to the engines. (This is why engine mod is on my list for later. after weapons, but not sure if before or after sundiving gear.) While limiting the number on ships makes a lot of sense, I’m not going to for the timing being since it would gimp a lot of people who build big.
From talking to other Mod authors, it seams like I can’t send only 3 power to each of x number of things at the same moment, it has to be sent on a condition, like the one with least power, then next cycle the next lowest, and so forth round robbin. This is why a few shields makes them strong, but many end up going down and never coming back up in combat. This is also why finding a transfer amount that made sense was very, very hard. I never ran into this with anything that had a transfer rate of 1 battery every 0.01 seconds or slower and wasn’t aware of the issue about to happen. The original transfer rate of ALCRs was good for sundiving a mid sized ship. Though my mid sized ships are about 2.5x the size of a space station.

Power Storage: This is factored into size and cost of building the parts. And the ETTM counterparts are close to the same scaling. At first, I wasn’t going to make substations to replace capacitors, which was part of why I built them in. The other part being that it looked cool and made sense from a power distribution stand point. If I had one LCR on my ship when without crewed reactors, I’d have 4 or 6, it seamed like a good trade-off. With the substations, it can be a less expensive alternative to a whole ship reactor or 3. While I will probably make 3×3 and 4×4 (I hear someone asking for an 8×8), not right now. I want to see if I need it for the weapons mod or not. If demand is there, sure, I will.

Power distribution radius. I’m happy with the numbers to keep it from being too strong right now. I’ll wait to see if there is enough want for it to be increased. ETTM variants will always have more reach.

I’m probably forgetting something, I’ve worked 75.58 hours the past week and 70+ most weeks, so please forgive me if I accidentally sound mean or impolite here and there.

Sprites used for power levels of the substations were created by JadeOfMar,

Please note the animated gif in the mod images that shows how to have the reactor extensions work. The storage ones will not allow retreival of goods unless they are inline with a reactor like the example image and example gif