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Power Generation

If you want power then you gotta talk about how it's generated first

Thermoelectric Generator

See also: Supermatter Engine Guide
You put in cold gas in one end and hot gas in the other and you get power depending on the difference in temperature and if the pressure difference isn't awful

Tesla Coils

See also: Tesla Engine Guide
A thing gets shocked by the tesla and it outputs power depending on how many miniballs the tesla has before arcing to another machine at half the power

Solar Panels

See also: Solar Setup Guide
You connect the solars to a solar tracker and it tries to track the sun and generates power based on how many solars can see the sun

Antimatter

Wacky engine that supplies power by feeding it fuel. It can also be scaled as large as you want and in any shape you want as long as the parts are laterally adjacent. There's not much else to it unless you mess up the settings, then it might blow up. Ordered through cargo.

PACMAN

Secure over a wire knot, give fuel, set target power, turn on. What fuel it takes and how high it can go depends on the subtype

• PACMAN: Takes phoron sheets
• SUPERPACMAN: Takes uranium
• MRSPACMAN: Takes tritium

Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator

thing with infinite fuel that can power up to 1 kilowatt. that's it. there's an advanced version that can generate up to 10 KW with good parts

Unimplemented and Misc

TEG 2

If the TEG is so great then why isn't there a TEG 2? Well, there was. It didn't go anywhere and has been sitting around collecting dust in the code for ages.

Radiation Collector Arrays

Though available in cargo, these don't collect radiation since they've existed before radiation was actually implemented and never got changed. They can harvest power from a singularity but they can't harvest energy from a SM because that part of the code got commented out.

Gas Turbine

See also: Guide to Atmospherics
Two machines that compress gas in the surrounding atmosphere to shove through a turbine in order to generate power. The compressor takes power to do its job, meaning this engine can be run at a net loss for power, but if supplied a decently hot burn mix then the pressure will be high enough to allow the turbine to turn at a rate that can generate sort of decent amounts of power - the turbine is more of a supplement to existing engines for powering the station rather than a standalone one. As it stands, despite the code not being meaningfully altered in almost a decade, the turbine runs almost exactly as it was intended.

Pipe Turbine

The pipe version of the gas turbine, however the code and era when it was implemented are completely different. High pressure gas must be piped into the input and the output pipe should remain as low pressure as possible to allow gas to be turned through without issue. The turbine will then turn a motor which generates power. Just needs a proc called on the motor to connect to a wired power net, otherwise this setup is still functional. Mention the Adiabatic Process

Fractal Reactor

Generates 1 MW of power when active, which is pretty crazy, and it doesn't seem to use any fuel. Probably because it's actually used for debugging. If you see this then you should probably ahelp.

Power Storage

If you wanna keep power then you gotta talk about how it's stored

Файл:SMES.pngSMES

Big battery fella. The amount of power it can store and the amount of power it can input and output per tick depends on the type and amount of coils installed. Receives power through a terminal, outputs power into a wire beneath itself

SMES Coils

Coils determine how much power can be stored and how far you can adjust the I/O. You can fit six coils inside a single SMES unit

• Superconductive Magnetic Coil: Stores 5 MJ of power, I/O of 250 KW
• Transmission Coil: Stores 0.5 MJ of power, I/O of 1000 KW
• Capacitance Coil: Stores 50 MJ of power, I/O of 50 KW
• Basic Coil: Stores 1 MJ of power, I/O of 150 KW

Power Cell Rack PSU

An alternative to the SMES. I/O is probably locked but the amount of power you can store depends on how many power cells you shoved inside it.

Power Cells

• Default: 1000
• Heavy Duty: 5000, found in APCs and portable atmospheric equipment
• High Capacity: 10000
• Super Capacity: 20000
• Hyper Capacity: 30000
• Slime: 15000, recharges, harvested from yellow slimes in xenobiology
• Potato: 300

Power Distribution

If you wanna use power you gotta talk about how it's distributed

Wires

Things you throw down to carry power from one place to the next. Distance doesn't matter, a cable close to a SMES and a cable really far on the same network will have the same charge. use a multitool on these to figure out how much power is available.

APC

Stores power but not much, it supplies power to all machines in the same area as the APC. If it's not in the same area, it's not under that APC's control

Rechargers

These things use ridiculous amounts of power so maybe don't decide to recharge more than two power cells at a time lmao

• Device Recharger: 45 KW when active. Accepts power cells, energy weapons, batons, and certain devices.
• Heavy-Duty Cell Charger: 90 KW when active. Only accepts power cells.
• Cyborg Recharging Station: 40 KW when active with default parts. Accepts stationbounds, IPCs, and biologic crew if they're wearing a RIG. It can also repair the damage of synthetic individuals if its parts are upgraded, though this can consume more power.
• Exosuit Dock: 90 KW when active. Park a mech over this to recharge its cell.

Power Priority

SMES receive priority over APCs, otherwise everything will try to charge equally and simultaneously based on available input, i.e. four SMES units with max input but only 4 KW available will mean that all four SMES will charge at 1 KW/h

Interruptions and Syncing

APCs will turn red for a while if an explosion happens or if substations have their breaker boxes toggled. That's because power code sucks and has to resync everything after a large change in power nets like wires being spawned or deleted. if people complain about APCs being red and that engineering sucks tell them to shove it up their ass and wait two seconds lmao

RCON

RCON is short for Remote Control in that it is a program that can remotely interface with SMES units that have their RCON wire enabled, and it is also able to toggle breaker boxes remotely, allowing you to manage most of the grid from a single computer. It's intended purpose is to separate and organize department power networks into their own grids so that they aren't wholly reliant on the main grid. There are many reasons to setup substations, however there are another many reasons to not use RCON. You will have to determine when it's best to use, but setting up substations is by no means necessary: unless purposefully sabotaged, the main grid will power the whole station just fine assuming the SMES in charge of the grid is charged and outputting enough power.

The ideal way to configure each substation is to set it up in a way that the department will always receive power when necessary. If you aren't sure what settings to use then don't bother configuring the substation; it's simpler and safer to just run it off the grid directly. Nonetheless, the substation's output must be able to meet a number of factors:

1. The amount of APCs: All rooms should have one APC, though sometimes multiple rooms share an APC. Departments vary in the amount of APCs they have but, ignoring the rest of these factors, 20 to 60 KW is a safe minimum to expect.
2. The amount of machinery: Lots of machinery will consume power while idle, so it's important to keep them in mind, especially when they're in use. Lights fall under this category, atmospheric installations especially so.
3. The amount of rechargers: Rechargers are machines that tend to consume the most power at a time. The amount of rechargers in a department is what you want to know the most, and you'll want to adjust the SMES output to account for the potential for all rechargers being used at the same time. If the SMES output doesn't go high enough then the department will lose power if someone decides to recharge a lot of equipment. Research is especially prone to this.

If you want a quick and easy way to determine how much power a department will draw normally, just setup the substation like normal and set the output to maximum, the SMES will tell you the expected draw. If the draw is below available output then you can lower it to something a bit above that value to account for intermittent draws of power. However, if the draw is the same as available output or higher then you will need to either upgrade the SMES or re-enable the bypass.

The substation's input, on the other hand, must be set to what the department is expected to require at the least. It is safe to set the input lower than the output - as long as the input can meet demand during normal work then the higher output will use the SMES' stored charge to account for more demanding loads, assuming the high demand is only temporary (like recharging equipment).

Breaker Boxes

Breaker boxes are the physical objects next to SMES units inside substations that determine whether or not the substation is bypassed. It does this by literally spawning wires underneath itself to connect a wire leading to it from the grid to a wire beneath the SMES leading to the rest of the department, effectively connecting the department to the grid and bypassing the SMES. Breaker boxes can be interacted with in person or remotely, though to prevent power net weirdness they cannot be toggled back for a while. To clarify: wires beneath the breaker means the SMES is bypassed, wires missing from beneath the breaker means the bypass is disabled.

Pros and Cons

Setting substations can be a nice tool if you know what you're doing, but it can easily incapacitate entire departments if you aren't careful. If you aren't sure then don't setup substations. Anyway here's all the benefits and disadvantages to disabling the bypasses of substations:

• Pros:
  • Department-specific power net monitors will be limited to only their department instead of it and whatever else is connected to the grid, allowing you to diagnose room-specific power draw issues remotely more easily.
  • Substation SMES can function as backup batteries if something terrible happens to everything else, assuming they're charged. This, however, doesn't require the bypass to be disabled: the SMES will charge as long as a wire from the grid is connected to its terminal, and it will always be there unless damage or sabotage is done.
  • Incomprehensibly high power draw can be isolated to a single department, sparing the rest of the station.
  • Carefully maintained output can reduce the damage of being shocked by equipment managed by the substation.
• Cons:
  • Values that do not take all equipment in a department into account can result in the department running out of power, or simply not being supplied enough power.
  • Certain departments (like Research) are capable of exceeding the maximum possible output of their substation SMES by several times, meaning either the SMES needs to be upgraded or the SMES should remain bypassed.
  • The benefits of keeping a SMES' output low for the sake of reducing the damage of shocks is irrelevant if you are forced to maximize the output or need to bypass the SMES.
  • Grid checks affect APCs and SMES units. A SMES must be restarted before it can output power again, so departments that don't have their bypass enabled are reliant on their substation to restart rather than the main grid SMES being restarted and powering everything.

Engineering Department
Head of Department	Chief Engineer
Personnel	Engineer - Atmospheric Technician
Useful Guides	Guide to Atmospherics - Supermatter Engine - Guide to the INDRA - Guide to Thrusters - Telecommunications - Integrated Electronics