Configuring System Power

[alexanderson1993]

There has been a lot discussed about power already. The one thing that hasn't been addressed yet is how systems get their power and what they do with it.

First off, one thing that hasn't really been addressed is power overloads. It should be possible to allocate more power than is necessary into a system to make it operate better. A 200% increase in impulse engine power should double the possible impulse engine speed, etc. Overloading a system will automatically induce damage or an efficiency decrease, comparable to the amount of power supplied above the recommended amount.

To illustrate this, let's look at a few different kinds of systems and how they respond to power usage.

• Sensors: Always consumes power, and consumes more power when sensor scans are active. When allocated extra power, scan results appear faster, or there can be more concurrent scans, and maybe sensor range extends. With less power, scans results take longer to appear and sensor range is smaller.
• Impulse Engines: Only consumes power when engines are active. Power consumption varies based on the desired speed. More or less power affects the acceleration and top speed.
• Shields: Only consumes power when raised. Consumes more power when charging, but doesn't consume as much when shields are up but idle. More or less power affects how fast shields recharge.
• Phasers: Don't consume power directly. Instead, phaser capacitors are connected to the phaser systems and rapidly discharge into the phasers, which produces the high-energy beam.
• Torpedos: Consume a little bit of power when loading a torpedo, and a large amount of power when firing.

More system situations are described here: #349

So, how do we devise a system for defining power that works across all of these different ways of consuming power?

In Thorium Classic, power was defined with three properties:

• The number of power levels that provided some power benefit.
• The number of power bars needed for each level.
• The default power level that the system starts off at.

My proposal for Thorium Nova is three (only 3!) different properties:

• requiredPower - The minimum amount of power required to make the system operate. Below this and the system shows an "Insufficient Power" warning.
• defaultPower - The normal amount of power the system will request. The system should operate at the expected levels when at this power level.
• maxSafePower - The threshold of power usage for safely using this system. It should be possible to increase power usage up to this point without damaging the system. Any usage above this point will overload the system and cause better-than-expected output while damaging the system and decreasing efficiency.

How are systems overloaded? By deactivating the safety protocols on a system. This would be done from the power distribution screen. I'm not sure exactly how this will work yet, whether it's merely toggling the safeties on or off, or whether it should be possible to choose exactly how much power the system will accept. Probably the latter, to make it possible to have the system never use more than that requested power, and to limit how much a power hungry system can damage itself.

Examples:

• Sensors will operate best when supplied defaultPower, but will continue to work (but worse) up to the requiredPower level. Sensor scans will cause power to spike by some amount (configurable on the sensors system itself) up to the maxSafePower level, at which point sensor scans will slow down. If there isn't enough power, concurrent scans will spread power, slowing all of them down.
• An impulse engine with a requiredPower of 4 and a maxSafePower of 10 would consume 4 units of power at ¼ impulse, 6 at ½ impulse, 8 at ¾ impulse, 10 at full impulse, and overload to 12 at destructive impulse. The defaultPower would automatically be set at the maxSafePower, making it possible to accelerate to any speed except destructive.
• Shields in a raised but idle state consume power at the requiredPower level, and recharge faster with higher power usage. When recharging, they will always consume any surplus power.
• Phasers and phase capacitors don't fit this model exactly, so it's most likely that none of these settings will affect them, though that might change during the actual implementation.
• Torpedos: requiredPower is how much is consumed during the loading phase, and defaultPower is how much is required to launch a torpedo. Using up to the maxSafePower will make torpedos load and launch faster.

One great way you can comment: Pick another system (link above) and describe how you think it should work based on these three properties.

Of course, thoughts, questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome as well.