Simple Question about Solar

[Deadly-Bagel]

Plug a steam engine in to the power network, you'll notice it takes about five seconds to go from 0 power to max. Running off months-old memory here so actual figures may vary but there is a significant delay in it reaching max output of 510kW.

Now, a laser turret consume 800kJ per shot, and at max research you can achieve 7.8 shots per second, so will consume 6.24mW. So per laser turret, you would need 12.3 steam engines on top of what is required to run your factory.

Let's say you have 250 steam engines (allowing 100 for the factory and 150 for the lasers) and the rate at which these 'warm up' is 100kW per second. Let's have 10 laser towers engage a wave of biters, your network very suddenly has a 62.24mW drain but your steam engines only up the power by 25mW per second, so there's almost 2.5 seconds where your factory will suffer partial or even total power loss (as laser towers take priority when distributing power).

It doesn't matter what you do, there will ALWAYS be power problems here if you make the suggested change. Even assuming you could read the status of the network without accumulators (which will always be 0) and connect a bunch of accumulators the moment you notice this, they will take priority so your steam engines will even start powering down! This means when you disconnect the accumulators they will need to go through their warmup anyway and you will still momentarily lose power.

To work around this you would need to be able to warm up at the rate the turrets fire, 6.24mW which would be 624 steam engines PER TOWER. I hope you now understand?

[nuhll]

I know what you mean. But still, its no problem, towers shoot some seconds slower... and inserters move some seconds slower... not a big deal, even tho i never run into this problem but i probably have too much accu and solar (i build before i used power switch to turn off not needed areas)

[Frightning]

Plug a steam engine in to the power network, you'll notice it takes about five seconds to go from 0 power to max. Running off months-old memory here so actual figures may vary but there is a significant delay in it reaching max output of 510kW.

Now, a laser turret consume 800kJ per shot, and at max research you can achieve 7.8 shots per second, so will consume 6.24mW. So per laser turret, you would need 12.3 steam engines on top of what is required to run your factory.

Let's say you have 250 steam engines (allowing 100 for the factory and 150 for the lasers) and the rate at which these 'warm up' is 100kW per second. Let's have 10 laser towers engage a wave of biters, your network very suddenly has a 62.24mW drain but your steam engines only up the power by 25mW per second, so there's almost 2.5 seconds where your factory will suffer partial or even total power loss (as laser towers take priority when distributing power).

It doesn't matter what you do, there will ALWAYS be power problems here if you make the suggested change. Even assuming you could read the status of the network without accumulators (which will always be 0) and connect a bunch of accumulators the moment you notice this, they will take priority so your steam engines will even start powering down! This means when you disconnect the accumulators they will need to go through their warmup anyway and you will still momentarily lose power.

To work around this you would need to be able to warm up at the rate the turrets fire, 6.24mW which would be 624 steam engines PER TOWER. I hope you now understand?

The tl;dr here is: This is one reason why Accumulators exist and work the way they do in the first place, so you can have surge power for lasers when needed. All that you need for the backup steam setup to work is the ensure that the accumulator level that activates the steam backup isn't too close to zero charge.

A few things to note:
-Accumulator max discharge rate=300kW (so you need enough Acc to keep up w/ turrets during steam warmup, and more generally enough to keep the rest of the base running as well, so that base requirement+expected surge from lasers is needed throughput and needed capacity is net drain over 5.1 second warm-up after taking out steam supplied portion).
-Accumulator capacity=5MJ (so each % of charge is 50kJ, so once you know what the net drain is you need to compute 50kJ x #accumulators and then take needed net/that number and round up to get % value to set the switching circuit to).

[Deadly-Bagel]

I know what you mean. But still, its no problem, towers shoot some seconds slower... and inserters move some seconds slower... not a big deal, even tho i never run into this problem but i probably have too much accu and solar (i build before i used power switch to turn off not needed areas)

Uh huh and any memory circuits you've set up forget whatever they were storing and belts/inserters sending item counts to the circuit network miss items and so on. You might not notice any problems but for some mild convenience for yourself (would it even convenience you or are you just arguing for the sake of it?) it would totally break the game for the more advanced players.

With only one or two hundred accumulators working as they do now it completely circumvents this problem.

[nuhll]

I just can talk of my self?!

I dont use such item counting or something like this... does it rly break when energy is only 70%?! (i didnt know that, just though it moves slower)

Even tho, you could just add accus to the backup steam....

[Deadly-Bagel]

I don't have problems because the system is set up to work so I can't say when the break point is, but I'm pretty sure if circuits have reduced power they have heavily slowed calculation time. This could certainly be enough to miss items going through a belt, or maybe for a memory cell to forget or corrupt its contents.

No you couldn't add accumulators, I already explained why.

It's not clear you're talking solely about yourself that you would like a feature to work a particular way for you only to achieve slight convenience at the cost of breaking many of the game's mechanics. Not sure why you would even want to talk about it but w/e I can't be bothered with this anymore.

[nuhll]

I already said that its okay because fixing it was easier then expectet...???