Factorio Forums

Summery: sustainibility is the theme of this suggestion. With the edition of rechargable power cells and a charging station, it becomes practical to make rechargable electric variants of nearly all electric equipment.

Detail: The crux of the idea is the addition of a charger station that sucks energy and puts it into usable power cells. The cells could either be in various sizes, or could be used in multiple. Power cells may also be loaded in modular armor, and will dump all energy into available batteries if done so, and will discharge 1% a second even if modular armor power storage is full
Electric Equipment
All electric equipment should be substandard compared to the basic variant, but about similar regarding tech requirement (laser rifle only requiring military 1 and laser as prereqs for example). Upgrades may improve most or all electric equipment, but it will always be substandard to the equivilant non-electric equipment achievable with the same or slightly less effort. The end result of this is that it's possible to function entirely for an indefinate period of time using nothing but existing electric equipment and solars to charge them.


Electric Car: Functions the same as the normal car, but slower and with the weapon using the same power source as movement, resulting in shorter active range

Laser rifle: Like the normal rifle, but with a lower firerate, higher damage, but overall lower DPS compared to smg with basic ammo. Maybe also a t2 version to do slightly less damage than smg with peircing.

Plasma Cutter: Like a pickaxe. Maybe between steel and iron.

Flash/Gravity Grenade: Reusable grenade drops an uncharged version of the grenade at the impact site. meh damage for a grenade but reusable and AOE, so good for spamming.

Electric Train: Uses a battery car (battery car may also transfer power, negating the need for long power lines to connect to very seperate bases).

I haven't researched it yet, but isn't the portable laser a sort of rechargeable laser that can run on solar power?

I think it would make some sense to have e.g. a hydrogen fuel cell that you create from iron plus water plus electricity, and that can function like solid fuel with lower energy density and efficiency loss. This would allow you to run cars and trains on a mostly reusable resource without needing to make a lot of different versions of equipment,

Electric trains are a handy thing IRL. They run a gigantic diesel generator as the main engine source. Thrust is then produced through electric motors. The big advantage is you can distribute the engine power very easily. Any car can potentially produce thrust, which means you aren't putting 5000 tons of stress on the couplings, and you can also accelerate more easily because electric motors get the best torque at their slowest..

I don't understand why making hydrogen would use iron. Unless you're talking about the storage for hydrogen, which I'd understand. But it would be awesome to have the choice between a car running on coal/solidfuel, a car that can use hydrogen as fuel with no pollution, and an electric car directly powered by batteries.

I'm imagining you'd need a new machine to make hydrogen, and something to store hydrogen in, like hydrogen canisters, to make it possible. But if you can have hydrogen canisters filled at the hydrogen plant (which would need electricity and water) you'd effectively be able to have something akin to the normal car in the fact that you can fill the storage of the car with hydrogen canisters and get as much range as a normal car could.

The electric car could have a faster acceleration and top speed, but low range. That is currently how electric cars work as well, seeing as the torque of electric engines is at peak from 0. Now that I think about it, would a hydrogen powered car use hydrogen power cells to convert hydrogen and O2 to water and electricity and then use that electricity to power electric motors, or is it more like a conventional engine?

Anyway, I really like the suggestion to make it possible to use renewable energy for all transport, and I find the idea of energy based weapons intriguing as well.

Khaylain wrote:I don't understand why making hydrogen would use iron. Unless you're talking about the storage for hydrogen, which I'd understand.

Hydrogen should use water and a decent amount of electricity to produce it.

Now that I think about it, would a hydrogen powered car use hydrogen power cells to convert hydrogen and O2 to water and electricity and then use that electricity to power electric motors, or is it more like a conventional engine?

Both exist: Hydrogen combustion engine, Hydrogen fuel cells. The former is not electric, it's pretty much the usual internal combustion engine but fueled by hydrogen instead of gasoline / diesel. The latter uses hydrogen fuel cells to power an electric motor.

vanatteveldt wrote:I think it would make some sense to have e.g. a hydrogen fuel cell that you create from iron plus water plus electricity, and that can function like solid fuel with lower energy density and efficiency loss. This would allow you to run cars and trains on a mostly reusable resource without needing to make a lot of different versions of equipment,

I don't think this would add much to the game. First you wouldn't need "hydrogen fuel cells" as you've described them here (really at the end of the day this is just another word for "solid fuel"), the same effect you describe can essentially be accomplished by just letting hydrogen be processed directly to the usual solid fuel, in such a way that the energy (via electricity) required to generate solid fuel from hydrogen is less than the energy required to generate solid fuel by any other means. But then you're adding two extra chemical plant recipes (water -> hydrogen and hydrogen -> solid fuel) just as yet another means to create solid fuel, and a means that doesn't require oil (so you end up breaking the balance of oil usage severely; who wouldn't make solid fuel from water and electricity?).

The other problem is that -- referring back to "proper" hydrogen fuel cells -- in real life these are used to power electric engines, not combustion engines. A "fuel cell" is a device that generates electric energy; it's not a storage unit for combustion fuel. So, "realistically", you'd still need electric engine versions of all the equipment (the current car is built with combustion engines, for which a hydrogen fuel cell would serve no purpose). Even in Factorio's world of solid fuel powered vehicles, electric fuel cells still don't really fit in.

So, all that said, I don't think this hydrogen-fuel-cell-as-an-alternative-fuel thing really makes sense.

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If electric powered items were added it should be:

• A new set of specialized electric equipment (e.g. an electric car, etc.)
• A proximity charging station energy (your equipment charges as long as it is in range of the station); perhaps in the form of robots (this has a lot of plusses; see below)

And that's it; no new materials, just electric equipment and a generic charging station that can be used for all of it.

And there has to be a trade off. The best one I can think of is limitation on range, which is sort of realistic. I can carry an emergency tank of fuel for my combustion engine in the trunk of my real gas powered vehicle, but I can't really carry spare electricity for me if my electric car runs out of juice away from a charging station. This should be an intentional trade-off to keep this balanced: A decent but relatively short range (compared to e.g. a normal vehicle with a trunk full of solid fuel).

Additionally, to prevent infinite range from being possible by carrying solar panels with you, I think charging stations should take some non-electricity resource, ideally a fluid, so that the stations themselves need to be kept close to proper bases. Alternatively (since it may be too much to add the need for a refinery or other fluid processor) you could add a new type of robot, charger robots, that charge vehicles and personal gear within range of a roboport, and have that be the only means of charging (this has the added bonus of simplifying the tech levels; the electric counterpart of each vehicle can just be made available with the current vehicle's tech, and only the charger robots would have to be a new research item - the other nice thing about charger robots is more charge faster, so there's incentive to build a number of them and balance them in roboport slots). That way it takes at least some effort to recharge your batteries if you get stranded. In any case, balance is important, we don't just want cheap infinite range vehicles.

Charge rates, by the way, should be fast enough to be reasonable, certainly faster than discharge rate, but not so fast as to be instant. You want e.g. some incentive to have at least two of all your electric things for a quick change (like you have two batteries for your electric drill, you charge one while you use the other) for added balance and an extra little goal.

TL;DR: It doesn't really seem to be necessary or desired to involve hydrogen at all in electric powered items, I don't see a place for it that makes sense and keeps balance. The most straightforward is that electric vehicles and weapons have an electrical energy storage capacity (perhaps make a battery an ingredient in all their recipes, just like accumulators) and charge from a specialized source (robots get my vote).

Btw:
- For the planned spaceship the fuel was planned as hydrogen
- We have some suggestions about hydrogen:

First of all the proposal of the devs:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5 Electric energy

Suggestions
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=487&hilit=hydrogen Explosives, Acids, Fuel.
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8172&hilit=hydrogen More Power Options
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=13023 Storing energy as hydrogen (and oxygen)