Factorio Forums

There are several situations when this would be extremely useful and convenient!
I have a suit with 10 portable roboports. Each has 700 kW charging rate... My portable reactor provides 35kW. Even with 3 reactors it would take REALLY LONG time to charge. All that time I would not be able to use my exoskeleton since roboports take all the power. If I take off my suit it would stop charging, so I have to wear it till it charges... It would be really nice to have some kind of charging station where I can just stand and it would quickly charge all my modular armor components from the grid. Another good way would be to have charger for portable batteries. In this situation it would be possible to have a bunch of batteries, place them in the suit to charge its components and then put it back to the charger.

Another useful application would be on the battlefield. Lets say you have a lot of force-fields on you, but not the reactors. It would be nice to be able to quickly get in range of your grid, recharge and get back to the battle.

I think the best approach would be to have some thing, where you just place you modular armor and it charges all armor components from the grid. I think it would not change the game balance since you are able to do the same thing if you have several suits and just wear them with portable solar panels or reactors to fully charge them. It just takes really long time in some cases.

This also seem very logical. You should be able to charge or replace battery on your suit. Imagine that your mobile phone did not have a charger and was able to charge only from build-in solar panel. Yes it is useful when you are out of town, but you probably want to charge it in a regular way when you are at home or at work.

Not being able to charge your suit seems extremely irrational, illogical and just stupid...

P.S. I am sure there are modders that would want to have accumulators with higher capacity and powerful modular stuff(portable teleporter?, predator's plasma turret?, Cybran infrared laser?, cloak device?) on their suits!

The thing is that I think there are reasons power armors have limited space. Like force people to make choices.
Choice between 10 portable roboports, 10 exoskelettons, 10 fusion reactors, ...
I mean you could have a power armor with 4 roboports only, which would free some space for more fusion reactors.

Without that constraint, it would be possible to rack enough stuff in the power armor to become invincible.

I still think being able to charge the batteries in the roboport and just batteries from the power grid would be really nice. Not sure if it can be done without having some exploitable situation of running powerlines to a place of combat and just tapping off it. Perhaps if you had to actually step inside the unit and become both immobile and unable to shoot, throw capsules, or similar.

Some type of induction charger would make a great halfway item between solar panels and portable fusion. Solar panels give less than 1kW per slot while fusion gives over 4kW per slot. An induction charger could easily give 2-3kW per slot and not be too out of place.

Koub wrote:The thing is that I think there are reasons power armors have limited space. Like force people to make choices.
Choice between 10 portable roboports, 10 exoskelettons, 10 fusion reactors, ...
I mean you could have a power armor with 4 roboports only, which would free some space for more fusion reactors.

Without that constraint, it would be possible to rack enough stuff in the power armor to become invincible.

Okay, the ability to charge just modules for modular armor probably is the same as having modular armor with bigger space... Since you would be able just to swap discharged elements in armor with charged ones...

Taking off the armor and placing it in special stationary thing(the charger) connected to the grid would not have this problem. This would allow to charge several piece of armor at the same time, but armor is quite expensive, so I think it should be fine. Another suggested way would be to have a charger where you would have to step in. This charger can just block the user for the charging time, so it really gives a limit that you can charge only one armor at the same time and you cannot use it while it is charging. Taking of the armor can use some timing event or a thing where you would have to step in. That would prevent the player from changing armor during the battle.
The exact way does not really matter. It would also give more options for armor configurations like placing batteries instead of power sources.

After a bit of thinking I really like the idea of a thing where you would have to step in to change the armor or charge it. I remember Enemy Infestation game where crew would have to step on special thing that was changing their outfit. This is what it looked like in that game: