Transporting Power in Bateries

[chris13524]

Currently, you must have a direct connection to an outpost via power line to be able to power it (unless you setup a power station there which requires much effort). I suggest that you should be able to store energy in batteries, and transport these around. I know you can put power lines in rail blueprints, but I think this adds an extra layer of complexity. Personally, I'd switch to battery-powered outposts if this was implemented. This also fixes the issue where aliens destroy power poles leading to outposts (causing the outpost to get overrun).

[ssilk]

I'm sure there have been some mods, that packed energy in accumulators and vice versa. I think in 0.12. So this is already possible. There are also ideas for having accumulator wagons to transport energy in that way and for electrified trains.

[chris13524]

I'm sure there have been some mods, that packed energy in accumulators and vice versa. I think in 0.12. So this is already possible. There are also ideas for having accumulator wagons to transport energy in that way and for electrified trains.

Electric trains would be interesting, but I'd expect them to work by adding batteries to the locomotive rather than the car.

[mattj256]

You can already store power in accumulators near each outpost.
If you want to be fancy you can put each outpost on its own electric network, as described in this post:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Accumulator#I ... r_Networks

You can also use the circuit network with a power switch to ensure that the reserve power only gets tapped when/if the main power is too low.

This still requires that every outpost is connected to the main power grid, but I think it's the best we can do in vanilla.

I think the bigger problem is there's no easy way to see when an outpost has lost power. This could be implemented as a map overlay. If an outpost has lost power and is being overrun by biters, it's probably already too late to do anything about it.