Electric Railroad

[Poopbutt12345]

TLDR: New fancy rail acts like a better rail, and a power pole at the same time. Also new fancy train doesn't require fuel, just electricity. Much faster, but more speed more power. Expensive.

General
These would act like ordinary rails, however they would carry power along the rail as if it were a power line. This would allow for cleaner builds, an increase in the scale of fulgora builds unlike anything possible now, an increase in UPS optimization for megabase runs ( I would imagine), and an upgraded version to the most beloved part of this game. This also allows for the introduction of a new, upgraded version of the train that can rely on electricity and not traditional fuels. I believe that this would add a lot of depth to several areas in the game that either lack necessity or upgrades that can be unlocked later in the game. I also feel that this is not out of place or unrealistic, however I do see the potential in conflicting design elements, however I think that it would bring a lot to the game and the player's experience.

Balancing
Crafting can be unlocked either mid-game, after fulgora, requiring holmium plates ( or a new item, holmium wire ) and super conductors. However, unlock can be pushed to late game and require unique resources from most or all 4 dlc planets. I believe that the rails should definitely require resources from fulgora, possibly also aquilo. The addition and/or cooling and cycling of fluoroketone requires some amount of infrastructure in order to use this new system. This all really depends on the opinion of the dev team and their goal for the game and has many different paths.

The upgraded train that is proposed along with this upgraded rail, would use electricity and not fuel. Acceleration and top speed can be dramatically higher than vanilla trains using nuclear fuel, at the cost of power consumption. Power consumption can add a fair bit of depth; The train does not draw much or any electricity at idle, but usage spikes high when accelerating or braking, and remaining stable at a moderate consumption when cruising at speed. Because of this, the stability of the electrical grid as well as the storage and/or instantaneous power production potential of a base becomes much more of a concern. This would increase the need to design better power systems or suffer blackouts and brownouts, and this need for a stable power system only increases as the number of electric trains increases. Another note, if the idea of trains needing no interrupts sounds ludicrous, just require that trains must be filled with fluoroketone and must go make a pitstop to drain, cool, and refill before leaving to do train things again. This keeps a similar nature to vanilla trains but implements more variety of buildings and requirements.

Fulgora can finally get BIG. Powered rails jumping from island to island, you would be able to set up many independent factories, or many different islands that produce one thing and each island contributes to the network. Each island also does not need it's own independent power but dedicated power plant islands can be made and supplied by train and power each other island connected. This makes fulgora much more interesting and dynamic, not dependent on researching foundations if you want to expand. If you made enough foundations to make a single large building platform on fulgora, you killed the spirit of fulgora, and if you connect the islands together with rails and power poles and using foundations to float singular power poles through the ocean, you have done the same thing this solution proposes to fix but in a much more clunky way. Depending on when the electric rail is unlocked, it can seriously change the way fulgora as a planet is played, but it would definitely bring a nice quality of life at any point in the game.

Finally, if a player walks along a powered rail, it can deal damage that scales with the amount of power in the electrical grid. In order to make this a tool and not a weapon to defend against biters, the short can draw huge amounts of power that can cause a blackout or brownout. There can also be a set blackout that occurs whenever a rail is shorted in order to prevent players from making the rail into a wall of death. Rails can also be restricted from ground placement, requiring that all powered rails be elevated if powered rails along the ground seems difficult or unrealistic.