Selling power

[Kaet]

With the engine being able to get way too much power for one station alone, it would be nice to do something other than destroy the station with.

So maybe some kind of portable SMES battery that you could hook up in QM to charge it up with power and sell it for the current electricity price or whatever.

That way the engineers can make some money for the station too.
Or the quartermasters sell too much power and force the engineers to work overtime to keep the lights on.

[enforcer9]

With the engine being able to get way too much power for one station alone, it would be nice to do something other than destroy the station with.

So maybe some kind of portable SMES battery that you could hook up in QM to charge it up with power and sell it for the current electricity price or whatever.

That way the engineers can make some money for the station too.
Or the quartermasters sell too much power and force the engineers to work overtime to keep the lights on.

Make the energy demands extremely high and the engineers are forced to work nonstop to keep the energy flow and i'm for it.

[UrsulaMejor]

How do we get power to other stations? Microwave beams?

If that's the case, or something, we should be able to BUY power back, for when there are no engineers, at the added risk of WHOOPS THE POWER BEAM JUST CUT BOTANY IN HALF.

[Captain_Bravo]

I actually suggested a microwave beam a while back, as a mining thing. A whole room of consoles dedicated to a couple arrays would actually be really fucking cool. Plus I love the idea of buying power when the engineers are being dickwads.

[Weavel]

Why not just have a unique SMES unit that you can un-wrench and move around? Re-wrench it to a wire, can power whatever's along it, OR you can shove it in the QM launcher and send it into space, where the power is transferred and it's returned empty.

Also everything in this thread sounds fun already

[Klayboxx]

If SMES units or APC's could move that would be so much code and processing, holy crap

[Preid]

What if QM could buy some sort of super industrial battery uncharged, charge it, then sell it back for a profit depending on how charged it is.

[Captain_Bravo]

What if you just tweak the code you're using for botany quality to let you sell power cells at higher prices with higher charges.

Pros:
Turn electricity into money!
Fight those damn roboticists who try to steal all the power cells every round!
Mining has a damn good incentive to get Cerenkite! Hell, with the new QM barcode/money system, Mining has a damn good incentive to get char. (Power the furnaces with char, use ores to make and charge batteries, then slap your label on it and turn it into money.)

Cons:
Not a single goddamned one. At all. None.

[Captain_Bravo]

Meant to preview, not post...

Anyway, you'd have to add in a bit more code for selling batteries to vary with power level. Also, you'd need to put a recharger at mining, give the mining fabricator batteries to build, and make it so that creating a battery doesn't start it with a full charge. (I honestly don't know if it does this or not, but everything else seems to come out of the fabber fully charged/filled/pressurized, so i dunno.)

A little work, but it would add a lot to the game.