[READ ME] GUIDE TO FIXING THE CHAR ENGINE SETUP ON POD WARS

[CaptainBravo]

hello. are you tired of your ship constantly running out of power for seemingly no reason on pod wars? does literally nothing about how an SMES unit functions make sense to you? are you actually the guy that started touching everything and now it's all fucked up and your commander is yelling at you and threatening to ahelp you for being such a useless POS? did some NT bootlicker sneak into your ship, futz with the SMES units, and now your idiot commander is blaming it on you and threatening to ahelp anyways?

well, good news. all that shit is totally fixable. just follow these easy steps

1. Check to make sure your furnaces are on.

Your furnaces need coal to burn. You should, even with power spikes, have enough coal to last you all round long at roundstart, provided nobody has thought they're too smart for the SMES units and adjusted them past normal operating capacity. If the furnaces are on and full, they should look like this:



Great! The furnaces are on and still full of coal. But what if someone HAS futzed with everything in the SMES and broken it?

2. Check to make sure the SMES are set up properly.

If set up properly, your SMES units' readouts should look like this:



Or, possibly, like this:



These two acceptable states represent:

1. An SMES unit that is charging and outputting power, and

2. An SMES unit that is charging, but idling while the other unit handles the load.

Notice that both units are set to 15 kW input, the default. Going higher than this can result in problems, which we'll cover shortly. Also notice that the output is set to 14kW, just below the input value. This can safely go higher and will help offset battery drains in APCs under heavy power loads (constant machine use/pod manufacturing), but 14 will handle most if not all issues just fine while ensuring the SMES continue charging under all circumstances.

Now, what does it look like when something goes wrong?



Ah, that's no good. Someone has set the target input higher than the amount of energy the furnaces were capable of producing. This stalls the SMES and forces it to constantly try to initialize power input. It won't charge while it's in this state.

Additionally, simply setting the target input back to 15 won't unstall the SMES. It needs to cycle fully. First, turn the output and input off:



Next, return the target input to the available value (15), and turn only the input back on:



Once the unit shows "Charging" under the Charge Mode, you can safely turn the output back on as well:



And everything is now all fixed. Congratulations, you're the best.