Switch-room concept.

[Sundance]

The switch-room, a sprawling mess of cables and monitors, is a true mechanics home. It is a small dingy room, but it plays a rather big function in power management, and has a few upsides as well. It is made up of 3 new things:
The Power Terminal, Portable SMES's & Switch Computer.


The Power Terminal

This is the power terminal. It is a simple plug device, with its sole purpose to charge devices attached to it via a wrench. It starts to empty power from the engine into whatever device is attached once it is on. It can be turned on via the Switch Computer. Beware: If it is turned on without a device attached to it, it will give a very nasty arc flash.


Portable SMES's

These SMES looking devices are different from their anchored counterpart. First off, they can be moved. Secondly, they can be wrenched to two terminals: The Power Terminal (in which it will start to be charged) or a Data Terminal (in which it will dump any charged energy to the connected APC). Which means they are good back-up for power outages, although the power they have is alot less than a normal SMES
Thirdly, they can be made via blueprints given, although you have two to begin with.
And finally they can be sold. A fully powered one can be sold for good profit.


Switch Computer

The Switch Computer works off DWAINE, off the Engineering Server (forgive me if I'm mistaken but I'm almost certain there's some server like this). It's purpose is that it can turn off/on any APC on the station, and can specifically turn off atmospherics/lighting/equipment if needs be. This is very handy in conjunction with the adjacent power monitors, and mischievous if you know how. It works off a programme called Make'N'Break. Launching Make'N'Break, you can run it automatically, in which it will request a letter, then gives a list of variables, then a shortened term, such as "eqp", "ams", "ltg" or "all" then it requests Y/N? Manual enters the code in without prompts, for those that are more familiar. For example: a02eqpN means:
a: Is the bridge sector
02: Is the 2nd APC, which in this instance is the captains room
eqp: Equipment
N: No
So by entering this, we turned off the captain's room's equipment. This is great, but there's catch. The Make-n-break does not state what A, or 02 is, this must be read via the yellow index book given.
Of course, given that it's DWAINE you know what this means: Nerds who understand how to replicate the script can do this on any computer. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

So.. what you's think? There definitely could be other things the mechanics could make that would require some big charge (perhaps a "huge object" emp? No? ok) and before you whine: No, I object to having the switch computer not work off DWAINE. The main reason for DWAINE is that it can be infiltrated by those in the know, and there needs stuff like this added to encourage hacking

[Chike101]

It all looks very good, I can see this working well. I still think it should be a room with switches lining the walls, but this is the next best thing.

Summary: Yes, I can dig it

[Captain_Bravo]

Make it so cyborgs, or anyone with robotic legs/treads can be wrenched in to the socket, and we're golden.

[Sundance]

Make it so cyborgs, or anyone with robotic legs/treads can be wrenched in to the socket, and we're golden.

That's what I was thinking, but if you think about it, this is untethered power, so the consequences of attaching something like that would be.. explosive.

[Ikkonoishi]

Why limit them to cyborg legs?

Place someone on the tile.

Use cable on them or the tile.

Apply the full power of the engine to them directly.

[Captain_Bravo]

Oh my god, if this ends with a staff assistant spontaneously turning into the Maecho Mann we will have officially come full circle in Space Station 13.

[Clarks]

What I really want is be able to direct power, rather than turning apcs on and off.
For instance, sending 10 MW to the medical area, and see all their machinery work into overdrive (with comical disruption) while arcflashes hit everywhere. Or turning the power to the brig all the way down and see their lights go dim, and airlocks cycle slowly.

Ideally engineering would feed power to mid-level power stations for each department; from engineering you could tweak the amount of power sent to each. Department apcs would get power from the power-station they are connected to. Each power station would have control machinery for the apcs it feeds.

However, machines, lights and doors wold require new code to take into account power levels.

[Cogwerks]

There is quite a bit more planned for the switch room idea still, I sprited a distribution panel ages ago, drsingh set up a bunch of preliminary code for it, and angriestIBM has some framework for network actions on APCs that can be seen on Hemera. Remote access to APCs via a central system is still a planned feature, it'll happen eventually.

[Jerkops]

A corpse stapled together from body parts (legs, arms and torso+head from 5 different people, or maybe 4 people and one cyborg limb), strapped to the power terminal and electrified should create a Frankenstein monster.