robotics docks power issue

[Retrino]

ever since the recent change to how powering machines works, robotics has seen a severe anti qol issue (and sort of by extent, any room with a cyborg dock). if you start with borgs, you should expect the apc to be drained within 10 minutes from the round beginning. thats often resulted in a lot of confusion as to why its happened, or random accusations thrown around that the apc was tampered with. 

the increased speed that borgs charge at is really not worth having to constantly change its cell/manually repower. its incredibly annoying, and from hearing that this is the intended behavior, it just makes me wonder …. why? hopefully it can be retuned at some point, because its currently a pain to work around

[Waffleloffle]

while I like this change in concept, I think its bad-feeling execution a symptom of a larger design choice regarding powering the station - that being that it kinda just falling into a boolean of Everything Hooked Up To An APC's Working or Nothing's Working. there's very little that conveys what the specific things that draw an apc's power are, especially if you're not an engineer, and not really many ways to use the power you get efficiently beyond turning off lights I guess

infrastructure to let specific apcs draw more power from the grid if, say, the CE approves a request for it would be neat, as would letting borgs/roboticists be able to adjust the charge rate of docks. more nuanced usage of power is something I've dreamed of seeing for a while now and I'd really love to see it get pulled off well

[Decarcassor]

This was not a very explicit change. But yeah, borg charging stations drain APCs too fast right now. Even with a fully powered station, the APC cells just don't charge fast enough.

Adjustable power draw/APC charge speed seem like the sort of thing that would be nice to have.

[Lord_earthfire]

Wouldn't that be easily solved with a second APC in robotics? Just ask the engineers to build one. That's a simple way to double charge speed and capacity.

Then again, i don't mind actually needing to take care of power. Thats not qol only, thats a gameplay mechanic actually mattering now.

[RelentlessGarbage]

APC's do charge pretty slowly at the moment, even if they're getting good external power from the grid. I've only really noticed this change by the fact that, nowadays, Tool Storage will randomly be rendered darkened and non-functional for a couple of minutes because the APC got drained by a borg just trying to stay alive.

Not exactly sure what approach we should take to fix this, but having borgs totally drain the battery of a room by getting a full charge seems...wrong. Like, I know SS13 takes place on a ratty, scrappy space station most of the time, but a piece of critical infrastructure like the Cyborg charger probably shouldn't lead to local blackouts when used as intended.

[Lord_earthfire]

I looked through the APC code... If i read it correctly, it appears the charge rate is capped at 1% 0,1% per second tick. Everything less than that depends on the power in the network (meaning not enough SMES).

Overall the drain of APC's only happens if there is not enough power in the network. Which, again, means not enough SMES.

What could be is, due to the amount of power drain added in the past PR's, there are not enough SMES to raise the stations power grid to high enough Voltage to keep some departments powered.

This means either we should encourage engineers to build more SMES. Or add a few more to some maps. Most stations only got ~2 SMES connected with the main engine, which is probably not sufficient anymore.

Another option would be to just be able to increase the output SMES add to the power grid.

[Kotlol]

Make a new version of the APC.. that's the old version... put a strong charging drain on it.

Call it APC + and give it to Robotics and Port-Sci.

Fun interaction: You can now EMP these APC's, so they start draining too much.

[Zamujasa]

the main problem is that a ton of power usage and shit was edited without considering the consequences of this upon game balance

i've talked a bit about it in admin discussion and on-station

a huge pr went out that redid a lot of power usage across the board; one of the things it did was turn cyborg charging into a one-to-one APC-power-to-borg-cell-power

now keep in mind that borg cells default to 15000 and the apc defaults to 2500. now consider that, as above, apc recharge rates are pretty heavily capped. you can probably figure out the probelm

the first attempt at fixing this added a magic bullshit power modifier, so that for every 1 unit of apc power, the borg got 3 units of power instead. this "solved" it in that borgs took less time to charge, but a full-charge borg would still drain the apc twice over

a second attempt at fixing it moved the multiplier so that it drained 1/3 and charged 1x, which still has the same problem (since, again, 15000 / 3 = 5000, double the default APC cell)

the power system is busted as fuck regardless for a whole host of reasons -- borgs are free infinite power (use the cell charger to recharge an apc, then recharge, repeat as needed), cell rechargers are free infinite power (always drain 50w regardless of what they're doing), etc

the potential ideal solution would probably require several different changes; i am not saying these are easily doable, just "what we would probably need"

- apcs should no longer rely solely on their own cell for power options
- if the external power is good and sufficient to power all use, the cell should not be used at all, and it the apc should remain auto-on even if the cell is low
- if something is drawing excessive power, it should be pulled from the grid first, and fall back to the apc if that doesn't work

that would give something of a buffer for APCs and a reason to dump excessive power into the grid; you'll still drain robotics or tool storage if the station power isn't sufficient but if there's enough power it shouldn't matter

i don't know how feasible this is because tbqh the entire powernet setup to me is confusing and incomprehensible

[BatElite]

I'm pretty sure that 1%* is off by a factor 10, and also APCs don't tick every second anymore. If I understand the code right it's actually 0.1% every 3.2s. - That's why they charge at a glacial pace in general.

I wanna say though, if I remember right the APC code will look at the consumed load since last tick and if it can draw all of it from the grid, then the APC should be fine. Problem here is that what any APC can draw from the grid is just the total power available divided by the number of APCs, so the system doesn't account for outliers.

I dunno if that's hard to follow for non coding folks so for example:
-If we take cog1 for example and ignore solars, the TEG supplies 4 SMESes that can each output 200kW at most or 800kW total. (Not that people set them that high, but...)
-Say that there's 80 APCs on the cog1 main grid (a low estimate), that makes for 10kW per APC on average.
-Most APCs are well below that and probably won't even reach 5kW. Assuming they do, that's 5*79 = 395kW so there's a 405kW surplus still
-If telesci has their portal active that's a 50kW continuous drain, which is well within that surplus but because it is above the 10kW average the APC will draw 10kW and drain the cell for 40kW worth.
-That shit's fucked. Sorry for ruining the powernet magic for y'all.

I don't remember the conversion to cell charge but obviously it works out to much less than 40k on the cell, those 2500 capacity APC cells don't run out in seconds after all.

(*assuming Lord_earthfire looked at https://github.com/goonstation/goonstati...ery.dm#L34 - the comment is incorrect there: 1 = 100%, so 0.1 = 10% etc)

[Kotlol]

I got another way to fix the whole cyborg charging station problem.
Just add a generator next to them. You know a portable one that's ready to go?
Or any type of generator. it would be a bandaid fix.. but atleast Robotics will always have power.

And so will charging stations....

That or just temporarely disconnect charging stations from the APCs and just have them charge borgs for free for now, till we can fix it.

Right now a bandaid fix is needed asap.

[RelentlessGarbage]

That or just temporarely disconnect charging stations from the APCs and just have them charge borgs for free for now, till we can fix it.

Right now a bandaid fix is needed asap.

I can't comment on how severe this issue is as a non-roboticist, but this might be fine if the problem is that severe and the community is willing to work together to fast-track an improvement to the power system. That or we roll-back the changes made to power consumption until the way that station power is managed is improved and won't lead to borg-related blackouts.

Of course, having borgs give totally free electrical power isn't something that the game should have long-term.

[Lord_earthfire]

(*assuming Lord_earthfire looked at https://github.com/goonstation/goonstati...ery.dm#L34 - the comment is incorrect there: 1 = 100%, so 0.1 = 10% etc)

Jup i did. That is certainly too low. I correct the comment above.

That's the second time recently i read parts about the code wrong. The stuff is really confusing at times.

[Kotlol]

That or just temporarely disconnect charging stations from the APCs and just have them charge borgs for free for now, till we can fix it.

Right now a bandaid fix is needed asap.

I can't comment on how severe this issue is as a non-roboticist, but this might be fine if the problem is that severe and the community is willing to work together to fast-track an improvement to the power system. That or we roll-back the changes made to power consumption until the way that station power is managed is improved and won't lead to borg-related blackouts.

Of course, having borgs give totally free electrical power isn't something that the game should have long-term.

I played one shift as a robotcist where my objective was "Keep 3 borgs alive"
Not that hard.. but when I loaded both cyborg charging stations within 10 mins my APC was out even with the engine running (Donut 3)
Of course we had to replace to cell to keep going, but an actual busy robotcist lab. Aka fabricating, charging borgs and batteries and such.. will drain fast.
It also means borg players have to get out in time of their chargers to not drain the APC.

It can be worked around, but it's fairly annoying.

BUT... I can see this being a HUUUUUUUGE problem with an engineer/robotcist antag combo.
How? Engineer keeps making cyborg charging stations as a robotcist keeps building borgs.
Heck you don't even need a robotcist. You just need powercells and the robot fabricator to make your own "free to open key" and "power sink"

Remember if you push inactive borgs against doors they will open them for you.... Now this hasn't happened yet as an antag, but... cyborg charging stations across the map with borgs in them as an engineer to drain the power or even SHUT DOWN THE ENGINE?! Yea.. you can see this as a possible abuse and annoyanc

[Zamujasa]

if you want to test power stuff locally, i added an admin toggle, "Toggle Power Debug", that causes flying text to show up over most things that are consuming power



it will also show when the grid doesn't have enough power, so the APC is draining and how much (red), and how much power it is charging if it is (in green)


"Eq" is equipment (most things)
"En" is environmental (very few things)
"Li" is lighting; may show up in walls because lighting is usually credited to an invisible Area Lighting object

[TDHooligan]

I think that an average borg storing a whole room's worth of power is a bit absurd, and there is no fix for that without separating borg cells and APCs, as the two are interchangeable.
How about something like making APCs hold more than 1 power cell? rather than trying to play with making weird efficiency changes and reworking how *every* power cell works, just make the station in general store a larger buffer that a borg literally cannot match by virtue of having only one battery slot. artcells' capacity could also be brought down a bit to stop a borg having infinite juice capacity.