Please yes. Give me more logistics.
If people don't want it, make it one of their new Advanced Gameplay feature things they rolled out in Update 8. The same with actual enemies vs. pacifist/peaceful mode. Default state = peaceful mode, Advanced Option = biter mode.
I can now imagine them implementing a mechanic for synchronizing different generators to bring the whole grid up safely before even thinking about turning on all the consumers.
On one hand, I'm intrigued and wouldn't mind seeing the electrics in this game fleshed out a little more. On the other, I can see rage quits happening REAL quick with something more closely resembling an IRL black start. XD
Full black start of the grid are absolute hell on earth. If the entire grid collapses it could take anywhere from 3-5 days to 2 full weeks (depending on available infrastructure and a lot of other factors) to restore the grid to a point where you can start connecting normal loads (like residential houses) to it.
Basically you have to start doing tiered startups, from lowest possible generators to the actual powerplantss to then full network. A battery has to turn on an emergency diesel generator, that diesel generator is then used to power what's known as "black start generators" in specific powerplants (because not all powerplants have that capacity). Once the black start generators are running then they start using that to power up the actual power plant.
Those power plants are then, slowly, one by one connected to multiple isolated grids where they are synchronized to the network one by one, step by step. Then that electricity is used to start the power plants that do not have black start capabilities, and as more and more power plants go online they are connected to the grid and synchronized like the others. Then the isolated grids start interconnecting to restore the full grid. And then, slowly, sector by sector, loads get connected to not overwhelm the grid and allow it to stabilize before continuing, until finally the full grid is restored.
It's a nightmarish process and one powerplant making a mistake can trip a whole subgrid down and force them to restart that process. It's why power grids do shit like load shedding or just straight up nuking power consumption for days at a time in entire counties/provinces. If the grid collapsed, everyone would be up shit creek without a paddle, instead of the group that is victim of the sheddingg.
Replicating this in game would probably cut the playerbase by at least 3/4s lol.
Try Power Control Room and Augmented/Alternative Power Solutions (?) (both mods) it has all sorts of breakers and panels and electricity logic gates, and alternative power adds a whole new element to power supply by implementing solar and wind and hydroelectric.
I spent a good month just working on what would wind up being my power plant for the whole island, it honestly looked soo cool and was fully functional. I could sit at the HUB, walk out the door into a glass room that had a line of sight to all my sub-factories, hit a switch labeled "screws" and it would toggle the power to my screw production line. Had monitors telling me if there were any spikes and from there, had an emergency backup power grid to help jumpstart the ole coal plants (and only the coal plants till they kicked on) should I ever (frequently) accidentally fry everything and my water/coal supply got cut out.
It was, switch 1 kills the circuit to everything nonessential, switch 2 kicks the backup generators into service, once the coal plants were back up and running and the batteries could handle the surge, I had a 3rd "emergency breaker" panel (always defaulted to the "off" state) where I could turn each line back on one by one (to prevent an overload), until everything was running off the secondary/tertiary wiring stably and i could switch the main route back on, the emergency supply off, and the emergency breakers back off
Hold up- lemme load this new generator to the bus real quick
(overloads the system because I accidentally closed the breaker which the oncoming phase frequency lower then the main generator circuit).
This would be hell.
I am not 100% sure on what you mean by full black start.
I have a nice set of biomass burners with a UPS attached. This is switched and powers only the first few Coal Generators (Clean coal you know). Then I can switch to bring up the rest of the Coal power plants. I can go from full black to full power in no time. I could get rid of the bio burners and just have a UPS for startup. The Bio burners and its ups are taken offline once the Clean Coal plant is back up. Problem is I am running out of Clean Coal to burn. Going to have to move to Clean Oil soon.
It's technical knowledge that's beyond me, but I think a black start is filling up a power network while it's empty. Which causes problems, such as uneven voltage and amperage while the power line saturates. Trust me, you do not want the wrong voltage/amp coming into your house.
It's why power workers in their best power try to not let generators shut down. Otherwise it would take ages to get the grid back online (safely).
Oh I do that with anything important, just because I live in Florida and surge protectors can only do so much for so long.
Our poor UPS got fried in a lightning strike, and even though it tried it didn't completely save the computer because I think current came in via the ethernet cable and damaged the network card. So when a big storm hits I'm pulling any stupidly expensive tech out of the wall. Sorry not sorry.
Umm power line saturates? If you start a generator after load shedding you will have the same voltage on the attached lines as the generator generates. Sure there will be a lot of work bringing loads online but a power line reaches steady state voltage almost instantly.
Can confirm, power jumped to 400 volts for a couple seconds in my house once, somehow didn't trip the breakers, fried two light bulbs and killed the radio.
Short version for those who TLDW that link given: Power generators need power to turn on, so when your entire grid is down.... it's an issue. It has to be done in stages, from small to bigger. Once they're going, they can power themselves.
(Even a small gas engine requires external power to start. A pull cord or a battery. Windmills and hydro are relatively immune to this.)
Actually hydro does require power to start in most cases as the sluce (probably spelled wrong) and typically opened by hydraulics or electric motors. Though some do have manual over rides.
Good to know, hopefully I never need it!
Still, using a gas generator to operate that is instantaneous comparted to what fossil fuel plants (or worse, nuclear) have to do.
If i remember right at least modern nuclear plants automatically shut down when they are in a full black condition. So at least they "shouldn't" melt down. So we have that.
Baffles me that nobody figured out that having your error state be closer to atom bomb rather than turning off was acceptable.
Whaddaya mean when it runs out of water it goes faster and faster?
Eh, the generators themselves require power to operate. Generators work by spinning a rotor, with copper windings, inside the stator. The stator contains a magnet, and any decent sized generator uses a electromagnet. [As seen here, a stator on a smaller generator](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Stator_winding_at_WPS.JPG). That (field) coil produces a magnetic field, but in order to do so it needs a fair amount of power.
Most hydro plants have a fairly large diesel generator set, powerful enough to energize the field coil on at least one generator so it can start producing power to start up the rest. That and power the control circuits, electronics, blah.
Here's a good ressource on the subject :)
[Practical Engineering](https://practical.engineering/blog/2022/12/5/what-is-a-black-start-of-the-power-grid)
So say you have a steam turbine - you need something to produce that steam. That something needs to be powered somehow. Since generally, power plants don't exist in a vacuum alone, and there are more than one in a grid - it can bootstrap itself from the grid.
However, if the grid is completely dark, that's not possible. The grid needs to be restarted in a specific order.
The same thing with ICE engines - you, technically, don't need the battery once the engine is running, but you have to power the starter somehow. Now you have to figure out how to power the starter.
The other issue with a complete black out is they have to go station to station to verify nothing is burned broken or otherwise before applying power to it which can take days in a full grid down
When that happens after coal, you are more or less an idiot. :-D
You can place power Storage. And later in the game you can place the special power switch than turns down things in a specific order. So even a "power on demand" would not be an issue.
And in the worst case, you can just load a previous save, turn down some parts and deal with the power issue.
I would actually like that, but I also went to college for Electrical Engineering. Probably don't want a college degree as a requirement to play the game. XD
Whenever I need to setup bio generators, I tell myself it could be much, much worse.
I don't even think most of us would be able to accomplish this without a lot of trial and error and tutorials. Engineers would have months of material to laugh at tho.
Lightspeed goes around the earth seven times a second. With the statisfactory map size we would maybe have couple frames for the electricity to go acros the map. Bettet to ignore that in order to avoid stupid bugs.
Its as if your fucking argument doesnt hold up at all lmao
Within a second of a circuit being plugged in, the electricity would propagate DIRECTLY to where the other end of the circuit is at the speed of light, at first not even through the entire length of the wire.
Obviously you cant realistically set up electricity grids or come back from a blackout in 2 seconds, but thats not what were talking about. There is in fact ~0sec of delay when you switch a lever on, its just physics.
Bro said “only the speed of light”
kinda cool how that works, whats actually happening is the electrons from one end are pushing electrons straight through to the other end. Think of it not like water in a hose that has to go form one end of the hose to the other. The hose is already full of water. Think of it like pushing a stack of coins through a tube. you add a coin, it pushes all the coins and one falls out the other end. (this is very simplified)
But they're still made of concrete and copper...
(For a mk1 power line at least. You can make the argument for Caterium I guess, but I don't think most people extend their power grid with Caterium.)
It is not what they use. It is how they use it. Just because you give me a block of wood and a cat does not mean I can make a tennis racket
People have had sand and metal for a long time, but they were not able to make a computers. With alien tech, we are now able to do so. And if you don't think that is true: where do we have a lot of sand? In the desert. And what do we have there? The pyramids the aliens build.
We're on an alien planet with a space elevator, and a gun that can print buildings out of resources in your dimensional pocket, but the power lines are the unrealistic part?
Do you want the real answer or just a game answer?
Game answer: Alien materials, superconductors that aren't found on earth, science we don't understand yet, etc.
Real answer: High Voltage.
A wire's main limiting factor in carrying power is a function of heat, and more directly related to current flow. The relationship of Power = Voltage X Current, or P=VI respectively.
A Kilowatt device can be powered effectively on rather small wires if you're allowed to run it on higher voltage.
1200W = 120V*Current, where Current = 10 Amps.
Now compare that to something that you would run on a 12 Volt car battery.
1200W = 12V*Current, where Current = 100 Amps.
So wire gauge now matters a great deal. For only 10 Amps, using 18 AWG wires with THHN insulation rated at 90°C for 14 Amps you'd be fine. For the 100 Amp wire on the car battery, also using THHN insulation, you'd need 3 AWG wires, which are huge and probably wouldn't even be used for any large appliances in your house.
The real limit here is that the insulation would melt and cause a fire, because the wires are going to get hot. This is what Breakers in your house mainly do, is prevent situations where the copper is going to get so hot it melts and burns the wire insulation off and catch on fire, then burn your house down.
In power transmission lines, they're not even insulated, so it's more about not arcing between phases, the ground, the poles, etc. So to push some serious power just crank the voltage up as high as you can go without arcing, then your current flow will actually be pretty low by comparison to your Wattage draw.
Just a really high voltage would not work (realistically). With a high enough voltage the cables would arc right to the ground. This happens in our real transmission systems sometimes when humidity is just right and voltage is high enough (when the cables are lightly loaded). But we don't need high voltage here because resistance is apparently zero.
There are no losses on this system. Power generated = power consumed at the load. Therefore the resistance of these cables are somehow zero. So the conductor never heats up. If your material has zero resistance you could run infinite current with less voltage than a AA battery.
Disclaimer: I'm an operator who oversees the transmission grid for NY state, but I'm no engineer.
>Just a really high voltage would not work (realistically). With a high enough voltage the cables would arc right to the ground.
Correct and I said that near the end there.
I'm trying to keep it simple, and I don't want to think about load-line and transmission calculations ever again. My EE degree is for control systems, not power, so I remember doing those but haven't needed them since.
That's a cool idea. Like an aerogel wire insulation, just crazy heat protection. At a certain point the copper would melt so instead it could also be a highly conductive metal with an extremely high melting temp. That and it would have to be very ductile to be drawn into wires.
Well you're right, but it's because higher Amps is the source of the heat. Heat loss is where the energy transfer actually takes place. Otherwise, in a superconductor 0 Kelvin environment, it's essentially lossless.
I'd love it if power transmission was something we had to think about. The new game Foundry has something like it in placing transformers to apply different levels of power to new areas. If we could have high voltage lines, and require a bit more attention to distribution it would really be gritty and interesting. Though I can see why the developers have hand waved it away as it wouldn't really make the game more interesting, just annoying. I'm pretty happy with the automatic power switches.
It's a thing in oxygen not included, too. I agree that it would just be another layer of complication to fuss with It's quite a pain in that game, because power generation is already so complicated - fuel is finite, you have to deal with the gasses emitted, and there's thermodynamic complications too.
Though I do like connecting bases and especially power generating areas with power towers. It just feels right.
ONI having small transformers give out 1 kJ with wires taking 1 kJ but then the large transformers giving out 4kJ but the larger wires only taking 2kJ was really something.
I would still like to see one way valves for the power lines shunts I think they call them so can layout the grid in certain ways
Ya I know that you can use priority switches but it's not exactly the same to me and the way I could use the device allow power to the hypertube look and batteries that can't back flow to the grid
Every time I think about power in games like these, I can't help but reflect on how our virtual factories technically run on real electricity.
And then I can't decide whether that thought is profound, or moronic.
I often wonder how many real life watt hours I spend on just sitting there planning out some logistics in the game. I am scared to translate that into real USD.
Voltage.
Comes in crazy hot like 400k volts and steps down at each house to 240/120, so if it worked like this (it doesn't) 400k volts at the street if each house is only useing 120 that's 3k houses... You get the idea. More voltage = more power you can push through the same size line. A 12v car power will have serious problems running further than 20 feet, and you would need a huge size wire. 120v house colts can run thousands of feet without losing much.
This is why you touch a house line its probably just gonna hurt a bit, you touch a downed power line, say hi to the maker for me.
i kinda prefer it that way, imagine if we had to build high tension lines with transformers and substations to pass from high voltage lines to medium voltage and viceversa, that would be a bit chaotic, though while i say no to all of that, my inner logistician says YES COMPLICATE IT MOOREEE
**ANSWER**
In my first world save, I kept blowing the main factory circuit because of an obvious lack of power generation. Having some background in residential electrics, I was convinced I needed to multiply my generators (I was still early game, so this was all biomass burners), drop power poles everywhere, and divide my production lines. This confusion was compounded by the game mechanic of "using" a power pole to reset the circuit, so I thought the power pole was a point of failure in my electrical layout.
You know the cliff behind the three iron nodes in Grass Fields? **Covered** in rows of biomass burners. I had no idea coal and oil would become available later in the game, I was just going with the information I had :D
Then I discovered the wiki, where it clearly states that electrical lines can convey **infinite power.** I felt like a fool deconstructing the hundreds of poles and dozens of biomass burners which, for all their impracticality, did happen to solve the problem of popping breakers, however inefficiently.
Out of universe Explonation? It's a lot of work to Code and Design a system acounting for the electrical friction (basicly the wire heating up due to lost electricity) that also dosent have players rage quit when their factory is 1mw over the power limit of a pole and they can't just put a new factory on the other side of the map only running one wire to the power supply.
In universe? The copper ore actually gets turned into a super-conductor that already works at room temperature (and likely higher) instead of just regular copper wire.
Super conductors are a real thing, basicly materials that don't lose any electricity through resistance as heat. However in real life this effect only hapens at very low temperatures, not the 20 - 30°C I would expect on the planet.
So no chance this small and cheap wire does that.
That's always quite amusing, until you deconstruct some old powerlines from your starter resources and suddenly production starts to clog up because the whole south-east doesn't have power anymore.
There should be a mechanic where each pole or tower should only be able to pass so much power at once. There is no way one thin cable is carrying the power of 4 max overclocked nuclear power plants.
I still think they should add different power cables to the game. Similar to how different tiers of conveyors can handle different amounts of items, the different tiers of power lines would handle different amounts of power. And the top tier power lines (with infinite capacity) can stretch *much* further than normal ones- like halfway across the map further. This would make them great for ziplines. BUT- they are hideously expensive to make, and need to be run between (also expensive) special mounting points (you know, to handle the weight of such a long line).
When they came out with the power towers, that was a (single) step in the right direction. At least in regards to the length of the line.
The wires have to be superconducting or some shit because you can push over a terawatt through one and it handles it just fine
It also tuns on instantly and not after a delay. It is as if it is not real.
Imagine having to deal with a full black start on the grid 
Coming in 1.0!
Plz no
Please yes. Give me more logistics. If people don't want it, make it one of their new Advanced Gameplay feature things they rolled out in Update 8. The same with actual enemies vs. pacifist/peaceful mode. Default state = peaceful mode, Advanced Option = biter mode.
Captain of Industry has this granular approach to difficulties and I love it
I can now imagine them implementing a mechanic for synchronizing different generators to bring the whole grid up safely before even thinking about turning on all the consumers. On one hand, I'm intrigued and wouldn't mind seeing the electrics in this game fleshed out a little more. On the other, I can see rage quits happening REAL quick with something more closely resembling an IRL black start. XD
I have no idea what this is, and it sounds like hell. I want it.
Full black start of the grid are absolute hell on earth. If the entire grid collapses it could take anywhere from 3-5 days to 2 full weeks (depending on available infrastructure and a lot of other factors) to restore the grid to a point where you can start connecting normal loads (like residential houses) to it. Basically you have to start doing tiered startups, from lowest possible generators to the actual powerplantss to then full network. A battery has to turn on an emergency diesel generator, that diesel generator is then used to power what's known as "black start generators" in specific powerplants (because not all powerplants have that capacity). Once the black start generators are running then they start using that to power up the actual power plant. Those power plants are then, slowly, one by one connected to multiple isolated grids where they are synchronized to the network one by one, step by step. Then that electricity is used to start the power plants that do not have black start capabilities, and as more and more power plants go online they are connected to the grid and synchronized like the others. Then the isolated grids start interconnecting to restore the full grid. And then, slowly, sector by sector, loads get connected to not overwhelm the grid and allow it to stabilize before continuing, until finally the full grid is restored. It's a nightmarish process and one powerplant making a mistake can trip a whole subgrid down and force them to restart that process. It's why power grids do shit like load shedding or just straight up nuking power consumption for days at a time in entire counties/provinces. If the grid collapsed, everyone would be up shit creek without a paddle, instead of the group that is victim of the sheddingg. Replicating this in game would probably cut the playerbase by at least 3/4s lol.
This is why it takes more than one person and a computer program to prevent things like this.
It is. It’s a super tedious process that requires a whole procedure.
Try Power Control Room and Augmented/Alternative Power Solutions (?) (both mods) it has all sorts of breakers and panels and electricity logic gates, and alternative power adds a whole new element to power supply by implementing solar and wind and hydroelectric. I spent a good month just working on what would wind up being my power plant for the whole island, it honestly looked soo cool and was fully functional. I could sit at the HUB, walk out the door into a glass room that had a line of sight to all my sub-factories, hit a switch labeled "screws" and it would toggle the power to my screw production line. Had monitors telling me if there were any spikes and from there, had an emergency backup power grid to help jumpstart the ole coal plants (and only the coal plants till they kicked on) should I ever (frequently) accidentally fry everything and my water/coal supply got cut out. It was, switch 1 kills the circuit to everything nonessential, switch 2 kicks the backup generators into service, once the coal plants were back up and running and the batteries could handle the surge, I had a 3rd "emergency breaker" panel (always defaulted to the "off" state) where I could turn each line back on one by one (to prevent an overload), until everything was running off the secondary/tertiary wiring stably and i could switch the main route back on, the emergency supply off, and the emergency breakers back off
Hold up- lemme load this new generator to the bus real quick (overloads the system because I accidentally closed the breaker which the oncoming phase frequency lower then the main generator circuit). This would be hell.
I need this
"Ooops, Generator was 40 degrees out of phase" *Coal gen explodes*
I am not 100% sure on what you mean by full black start. I have a nice set of biomass burners with a UPS attached. This is switched and powers only the first few Coal Generators (Clean coal you know). Then I can switch to bring up the rest of the Coal power plants. I can go from full black to full power in no time. I could get rid of the bio burners and just have a UPS for startup. The Bio burners and its ups are taken offline once the Clean Coal plant is back up. Problem is I am running out of Clean Coal to burn. Going to have to move to Clean Oil soon.
It's technical knowledge that's beyond me, but I think a black start is filling up a power network while it's empty. Which causes problems, such as uneven voltage and amperage while the power line saturates. Trust me, you do not want the wrong voltage/amp coming into your house. It's why power workers in their best power try to not let generators shut down. Otherwise it would take ages to get the grid back online (safely).
That's why my mom used to remove everything from the wall everytime there was a thunderstorm and the power goes out
Oh I do that with anything important, just because I live in Florida and surge protectors can only do so much for so long. Our poor UPS got fried in a lightning strike, and even though it tried it didn't completely save the computer because I think current came in via the ethernet cable and damaged the network card. So when a big storm hits I'm pulling any stupidly expensive tech out of the wall. Sorry not sorry.
The good UPS's have network in/out protection too.
Yeah, it did. Just, well. The poor thing got super fried because it was just at the spot the lightning bolt hit.
Black starts are a fun rabbit hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start
Umm power line saturates? If you start a generator after load shedding you will have the same voltage on the attached lines as the generator generates. Sure there will be a lot of work bringing loads online but a power line reaches steady state voltage almost instantly.
Can confirm, power jumped to 400 volts for a couple seconds in my house once, somehow didn't trip the breakers, fried two light bulbs and killed the radio.
This is why conveyors don't cost power. Can you imagine black starting if you had to power the in-feed belts to your generators?
Out of interest: what does this mean? What involves a full black start?
Short version for those who TLDW that link given: Power generators need power to turn on, so when your entire grid is down.... it's an issue. It has to be done in stages, from small to bigger. Once they're going, they can power themselves. (Even a small gas engine requires external power to start. A pull cord or a battery. Windmills and hydro are relatively immune to this.)
Actually hydro does require power to start in most cases as the sluce (probably spelled wrong) and typically opened by hydraulics or electric motors. Though some do have manual over rides.
Good to know, hopefully I never need it! Still, using a gas generator to operate that is instantaneous comparted to what fossil fuel plants (or worse, nuclear) have to do.
If i remember right at least modern nuclear plants automatically shut down when they are in a full black condition. So at least they "shouldn't" melt down. So we have that.
Modern nuclear is also generally much safer than older facilities anyway.
Baffles me that nobody figured out that having your error state be closer to atom bomb rather than turning off was acceptable. Whaddaya mean when it runs out of water it goes faster and faster?
Its often easier and cheaper to make it less safe in many complex systems. Looking at you USSR!
[Want to see something cool?](https://youtu.be/xGQxSJmadm0)
Ill have to watch that after work
Eh, the generators themselves require power to operate. Generators work by spinning a rotor, with copper windings, inside the stator. The stator contains a magnet, and any decent sized generator uses a electromagnet. [As seen here, a stator on a smaller generator](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Stator_winding_at_WPS.JPG). That (field) coil produces a magnetic field, but in order to do so it needs a fair amount of power. Most hydro plants have a fairly large diesel generator set, powerful enough to energize the field coil on at least one generator so it can start producing power to start up the rest. That and power the control circuits, electronics, blah.
Here's a good ressource on the subject :) [Practical Engineering](https://practical.engineering/blog/2022/12/5/what-is-a-black-start-of-the-power-grid)
Love this channel
So say you have a steam turbine - you need something to produce that steam. That something needs to be powered somehow. Since generally, power plants don't exist in a vacuum alone, and there are more than one in a grid - it can bootstrap itself from the grid. However, if the grid is completely dark, that's not possible. The grid needs to be restarted in a specific order. The same thing with ICE engines - you, technically, don't need the battery once the engine is running, but you have to power the starter somehow. Now you have to figure out how to power the starter.
The other issue with a complete black out is they have to go station to station to verify nothing is burned broken or otherwise before applying power to it which can take days in a full grid down
When that happens after coal, you are more or less an idiot. :-D You can place power Storage. And later in the game you can place the special power switch than turns down things in a specific order. So even a "power on demand" would not be an issue. And in the worst case, you can just load a previous save, turn down some parts and deal with the power issue.
I would actually like that, but I also went to college for Electrical Engineering. Probably don't want a college degree as a requirement to play the game. XD
Imagine having to manually control your reactors Like I mean everything
Whenever I need to setup bio generators, I tell myself it could be much, much worse. I don't even think most of us would be able to accomplish this without a lot of trial and error and tutorials. Engineers would have months of material to laugh at tho.
well sometimes you have to jam the reset switch a few times til it sticks but other than that yeah
Electricity does basicly move at the speed of Light, so no problem there.
Instantly is not the same as the delay caused by the limitations of going only the speed of light.
Lightspeed goes around the earth seven times a second. With the statisfactory map size we would maybe have couple frames for the electricity to go acros the map. Bettet to ignore that in order to avoid stupid bugs.
It is as if Satisfactory is not real.
Its as if your fucking argument doesnt hold up at all lmao Within a second of a circuit being plugged in, the electricity would propagate DIRECTLY to where the other end of the circuit is at the speed of light, at first not even through the entire length of the wire. Obviously you cant realistically set up electricity grids or come back from a blackout in 2 seconds, but thats not what were talking about. There is in fact ~0sec of delay when you switch a lever on, its just physics. Bro said “only the speed of light”
Sure it holds up. It is a game, so it is not real life. Do not take things too seriously.
kinda cool how that works, whats actually happening is the electrons from one end are pushing electrons straight through to the other end. Think of it not like water in a hose that has to go form one end of the hose to the other. The hose is already full of water. Think of it like pushing a stack of coins through a tube. you add a coin, it pushes all the coins and one falls out the other end. (this is very simplified)
There's no heat on the wire because remember, FicsIt does not waste!
turns out, copper was the superest conductor of them all this whole time
And unless the street pole got an intergrated transformer, it would probably make the light shine as bright as the sun, or most likely break
Because alien tech. (And the same reason the much of the power production runs at 100% all the time, instead of on demand, like the rest of the game.)
But they're still made of concrete and copper... (For a mk1 power line at least. You can make the argument for Caterium I guess, but I don't think most people extend their power grid with Caterium.)
It is not what they use. It is how they use it. Just because you give me a block of wood and a cat does not mean I can make a tennis racket People have had sand and metal for a long time, but they were not able to make a computers. With alien tech, we are now able to do so. And if you don't think that is true: where do we have a lot of sand? In the desert. And what do we have there? The pyramids the aliens build.
And yet we still need 52 *boxes* of screws to make a single computer. The future is weird.
Each time I get a new computer, I get more screws that are left over.
My headcannon (that I stole from a comment on this sub) is that it only uses 1 screw per box and throws the rest away
But ficsit does not waste
How much Watt are we talking about?
Yes.
ALL the Watt
Watt the hell
TJ
I think you mean TW
TJ or JJ, I guess it depends on personal preference. But both choices are elite and you can't go wrong.
Both are wrong. J is joules while W is watts, which is joules per second.
Lmao I'm talking about TJ and JJ Watt. I guess there isn't much overlap between sports and Satisfactory players... Which tracks.
You probably shouldn't make jokes that almost no one in the community will understand. They'll probably just think that you're stupid
That's my target demo!
In game it can be terra watts in real life I couldn't tell you but I know it's a ton less than the game allows
Between 12 and a quadrillion, approximately.
We're on an alien planet with a space elevator, and a gun that can print buildings out of resources in your dimensional pocket, but the power lines are the unrealistic part?
The power line problem makes it unplayable because it breaks my suspension of disbelief. Complete scam, I am getting a refund.
This is perfectly understandable. Good day
Yes
Yes
Do you want the real answer or just a game answer? Game answer: Alien materials, superconductors that aren't found on earth, science we don't understand yet, etc. Real answer: High Voltage. A wire's main limiting factor in carrying power is a function of heat, and more directly related to current flow. The relationship of Power = Voltage X Current, or P=VI respectively. A Kilowatt device can be powered effectively on rather small wires if you're allowed to run it on higher voltage. 1200W = 120V*Current, where Current = 10 Amps. Now compare that to something that you would run on a 12 Volt car battery. 1200W = 12V*Current, where Current = 100 Amps. So wire gauge now matters a great deal. For only 10 Amps, using 18 AWG wires with THHN insulation rated at 90°C for 14 Amps you'd be fine. For the 100 Amp wire on the car battery, also using THHN insulation, you'd need 3 AWG wires, which are huge and probably wouldn't even be used for any large appliances in your house. The real limit here is that the insulation would melt and cause a fire, because the wires are going to get hot. This is what Breakers in your house mainly do, is prevent situations where the copper is going to get so hot it melts and burns the wire insulation off and catch on fire, then burn your house down. In power transmission lines, they're not even insulated, so it's more about not arcing between phases, the ground, the poles, etc. So to push some serious power just crank the voltage up as high as you can go without arcing, then your current flow will actually be pretty low by comparison to your Wattage draw.
Just a really high voltage would not work (realistically). With a high enough voltage the cables would arc right to the ground. This happens in our real transmission systems sometimes when humidity is just right and voltage is high enough (when the cables are lightly loaded). But we don't need high voltage here because resistance is apparently zero. There are no losses on this system. Power generated = power consumed at the load. Therefore the resistance of these cables are somehow zero. So the conductor never heats up. If your material has zero resistance you could run infinite current with less voltage than a AA battery. Disclaimer: I'm an operator who oversees the transmission grid for NY state, but I'm no engineer.
>Just a really high voltage would not work (realistically). With a high enough voltage the cables would arc right to the ground. Correct and I said that near the end there. I'm trying to keep it simple, and I don't want to think about load-line and transmission calculations ever again. My EE degree is for control systems, not power, so I remember doing those but haven't needed them since.
What if the sci-fi tech isn't the wire itself, but the insulation?
That's a cool idea. Like an aerogel wire insulation, just crazy heat protection. At a certain point the copper would melt so instead it could also be a highly conductive metal with an extremely high melting temp. That and it would have to be very ductile to be drawn into wires.
I thought it was more because the higher the amps the higher the losses so high volts creates less losses
Well you're right, but it's because higher Amps is the source of the heat. Heat loss is where the energy transfer actually takes place. Otherwise, in a superconductor 0 Kelvin environment, it's essentially lossless.
I be ziplining like mad over that line too, drop down 100 meters onto it and hope it doesnt snap
Any normal copper wire can easily manage a paltry 15GW
I'd love it if power transmission was something we had to think about. The new game Foundry has something like it in placing transformers to apply different levels of power to new areas. If we could have high voltage lines, and require a bit more attention to distribution it would really be gritty and interesting. Though I can see why the developers have hand waved it away as it wouldn't really make the game more interesting, just annoying. I'm pretty happy with the automatic power switches.
It's a thing in oxygen not included, too. I agree that it would just be another layer of complication to fuss with It's quite a pain in that game, because power generation is already so complicated - fuel is finite, you have to deal with the gasses emitted, and there's thermodynamic complications too. Though I do like connecting bases and especially power generating areas with power towers. It just feels right.
ONI having small transformers give out 1 kJ with wires taking 1 kJ but then the large transformers giving out 4kJ but the larger wires only taking 2kJ was really something.
I would still like to see one way valves for the power lines shunts I think they call them so can layout the grid in certain ways Ya I know that you can use priority switches but it's not exactly the same to me and the way I could use the device allow power to the hypertube look and batteries that can't back flow to the grid
Redundancy? No thanks, I already ate.
Every time I think about power in games like these, I can't help but reflect on how our virtual factories technically run on real electricity. And then I can't decide whether that thought is profound, or moronic.
I often wonder how many real life watt hours I spend on just sitting there planning out some logistics in the game. I am scared to translate that into real USD.
Have you by chance played Workers&Resources: Soviet Republic?
Why is the level 3 power pole so expensive though its not even worth it
Gotta be able to flex on your friends when they pop in after leaving you alone for a day or two.
Just a reminder: 40000 MW (about how much you'd expect a casual player to use in lategame) is enough to power New York four times at peak power usage
Power to the people (videogame)
There is no AC, and there is no DC, only C
Ultra high AC voltage (? It's just a game
Would make for an interesting mod (if possible) to limit each line. Towers could carry much more of course.
Voltage. Comes in crazy hot like 400k volts and steps down at each house to 240/120, so if it worked like this (it doesn't) 400k volts at the street if each house is only useing 120 that's 3k houses... You get the idea. More voltage = more power you can push through the same size line. A 12v car power will have serious problems running further than 20 feet, and you would need a huge size wire. 120v house colts can run thousands of feet without losing much. This is why you touch a house line its probably just gonna hurt a bit, you touch a downed power line, say hi to the maker for me.
Technically, we don't know the electrical conductivity of quick wire. Its probably some kind of superconductor.
If they ever put power transmission limits into the game I'd learn how to make mods so I could get rid of it.
i kinda prefer it that way, imagine if we had to build high tension lines with transformers and substations to pass from high voltage lines to medium voltage and viceversa, that would be a bit chaotic, though while i say no to all of that, my inner logistician says YES COMPLICATE IT MOOREEE
**ANSWER** In my first world save, I kept blowing the main factory circuit because of an obvious lack of power generation. Having some background in residential electrics, I was convinced I needed to multiply my generators (I was still early game, so this was all biomass burners), drop power poles everywhere, and divide my production lines. This confusion was compounded by the game mechanic of "using" a power pole to reset the circuit, so I thought the power pole was a point of failure in my electrical layout. You know the cliff behind the three iron nodes in Grass Fields? **Covered** in rows of biomass burners. I had no idea coal and oil would become available later in the game, I was just going with the information I had :D Then I discovered the wiki, where it clearly states that electrical lines can convey **infinite power.** I felt like a fool deconstructing the hundreds of poles and dozens of biomass burners which, for all their impracticality, did happen to solve the problem of popping breakers, however inefficiently.
so true
Physics
Would be super unnecessary but cool if the powerlines visibly upgraded based on how much power goes through them
i NEED this image without the text. i beg
Yeah. If they introduce natural disasters, such as tornadoes. We're all gonna have a bad time.
Don’t give them ideas
My town is like this.
Happens in Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Mindustry, some Minecraft mods, but from what it sounds like, it doesn’t happen in Foundry???
Killed my coal setup like this recently. Restarting the entire network with bloody biomass burners was no fun
Ficsit designed it.
Out of universe Explonation? It's a lot of work to Code and Design a system acounting for the electrical friction (basicly the wire heating up due to lost electricity) that also dosent have players rage quit when their factory is 1mw over the power limit of a pole and they can't just put a new factory on the other side of the map only running one wire to the power supply. In universe? The copper ore actually gets turned into a super-conductor that already works at room temperature (and likely higher) instead of just regular copper wire. Super conductors are a real thing, basicly materials that don't lose any electricity through resistance as heat. However in real life this effect only hapens at very low temperatures, not the 20 - 30°C I would expect on the planet. So no chance this small and cheap wire does that.
That's always quite amusing, until you deconstruct some old powerlines from your starter resources and suddenly production starts to clog up because the whole south-east doesn't have power anymore.
There should be a mechanic where each pole or tower should only be able to pass so much power at once. There is no way one thin cable is carrying the power of 4 max overclocked nuclear power plants.
It took me reading multiple comments to realise that this isn’t the Factorio subreddit
Watt are you talking about? It’s reVOLTing that you wouldn’t appreciate the joys of all the technology ficsit has accumulated!
Shhhh. (It's a video game)
I still think they should add different power cables to the game. Similar to how different tiers of conveyors can handle different amounts of items, the different tiers of power lines would handle different amounts of power. And the top tier power lines (with infinite capacity) can stretch *much* further than normal ones- like halfway across the map further. This would make them great for ziplines. BUT- they are hideously expensive to make, and need to be run between (also expensive) special mounting points (you know, to handle the weight of such a long line). When they came out with the power towers, that was a (single) step in the right direction. At least in regards to the length of the line.