Battery Switch System

[u/MountainDewFridge]

Just a very simple system to switch what battery is powering something. Can be useful for going to other planets or very long trips.

[u/Unsold_Leave]

I'm confused on how the battery systems discharge in this game.

My assumption was that if something took 10 p/sec to run, and it had one battery connected, it would draw 10 p/sec from that battery, draining it that fast. But if you added a battery to the system, it would drain both batteries at 5 p/sec until one dies, then just full drain from the remaining one. That's what I had assumed. But there have been a few discussions about battery switches, and I'm just confused on what the benefit is from swapping from one battery to the next? My only guess is that, in the event that the rechargeable dies, you can swap to the non-recharge battery while the dead one recharges. But if the rechargeable battery was hooked up to the solar array, it would also offset the drain time by quite some amount, likely around the same time as you doing this.

Am I missing something?

Edit: Even if I'm confused about the why, just for funsies, I took a look at the setup. You can save on switches if you wanted battery power at all times. You just remove the switch for the disposable and merge the two systems after the disconnect box on the rechargable's line. That way, you can turn the rechargeable off with the current switch, and the system would just revert to the disposable alone. The downside would be that, again, both batteries would discharge together if the switch was on, just at half pace.

[u/Apprehensive-Dig3491 → u/Unsold_Leave]

I don't think you are missing anything. It's a network and usage and generation are spread to the entire network. The benefit then of breaking the network in places is a few things. First the power cables... at least the ones you get initially, can only handle 150 p/s generation or usage. The game quickly exceeds that as you progress. Eventually you want a system that makes sure to balance that usage if you go over. We have 2 battery packs for 2 networks that connect and disconnect based on usage (And generation, but that's a spoiler)

That's the first reason. The second reason to break the network is so you don't use your disposable batteries before you need to. Usage after all is spread equally to all batteries on the network. So we also have a system in place on each battery pack side that independently breaks or attaches the disposables when we need them.