Electric vehicles are no-brainers (git b85c4a930b)

Game Talk The Drawing Board
#1

Electric vehicles spawning with on-board solar panels makes them early game no-brainers. Once you have such an EV, you no longer need to worry about acquiring more fuel. I found a tyre-less EV on day#1 and a perfectly good one on day #3. After that, I ditched the gasoline one from day#1, permanently. Now I have a total of 6 swappable batteries and 7 solar panels. And there are more in town, due to unusually high rates of EVs.

I propose making them spawn without solar panels and to instead spawn solar panels on various roofs. I am aware that currently houses contain no power grids of their own, so let this be something to keep in mind. Perhaps having houses be “vehicles” of their own would make things work better?

PS: Which unit are battery capacity and power in?

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#2

Battery capacity is in “battery units” of 1 kilo-Joule (kJ); power is in Watts (W).

#3

That’s already happening. You can find solar panels on roofs.

Since this is more a proposition for a change and not really a “bug”, I’ve moved it over to The Drawing Board where it might get more long-time attention.

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#4

also: while solar engines are great, once you start making a death-mobile, if you want to go any reasonable speed you’re gonna have to use a high end diesel engine.

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#5

They could be rebalanced.

CDDA is a mix of ‘current world technology’ and ‘schizo tech’ (technology that is far in advance of current, or just plain alien). Although there are real world electric cars with solar cells (making the ones in CDDA apparently ‘current tech’) they are really ‘schizo tech’. Practical[1] cars with solar cells only get a trickle of power for a top up compared to the amount they gulp down from the electricity grid. That solar tricycle car is closer to reality. If it took one sunny day in Vermont to travel 30 miles then that is about equivalent to the Aptera.

1 Cargo space, four wheels, fit several people in it.

So, I guess what I’m saying is solar powered cars in CDDA are OP and that’s probably intended, but if it isn’t then the solar panel output should probably be nerfed.

#6

That reasonable speed is offset by having to hunt for fuel. I only got 23L of gasoline from the only gas station so far and most abandoned cars have <2L of it in their tanks. I don’t know if there is a way to get much more of it, but so far fuel seems scarce.

#7

you can ‘buy’ gasoline at the gas stations via the terminals, with cash cards, which refreshes the pumps.

them reserves are MASSIVE.

@Paul_Blay: if we nerfed solar panels down to what current day technology is, you’d never use solar panels again, because they just don’t generate that much electricity… you’d need a MASSIVE amount of them to power the same amount they do now… real solar panels generate like… 1.5 kilowatt hours per day? cata solar panels produce 40 kilojoules constantly, being in sunlight.

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#8

Well, the red gas station thingie went “CLANG” after those 23L and is now out-of-order. I assume that means that it’s empty.

#9

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these stations dont have em, so the pumps are one time use, each pump has its own supply though!.. i’m lookin for the right one.

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this one! see the 4 terminals? if you interact with em…

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it lets you re-fill the pumps (to a certain extent)
and there’s an atm nearby if you don’t actually have a cash-card on you. (zombies drop them frequently though, in varying amounts)

and if towns arent your thing (i mean, i get it, i’m havin to dodge zombies just lookin for these gas stations and i know exactly where they are) theres usually a few gas stations out in the middle of nowhere that are a lot less zombie infested. APC’s usually have lots of diesel in the tanks on the back of em… gas aint that hard to find.

(gas station in the middle of nowhere, no zombies there, but i didnt actually wanna go to that particular one due to the fungal bloom in the area, and migo’s on the other side.)

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… also as an aside to the efficiency of solar panels, i went clear across my current map tile on a single solar panel’d scooter and still have 83% charge in the medium storage battery installed on it.

#10

You would still use them, but not for vehicles (with the possible exception of the tricycle one). I was just pointing out that CDDA solar electric cars are not current world technology. Solar arrays at your base could still be used to power removable batteries for an electric scooter.

I think you are underestimating current solar power though. An efficient house in a cool, sunny, climate with a big storage bank could survive on solar power alone.

Not if you insist on running an electric kiln to smelt stuff to make your death mobile heavy frames, though. :stuck_out_tongue:

Talking about ‘current world technology’ - are there still cars driving around in CDDA powered by nuclear reactors?

#11

One could make a stationary “vehicle” full of solar panels and use it to charge those swappable storage batteries.

#12

for refrence, a refrigerator alone uses 1.64 kilowatt hours per day (and thats… roughly your average american fridge/freezer combo, so i guess we could split that into a minifridge/actualfreezer two blocks), the engine on a tesla (what i’d consider a large electric motor) is 31 kwh per 100 miles.
i guess it wouldnt be -that- bad, but you’d still have to layer the entire top of your mobile base in solar panels and have a decent charge built up if you wanted to move it.

(current solar panels in cata are 40 kilojoules… say per turn, per second then? so over 12 hours of direct sunlight (notrealistic,whatever) they’d produce 43200 kilojoules in a day, which is 12 kilowatt hours… does weather currently affect cata solar panels?)

#13

That’s pretty much what you’d expect, though? If anything that’s on the good side. Typical real-world solar-electric cars rely for the electric on the national grid with the solar energy as a top-up (aside from a few highly specialized and light weight vehicles).

#14

Most EVs in production have no panels on them, the car is expensive enough as is. The panels are only mounted on niche cars, either for rich people or for competitions.

cata panels cannot be 43200 kJ per day, because it takes at least 5 days to charge 2* 40000 kJ batteries with 4 panels.

#15

real life has variables though, and considering where cata is based, theres lots of rain. rain means no solar.

@ThinkSome that was guestimate, realistically you wouldn’t have 12 hours of sunlight (probably closer to 6 hours of direct usable sunlight) and batteries drain/are damaged (43200 would be under perfect ideals.)

#16

My 0.E2 stable vehicle is a diesel (original)/electric vehicle with the roof largely covered by reinforced solar panels. The base has a luxury RV whose roof is mostly covered by solar panels (all the quantum ones I’ve found among them) that acts as a recharging station for storage batteries which are swapped into the “real” vehicle, but still doesn’t quite generate enough power for continuous use every day.
I find that the electric engine of the vehicle is sufficient for my needs (transport and zombie mowing) with a decent acceleration. However, it took some time to get there, so I’m fairly happy with the balance.

As mentioned, gasoline is plentiful in pumps, while diesel is harder to get hold of, as I’ve only found it in very few gas station pumps, and none of those stations have had terminals, so what’s in the pumps is what you get (about 200 L total, I think). Diesel powered vehicles can have diesel in their tanks (sometimes draining, so you may have to be quick with your siphoning). I’ve also found a (turret guarded and infested) location that had a drum full of diesel. In addition to that, you can make bio diesel in the game.

While gasoline is reasonably plentiful, the vehicles that make good zombie smashers tend to use diesel, and you need to get your skills up a bit before you’re able to replace a diesel engine with a gasoline one.

#17

why WOULD you replace a diesel engine with a gasoline one

gasoline engines are faster (if you have a lighter frame) but diesel is the stronger option.

also you mention zombie-smashing but everything i ever mention is experimental, so… no zombie smashes for me when a ladybug can stop my 2 ton death machine. (not really, but its far less efficient now to use a vehicle as a zombie smasher because radiant crash damage)

#18

I’d replace a diesel engine with a gasoline one because I couldn’t get hold of enough diesel to keep the vehicle going.

I’ve been reasonably thrifty with the diesel, using a standard electric SUV for looting and transport to vehicles to be repaired and brought back to the base for dismantling, but still never managed to actually fill the (standard) tanks of the diesel vehicle fully until after I’d started to expand it with an electric engine.

If you can’t use the vehicle for zombie smashing I don’t see why you’d want to have an expensive (in terms of resources and labor) death mobile when you can just repair a standard vehicle for transport.
If I’ve understood it correctly, the radiant crash damage can be mitigated by installing shock absorbers on every vehicle tile, which is a chore, but ought to be doable. I haven’t seen any reports on the effects of such an upgrade package, though.

#19

Dragging this back on topic, and summarising. Standard solar panels in CDDA seem to be OP. Are they intentionally OP, or should they be nerfed? If they were to be nerfed then they would still make sense for things like RV and limousine where they can keep the fridge running. They would make less sense for the standard solar-electric car and there should probably be more hybrid cars (fuel engine + electric engine + storage batteries). aren’t as OP as I was led to believe, although there is still the practical question of how CDDA solar cars seem to be able to do what RL cars can’t. I think I’ve run out of energy to look into that for now, though.

As an aside, standard gas stations should probably have (non-operational) power charging stations for electric and hybrid vehicles. There are a ton of electric based vehicles but no way to charge them pre-apocalypse.

#20

i believe thats the reason for the ‘op’ solar panels, more or less.