Reconsidering batteries

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Throughout my time playing CDDA I’ve always found batteries to make little sense. How do we recharge a car battery using batteries from a cell phone? How do the batteries from a cell phone fit in a flashlight? I realize some of this can, and is, hand-waved away with near-future universal batteries. However, I think that a relatively simple change could make this make more sense and simplify a possible future system with houses having power outlets and lamps.

The idea is to simply treat electric charges as we currently do liquids. Rather than have the current batteries item, we have electricity contained in some common item. Something like a “Universal battery pack” that can be used to recharge any electrical device. This thing would basically be a small box with one or a few common (standardized future) power plugs for recharging whatever. They would use some near-future fast-charge technology so that you can recharge the whole thing in a short time.

One that holds, e.g., 100 charge would weigh and have the same volume as 100 batteries currently have. Then one could have bigger versions, as a stepping stone between the small, 100-unit ones and the smallest vehicle part batteries which in this system would be technically the same as the universal battery packs, but heavier.

A good thing about this is that the value of one unit of charge would be the same as it is currently so that no energy costs of anything would need to be adjusted. The way I imaging implementing this is to make batteries be a liquid, called ‘charge’ or similar, and use the existing code for new containers that only allow charge. I imagine this could help a system with wall sockets as well, since it solves the problem of how to get the power into whatever portable thing one would use it for. I haven’t looked very much at the code, so this might be more complicated to implement than I imagine and honestly I don’t know enough about structuring large projects to even find out in what files the relevant code is.

So this will just be another idea thrown out there to see if anyone latches on to it.

2

Adding the “Phase”:“liquid” makes batteries work like gasoline, but also lets you pour them into containers, so that’s the only issue with simply json editing.

There’s also the issue of spawned batteries becoming liquid (and thus can’t be picked up), but that can be somewhat negated:

{ "id": "battery_small", "type": "TOOL", "symbol": ",", "color": "yellow", "name": "AA Charge Pack", "description": "A battery commonly used to store and transfer power for small devices.", "price": 100, "material": "plastic", "weight": 6, "volume": 0, "bashing": -8, "cutting": 0, "to_hit": -3, "max_charges": 500, "initial_charges": 0, "rand_charges": [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,50,100,200,300,500], "charges_per_use": 0, "turns_per_charge": 0, "ammo": "battery", "revert_to": "null" },

So, when the above item spawns, it’ll be generated with a random number of charges between 0-500 which you can unload into another container. You can simply copy this code to make different size batteries.

Though, the unloading/reloading mechanism would get a bit annoying since batteries tend to need to be reloaded fairly often…

3

I think that a great majority of folks have seen or had already used recharging stations in real life. The portable ones are cheap and may have a wide usage span - these remind me of CataDDA batteries in vivo, altough your imagination should serve you better in-game if you understand those are only abbrevations for a resource type.
Some pointers, too - theoreticaly, you could start your car even if it packs a leaking car battery, and do it so with 1.5V batteries. As far as the plugs and ports go, you can always use live wires and silicon paste to improvise. As you can see, the portable-power-Gods are pretty forgiving and easy-going; it’s that getting on the same page with them doesn’t solve the consumption disbalance of the current mechanism.
There is this thing, however, that I thoroughly support about CataDDA and I had felt so ever since. Regarding the omnipresent ability to just drain power off of everything and anything, I just know this is in store for all of us in the very near future. It means existance of a certain draining expansion for every e-consumption device out there, looking to stand equaled with AC adaptors of sorts. This is where I agree with OP (author) - a modern el. power container distribution system should respect the differences between a personal, vehicle-bound and a couple of el. grid-based “packs”. So, what’s it all about, if you ask me?

a) understanding you can charge your car at your garage, and your cell phone inside a vehicle, but NOT vice versa;
b) generating a power consumption table based on per-category PU model;
c) Portable (PPU) branch for popular uses, with modding categories;
d) Vehicle (VPU) branch for determining class (tier) options amongst more common vehicle models - based upon tech level;
e) Distribution (DPU) branch that equals an electric power outlet in many ways, but has a storage capacity (generators, storage, etc);
f) Advanced (APU) branch which supports nuclear and fusion reaction utilities, which should have a dedicated link to bionic energy src;

Let’s work out an example, shall we?
Okay, a pop - and a self-sustaining, family home is here. It has all the power saving features you ever wanted, plus a recycling center in your basement. It is solar (and wind!) powered and has an advanced P-storage facility. This one’s sweet, because it allows for a failsafe switch; if your P-storage is empty, you can plug your car into it and take care of your power needs for a night.
We can approximate a typical home has eight large utilities such as a fridge, an oven, a tank for hot water, dishwasher etc. Because most of these have powerful electric motors, we can go and say a full “tank” for a personal elec. scooter is 1/8 of power of the whole household. We can even say a car asks for two, maybe even three times that much. This way, encouraging a form of solar power collecting expansion on a vehicle is probably a priority.
Linking portable devices to storage (and relevant) batteries should follow the upscale; this “vert” respects the fact that the future energy storage had advanced some levels. A small storage battery holds a lot of juice; it can charge up to eight times a relevant value of 500 (a welder unit), a total that equals 40 flashlights… looking all the way up, it means a (self-sustaining) house packs as much as 320 PPU. A typical storage batery should max out at 2 (or three, I’m not sure) VPU, and this means a lot of PPUs for wanderers and scavengers alike; obtaining a single P-storage unit should be hard work (it’s 5 times 320 PPU / 2 = 800 mp3 players!) because it can use existing solar/wind collector upgrades. Thus, a mobile base should lack functionality and never have the output that equals a DPU, which is a concern for some if it’s known that one can employ more than one P-storages, and brag with multipliers to his/her DPU.

4

What if the rechargable battery mod was twisted around, and most items acted as if they had the rechargable mod already in place?

Then you would need a recharging station to keep your tablet or soldering iron powered, which would be a bit more familiar. Batteries could be used for the flashlight, RC car kits, the vibrator, and maybe one or two more things, making them a bit more rare. A new mod could be added that allows you to convert a rechargable item to regular batteries. Then you could have a ‘small rechargable battery’ crafting item that would be disassembled and used in anything that doesn’t run on portable batteries. I don’t think there would be an easy way to pass the item’s charge onto the component during disassembly (and later back into an item), though, so newly crafted items would need to be plugged in for a bit to fill up.

On top of that, possibly remove entirely the idea of charging a vehicle with small batteries directly, and maybe add a new vehicle part that acts like the recharger but in reverse (draining power from rechargable items to fill the vehicle, but not at a 100% efficient rate).

5

If borrowing from existing code, make sure I can’t drink my batteries. That’s …sadly all I have to contribute XD

6

This is about the gist of what I was thinking, just that you could recharge your items not only with a recharge station in a vehicle, but also with portable batteries. It seems to me that if doing this, there is no real reason to keep the old standard batteries as two different system for powering arbitrarily different things is just confusing and unintuitive.

[quote=“Blaze, post:2, topic:7268”]Adding the “Phase”:“liquid” makes batteries work like gasoline, but also lets you pour them into containers, so that’s the only issue with simply json editing.

There’s also the issue of spawned batteries becoming liquid (and thus can’t be picked up), but that can be somewhat negated:

{ "id": "battery_small", "type": "TOOL", "symbol": ",", "color": "yellow", "name": "AA Charge Pack", "description": "A battery commonly used to store and transfer power for small devices.", "price": 100, "material": "plastic", "weight": 6, "volume": 0, "bashing": -8, "cutting": 0, "to_hit": -3, "max_charges": 500, "initial_charges": 0, "rand_charges": [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,50,100,200,300,500], "charges_per_use": 0, "turns_per_charge": 0, "ammo": "battery", "revert_to": "null" },

So, when the above item spawns, it’ll be generated with a random number of charges between 0-500 which you can unload into another container. You can simply copy this code to make different size batteries.

Though, the unloading/reloading mechanism would get a bit annoying since batteries tend to need to be reloaded fairly often…[/quote]

This is excellent, thank you. I agree with the issue of being annoying as well. It would be nice if the game recognised liquids in containers for reloads, not only for this but for things like the oil lamp or jackhammer as well.

I guess drinking batteries could be seen as draining them by connecting them to your body :stuck_out_tongue:

7

This is actually the case already. (On experimental at least, I haven’t played 0.A in quite a while)

8

Oh, then I must’ve just remembered things wrong.

9

What if you’re playing as a robot?

10

Batteries aren’t comestibles, so it’s impossible to eat or drink them (aside from the CBM).

Gasoline cannot be consumed either (with or w/o the CBM).