So, while raiding a lab, I found an autoclave and quickly found that I couldn’t power the thing. You need a Plutonium Heavy Battery for even one use. While continuing to explore I found a Vacuum Oven. This is smaller than an autoclave, but uses a large storage battery. Shouldn’t an autoclave use the same?
They are both semi portable (it’s not a backpack autoclave) and too large to use as a hand tool. I believe the problem is one of legacy. Back when autoclaves were first introduced a heavy battery was able to work for it, but then a reality pass happened and someone looked at the actual power use of one. I very much agree with doing this, btw, as the realism in the game is something I appreciate. The problem is that the realism pass ended there. In real life tools have battery capacity designed on expected use. A Maglight that uses a AA battery is a small pen light, the skull crackers used by security guards use D cells.
In a world where battery powered Autoclaves exist - and a world where science labs get hidden multiple levels underground they likely would - those autoclaves should have batteries up to the task. It’s also in line with other semi portable equipment.
It is possible to mount autoclaves in vehicles and run them off vehicle power (such as storage batteries). That’s a fair bit of a detour, though (but fairly convenient once done).
I get that. My plan was to disassemble some furniture, make the autoclave mountable, make a wood frame then mount the autoclave and large storage battery onto the frame near the infinite water source with light that I found.
Then I got to thinking about why the Vacuum Oven would be powered by the large storage battery and not the Autoclave. Seems like an oversight to me.
I’m pretty sure battery powered autoclave are not a thing irl because that’s stupid. It exists in the game because that’s the way things are powered sadly. Once we have a system for powered furniture we’ll probably change the tool autoclave so that you can deploy it like a brazier and then plug it into your power grid.
Having them plug into a power grid would be ideal, but when? They are working on it, but have been for quite some time and are likely to be for quite some additional time. Until then putting autoclaves in line with other tools like them would be best and when grid power becomes available all these tools would need a rework.
Battery powered autoclaves seem to be fairly in line with the battery powered jackhammer: it requires an enormous amount of power but is still capable of digging only two tiles before empty. An autoclave adjustment that made it powered in the same way might allow it to store enough power to be used once before being recharged (which is very much more useful than the jackhammer’s two usages). Obviously the built-in storage capacity should then be set to one use.
Yeah, this kind of threw me off when I saw the Autoclave “accepts” large batteries. So I crafted a large battery an loaded it up, and it says “Autoclave needs 8200 electric charge!” ??? So I just ended up putting it on a wooden frame and jumping it to my solar car instead.
My plan was to disassemble some furniture, make the autoclave mountable, make a wood frame then mount the autoclave and large storage battery onto the frame near the infinite water source with light that I found.