Solar cars and "isolated sci-fi elements"

[darktoes]

That’s not a bad idea at all, I quite like it. Personally I’d probably go for a more traditional bigger wooden wheel, preferably attached to a fairly large (probably homemade) generator. That’s assuming I had something to take the voltage a bigger generator would provide. And a decent sized river to turn the thing. Ideally probably a waterfall with a small paddlewheel going, possibly geared up and hooked to a larger generator so as not to have to deal with cooling/friction as much.

[Aluminumfoil]

Backload might kill this idea, but you might be able to just stack ten-ish alternators in series, add an inverter, and run your TV on 120V AC.

[darktoes]

Multiple alternators is a good idea, but I was thinking just run everything into a big battery, let that act as a buffer before going into whatever you’re powering.

[Aluminumfoil]

Car battery will boil if you go past 15V, iirc.

[darktoes]

Sounds about right. Car batteries are usually shallow cycle anyway, you’d want something bigger, like people use for their home solar panels.

[Aluminumfoil]

I guess you could load your alternators in parallel at 14V with a car battery stack and then use the stack and a transformer for your emf before passing it through the inverter.

What about batteries for hybrid automobiles? All [correction, 3/4] the buses in my city are hybrids, I bet their batteries are huge, and a lot easier to find than household solar.

[darktoes]

Dang, hybrid busses? That’s pretty cool…

I live in a rural area, and half the houses around have solar. That’s a lot of bigass batteries.

[Aluminumfoil]

Can DDA check to see what kind of overmap square you’re in before it lets you construct something? If you had to build on a River overmap, I think that would take care of hydroelectric ponds and marshes.

[Aluminumfoil]

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~nathan/nepal/ghatta/alternator.html

Interesting article about exactly this idea that includes some factors that I overlooked.

[darktoes]

Huh. That’s interesting.

[kevin.granade]

If it comes down to it, we can have mapgen start placing “flowing water” vs “still water” squares since it knows what’s a river vs lake vs swamp, so yea water wheels are doable.

[darktoes]

So again, I have to ask whether this would be a vehicle based thing or construction. If construction, how would we actually go about transferring power to a vehicle where we can use it?

[psyxypher]

What I don’t understand is why the 7.5kw generator is so damn rare.

I’m not even sure how to get that thing to work, to be honest…

[Human_Shield]

How isolated are the 2-3 cars in each city that are running with minireactors fueled by plutonium?

[proxiehunter]

Most of the time I don’t find any at all, when I do they all seem clustered in one city. Maybe the area was where they were testing them.

[redxlaser15]

–It makes sense to me people would use solar powered cars. The environment matters! However, is it thematic that there would be many people who care massively about keeping nature alive?

[Aluminumfoil]

I’ve never found one. Occasionally I’ve found an atomic tank with the Extra Vehicles mod, but mods aren’t main content so I don’t think that matters…

[darktoes]

I’m not even sure how to get that thing to work, to be honest…

It counts as an alternator. Just attach it to an engine and it will eat engine power and give you electricity.

How isolated are the 2-3 cars in each city that are running with minireactors fueled by plutonium?

I’ve seen a couple of those, but I think they’re fairly balanced by the difficulty of finding plutonium cells early game when it would be useful, as opposed to late game where you have a dozen upgraded solar panels and electricity is your bitch.

[psyxypher]

It counts as an alternator. Just attach it to an engine and it will eat engine power and give you electricity.

Does the engine need to be on? I’m trying to make a portable generator to plug myself into.

[darktoes]

Yeah. Once the engine is running it should generate power for the vehicle.