Would it be possible to add a vehicle part that automatically shares the electric systems of other vehicles around it within a defined radius? I don’t know if it is in the realm if realism or sci-fi but it would be a great alternative to hooking up things via power cables if they player was lucky enough to find or skillful enough to build two of them an install them into their respective rigs.
Most things are possible.
I am not excited about coding this, but maybe someone else is.
Hmm. What if it was based on current wireless tech? Which is to say conduction. Would require dedicated sender/receiver on both ends to get any kind of meaningfull transfer, which in cata terms could straight up mean needs power transfer… dish on both power grids. slight loss of power would be most realisic but the best part would be that code side it would be much easier to run a check of wireless_power parts within radius
No idea how jumper cables got pulled off, but its possible code could get pulled from that.
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Look into the efficiency levels of wireless power transfer. AFAIK this is pretty much pointless.
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Looks like pointless waste of energy on “charging” all of metal things in radius, including fences, trash cans etc. Can’t imagine such “smart” technology that would directly charge only such batteries\cars that player need. In fair manner it should charge all ferromagnetic objects in radius. And charge should become as lower as far you go from source.
I totally agree. But - just for fun - let’s have some calculations about that (fair warnings: “it’s going to contain math”, “it will be simplified” and “I’m no expert of the electromagnetic spectrum and its behavior”)…:
For our exercise, let’s say our energy transmitter is a single point and our antenna is placed 1 meter from the transmitter (1 Field, I assume) and has itself a width of 2 meter.
Now, let’s assume, our transmitter is designed to only send out power on one z-layer (no energy losses into the earth or the sky) and we somehow found a method to basically getting 100% of the input-power back out (100% efficiency).
If we now turn our transmitter on and allow it to send in a 360° direction-range, we will recieve… 25% of what we put into it (put 1000 charges in, get 250 out). Move the antenna or the transmitter 1 field further apart and you’ll have 12.5% power left.
If you want to, for an example, create an anvil (150 charges at the electric forge) and the antenna is 10 fields away from the transmitter, you would need 6000 charges from batteries on the transmitter side.
Then there’s an other problem. While the antenna only uses the energy it needs at a given time, the transmitter has to transmitt all the time and as much as it can (limited only by the power it recieves and maximum output). If you hook up a 10000-charges battery to the transmitter and flick it on, it would happly dump the battery within a second/step. Whatever you wanted to do… now it’s too late, the power’s gone.
If you replace the battery and limit it now to only consume 1000 charges at once, you’ll be able to walk over to your forge and still have half a battery left. However, since creating an anvil does cost 6000… that will still be impossible. (It would also need to consume 150 charges in “one go” but only recieves ~ 31 charges/sec, but that’s just the way the game’s coded and could be changed.)
It would help to see this drawn on a paper
If it would help to have a visual representation of what I just foolishly smacked down here, take a pen and paper (or open paint) and draw a point.
This is our transmitter and we are observing it from the top.
Now, draw a second point somewhere. Meassure the distance between the two points.
Now draw from the second point a straight line of the meassured lenght in a 90° angle to the first point (= not away or towards it, but sideways).
Go back to the start of the line and draw one of the exact same length into the other direction. This is now our antenna.
Our transmitter-point would emit it’s energy in form of a growing bubble/ring. Whatever of this form touches the antenna-line will be absorbed as energy. Everything else will flow out into space to be never seen again.
Drawing growing circles is a bit hard, let’s go with more lines instead.
Drawing lines from our transmitter-point into all possible directions will show: about 1/4 will hit the antenna, and 3/4 will miss it (there may be one point, where 2/4 lines will hit the antenna, but that’s just owed to the simplicity of the drawing - in reality, one of those (or two half of those) lines would miss).
If you’d make the antenna-line bigger or move it closer to the point, it will catch a bigger part of the “energy-bubble”… up to 1/2 of it, if the line touches the point.
Do the reverse, and it will have less and less cance of contact.
Placed in the real world, this would meen, be 30 ft. away and you’ll need a 60 ft. antenna to get 1/4 of the energy. Or 30 ft. antenna by the same distance will get you 1/8 of the energy. Going for a more realistic 15->7.5->3.75 ft. antenna, would yield 1/16->1/32->1/64 of the energy at the same place.
As you - one of the few who have not fallen asleep by now - can see, this would be a very expensive energy sharing system.
About the coding, it might be easy-ish to implement it, copying parts of the radio/-tower-code and scale it down to local (submap) level. But then again, why do it?
…Oh my, I’ve went a bit crazy on my first post, but oh well… scribbling nerd stuff and talking about the cataclysm… that’s what forums are here for, right 
?
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assume a sci-fi transmitter that can keep the transmitted energy in a tightly controlled beam.
More like an IR power system that is basically an overzealous solar panel with a tracker and high energy stream pointed at it at all times, but simplified math and with a higher transfer efficiency
A mildly Physics breaking version of the thing this obnoxious thumbnail person is showing:
Or assume a electro-magnetic field that is focused into a beam an elipsoid (rather than broadcast to all nearby space) and use the efficiency that seems reasonable from that.