Power Priority

[shand]

Is there a mod/plugin that allows some level of prioritisation of electricity comsumption.

a couple of examples of when it might be handy.

i've often had a ion-probe bottle out of juice, but with no power i'm unable to throttle down, so the ion thruster keeps pulsing while the probe spins out of control. (a solution for this precise situation is to block draining of the xenon gas, preventing ion drive pulsing, allowing control, but i digress)

anyone with remotetech will be familiar with the good old "dish that drained the camels batteries" dilemma

and anyone who isnt brilliant at rover design is familiar with the "too many powered motors for constant use" problem.

so what i would suggest is a plugin that allows you to define a hierarchy of electrical consumption, and (simplest) when electricity runs out, it turns them off from lowest priority to highest until something works.

More advanced would be circumstantial powerdown. so maybe you want ion drives to only function until batteries are 90% discharged. or maybe you want your second pair of rover motors to be disabled until the velocity is below 5m/s

what do you guys think? or does such a mod already exist?!

[Starman4308]

A workaround for now is to re-build your craft in such a way as to abuse the fuel flow rules for fun and profit. I don't know of such a mod, unfortunately.

[Drew Kerman]

I'd like this as well. Once, I had a communications satellite that ran down in power on the night side after I transmitted home a picture and when it hit the sun, its panels were only oriented enough to provide enough juice for one of the dishes - the one that happened to be pointing towards an interplanetary craft about 3 light minutes from Kerbin. Luckily that craft was relayed through another comm satellite to mission control so I had a connection... but it was like a 5min signal delay while I was 75km over Kerbin, LOL.

[Nori]

Let me throw in my interest in this sort of thing as well. It would be incredibly useful especially for people who heavily use certain mod like the Near Future suite.

I try to "work" around it by having RTGs, but that isn't always a options.

[JPLRepo]

I'm working on this mod. It doesn't prioritize power consumption, but it adds ReservePower resource, reserve power batteries and the ability to transfer the power between reverse and main power and vice versa... along with other things.

[FreeThinker]

OpenResourceSystem, has Prioritized Energy consumption, but it's a nightmare to understand