mystifeid

On reflection, this is not unreasonable. If at 1x warp my energy deficit is 40 per second then at 1000x warp it will be 40,000. I should run out of energy in the first second. However when my energy starts to increase it does not instantly go to full charge. If I had run out of energy I should see it increasing from zero but I don't - it increases from the level it was at when I increased the warp to 1000x.

Yeah I know. Typically when I dock with ore I switch to another ship/contract and let the conversion happen in the background. You lost me again. When an ISRU overheats it also stops working. At 1000x warp nothing stops. Incidentally, this started because landing on Duna is part of my Kerbals five star training program and in addition to three Kerbals, my brick-as-lander can haul 4500 units of ore from the surface back to dock with a station at 130km. Where only 100x warp is possible for the ore conversion. Which is infuriating enough. But to run out of energy each time the station passes into Duna's shadow... The first passage through the shadow with nearly full energy is ok but after that each transition into darkness brings a shutdown. So I started to look into how much energy generation I'd need to never run out. However I'm playing with hard difficulty reward levels and a new station or even a new station component is a major investment. Far simpler to move the station to a 300km+ orbit, bring less ore from Duna and rely more on the ore from Ike (landing on which happens to be also part of the 5 star program). At 300km and 1000x warp the station will always hit the shadow at full energy and never run out. This (Duna) station also has other ships permanently docked like a lander that can travel to the surface and back without refueling and another one with a grabber (which seems to be the only way of extracting Kerbals from inflatable airlocks) not to mention other ships passing through, so continuous fuel production is necessary.

Usually when no energy is available lights turn off, however this does not happen at 1000x warp. The lights stay on. Also, although the ISRU will automatically restart after a power out, the mining drills do not and must be restarted manually. It is easy enough to look at energy levels as you increase warp. If I am starting with say 40,000 units of electric charge, the level drops with increasing speed as I increase warp but it does not appear to suddenly drop to zero when I hit 1000x warp and then zoom back up. I might still have 20,000 units when I hit 1000x warp and the charge level looks like it immediately increases. But I could be wrong. You might have lost me there. All warp speeds are possible on a surface. In orbit, 1000x warp is possible at an orbital radius that is dependent on the orbited object but from memory, for Kerbin it is 240km, for Duna 300km, etc. It might be because my designs tend to be of the utilitarian flying brick class but I find it cheaper and easier to build orbital stations than bases.

Yes I have solar panels and they more than keep up at 1000x warp. I don't run out of energy - instead my batteries very quickly become fully charged. This is in contrast to lower warp speeds where my batteries instead are depleted. It is a good argument for keeping ISRU's out of low orbits. And when mining or converting ore either on the surface or in higher orbits, getting to 1000x warp asap.

Why is it that if I increase the warp, say while mining or converting ore, from 1x to 5x to 10x to 50x to 100x I use electricity faster and faster and usually quickly end up with flat batteries but if I can increase the warp to 1000x it becomes possible to instead generate electric charge?

All my LT-2 landing struts on all my landers are exploding. Landing at 0.1 m/s seems to help but still need to be careful.