Electrical bus system

[dmusson]

My suggestion is a mod where every part that generates, stores or uses electric charge has a tweakable in the VAB that assigns that part to a category or 'bus'. These parts will then only interact with other parts in that bus or category.

This way you can for example, assign your biggest solar panels and your ion drives to the Main Bus, have your reaction wheels and some smaller panels assigned to Aux Bus 1 so you still have some control authority, and perhaps have an RTG powering your remote tech antenna on Aux Bus 2.

Or another example, have an ISRU and drills running on a separate bus to your life support on your surface base.

This way all your important systems will be running and you're heavy applications can run full power, regardless of whether they run dry or not. Also making for some interesting planning and building in the VAB.

[Drew Kerman]

this would be cool. I once had a situation where I transmitted a large chunk of data as I departed the night side of Kerbin and ended up draining my batteries. My solar panels took a long time to recharge and in the meantime only my long-range dish was able to use the spare EC coming in - my local comm antenna reported a loss of power. So I had a 5min round-trip signal delay over Kerbin cause it was routing me through my probe at Duna back to my IP ComSat over Kerbin and down to MC Would have been nice to assign some sort of electrical priority to my local comm antenna in this case

[SAI Peregrinus]

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/108591-WIP-0-90-Pre-Release-AmpYear-Power-Manager-Reserve-Power-Ion-RCS-v0-12/ has a "Reserve power" system, and can automatically shut off some systems when power gets low. It's not quite what you're asking for, but it can probably accomplish most of the same things.

[Azimech]

I like it. And I would love hydraulics as well.