Give us a reason to use generators.

[BowlerHatGuy3]

Ksp has always had this problem where there was no real reason to use generators, as the engines on your ship have could always just power everything.  It’d be nice to actually have to attach generators to your ship to keep the power up.

If they do decide to implement this a good quality of life feature would be to have a bar indicating how much power your ship needs vs the amount being produced, kinda like command and conquer.

[Lowi_Sace]

Yeah, vehicles now only require electricity when turning with reaction wheels, having lights on or transmitting data. Vehicles/parts should have a standard power requirement like for life-support and Navigations/computers

[Davidian1024]

I think the main reason generators exist in real life is for very long term deep space missions.  Missions where the distance from the sun is so great that solar panels become ineffective.  Right now it would seem that performing missions like that in KSP doesn't really make sense.  I think that even at the furthest reaches of the Kerbol system the solar panels in the game are probably good enough, if the craft is only doing low power tasks.  A communications relay satellite, a science gathering satellite, etc.

Another reason generators might make sense is for very high speed interstellar missions.  Missions involving accelerating for long periods of time with the Dawn engine.  This is something of particular interest to me.  I've made many attempts at creating a craft with a large amount of Xenon fuel in order to see if I could achieve something like 1 or 2 percent of light speed.  I was basically trying to see how quickly I could leave Kerbol's sphere of influence.  The problem is that this basically makes time-warping while accelerating a requirement.  And at the moment it would seem that time-warping while accelerating is not possible.  It used to work, but was broken by one of the patches.

Flight Thrust while time-warp not working when above the atmosphere.

If/when acceleration during time-warp is fixed, we will have one reason for generators.  And for what it's worth, I think it's very likely that this will be fixed.  I think interstellar will make it a requirement.  This is because of the amount of time it takes to accelerate up to the speeds that make interstellar travel practical.  I gather some of the real world planned interstellar missions involved accelerating for years or decades.  Even right now, a vessel with one or more Dawn engines and enough Xenon should be able to reach these speeds in a reasonable amount of time.  But, only if acceleration during time-warp was possible.  I gave up trying to do this when I worked out how much time it takes the Dawn engines to burn through just one of the largest Xenon tanks.  It's like several hours if I remember right.