How to: Emergency Electrical Reserve

[Frederf]

I'm quite proud of this discovery. Often I will flub a mission due to losing electricity and thus control by careless actions such as picking a wrong orientation for solar panels or similar. What I wanted was an "oops battery," a source of electricity that would buy me a few seconds or minutes of control in order to correct my mistake and continue the mission. And accidentally I've found it.

The requirement is two locations where electric change can be stored, let's say a battery and a pod. Set the battery to the reserve by deselecting its resource from use (green triangle to red circle-slash). Now any electrical draw will reduce the charge stored in the pod and not the battery. When the accessible charge depleted the craft is unresponsive. It is not possible to resume use on the battery part (red circle to green triangle). This is where I thought this technique reached a dead end. However I discovered that while I couldn't unlock the part resources for use, I was able to transfer resources despite having no control over the craft. It's then a simple matter to shuffle electric charge from the inaccessible battery to the accessible pod and control is resumed.

Thus it is possible to run out of power (intentionally or not) and recover provided one has some charge stored on the craft.

[astropapi1]

So you can still transfer electricity? shhhh... don't tell the devs.

[annallia]

Interesting. I always liked the idea of an emergency power supply that could only be activated by you so that if a probe or something ran out of juice with its solar panels packed up I could hit the emergency stash to get me a bit of power to unpack the panels.

[Frederf]

Yeah, it's obviously unintended behavior but extremely useful. It allows craft to sleep for long voyages and to save from mistakes. Of course I've just shifted my problem from running out of power to remembering to arrange the setup in the first place. I wish resource locking could be bound to action groups.

[FrostOmega]

Squad could make this an intended behaviour in later updates or make a back-up battery (i.e. a battery pack that only kicks-in manualy, even in case of power failure)... I run into that problem more often than I would like to admit and it's quite annoying.

Also, why nobody made a mod for that yet? (considering its possible...)

[m4v]

They should remove the transfer option for batteries! electrons don't work that way!

[-RanZ-]

I knew about this also, figured it would get nerfed someday if someone said anything about it though.

[vasco]

I have forgot to extend solar panels so many times that now I'm using single RTG on most of my crafts:)

But your backup battery solution is a bit lighter, thanks!

[rottielover]

AmpYear mod has reserve batteries (I ignore the Ion RCS in that mod). But the power balancer is super nice and the reserve batteries are awesome. To my knowledge it has not been updated for .21.1 (the mod did something with sas and I don't think it plays nicely with the new sas).

Anyway it's a thought, but until the mod is updated your stock parts "work around" is great. I'm going to start including an emergency battery on all my designs!

[Tank Buddy]

If we want to keep this secret, you will have to destroy these forums and kill every one of us.

[Keome]

For my designs that don't have an RTG, I have one or more of the OX-STAT photovoltaic panels placed somewhere. They provide a bit of an electrical charge and the mass is light enough that four of them is almost the same as one solar panel. Usually they are on the stage above the lifter stage and get dropped off when that stage is expended. It keeps enough power going to open the main solar panels.

[Tanya Sapien]

They should remove the transfer option for batteries! electrons don't work that way!

yousir, have no concept of the effects of varying wattages and voltages on DC current. It's entirely possible to force an electric charge from one battery into another using the right setup, however there would be entropy in the system due to heat losses which this game fails to take into consideration.

However even if one were to assume the potential energy of the electrons in the material must remain even across all connected units, it would still be possible to balance them out. In essence; if the pod's completely dead, but the reserve has juice, then you would still be able to move 50% of the power to the pod so they each have half a charge (although the batteries usually have more juice than the pods, so it would actually be like 75% or something since the meter for the pod would move up faster than the meter for the battery would move down)

[Rarity]

Can't you right click fuel tanks and batteries and other resource containers and "disable" them, so they do not drain? You could do that to one single battery somewhere on a ship, just in case you forget to deploy panels or you leave too many things on while warping or something. I require emergency RTGs on all craft though, with some exceptions. On more than a few occasions, I've loaded up a ship with tons of batteries and sometimes solar panels but sometimes without solar panels. Either way I've learned my lesson from ships dying on me.

[Stone Blue]

If you are not opposed to using plugins, TAC Fuel Balancer isnt JUST for fuel...It has the ability to balance, transfer, and lock electric devices, as well as all the other consumable resources. Its just a plugin, and doesnt need any additional parts. Its quite simple and intuitive to use. I've run into emergency situations, not only with electricity, but fuel as well, and I can transfer/balance resources within a couple seconds to recover.

It would be nice to see similar functionality built into the stock game. After all, real world spacecraft have this functionality built in, so its not really cheating, IMHO.

I've also used it to help with docking very large ships with several layers of longitudinal fuel tanks.

(ie If I have a long, 2 or three stage rocket, thats just lifted into orbit, and is mostly empty of fuel, and there is a payload of several FULL fuel tanks on top for use as orbital refueling, I can balance or transfer the fuel between all stages to adjust the center of gravity, making it easier to swing around or manouver, to get things lined up for docking....Repeatedly transferring fuel back and forth, is kind of like an additional, longitudinal, torque wheel... )

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/tac-fuel-balancer-v1-0/

Edited September 2, 2013 by Stone Blue

[Skorpychan]

I prefer just fitting a couple of the static solar panels or an RTG for backup power. That way there's at least something trickle-charging the batteries.