Electric charge transfer speed

[allmhuran]

I had an issue where a craft with lots of stored electric charge was giving me "not enough electric charge" messages when attempting to transmit.

A helpful forum user told me that this is because the electric charge has to be transferred to the antenna. Or at least to the part that the antenna is attached to. Therefore a good way to speed up your transmissions is to make sure the antenna is attached directly to a battery, so you have a nice buffer ready to go.

This is great advice! But I still have a slight issue. Right now the only battery I have available that an antenna can be attached to is the small, circular battery which stores, IIRC, 100 charge.

I have also unlocked the surface-mounted 400 charge battery, but no parts can be attached to this, so I can't attach an antenna directly to it.

So this leaves me with a question: Is there any way to optimize the speed of the automatic electricity transfer? For example, is it better to have the large batteries closer to the antenna in the part tree? Or does it work like the manual fuel transfer, where the transfer rate is the same no matter how far apart the parts are in the part tree?

Edited October 22, 2013 by allmhuran

[toomuchbrew]

I have never ran into such an issue. As far as I know, battery power is for the entire ship I unlike fuel with multiple rocket stages. Maybe a glitch or you are using one of the antennas that use a lot more power? What antenna are you using? How many do you have and what experiments?

[allmhuran]

Update:

I just built some test craft and the advice of the helpful forum user seems not to be correct. Power is drawn from all batteries equally.

So I guess this one is answered (or rather, the question is not appropriate), but my original question, namely "Why does a ship with thousands units of charge available say not enough charge when transmitting?", still stands.

[allmhuran]

I have never ran into such an issue. As far as I know, battery power is for the entire ship I unlike fuel with multiple rocket stages. Maybe a glitch or you are using one of the antennas that use a lot more power? What antenna are you using? How many do you have and what experiments?

Ninjad.

Yep, doing some tests also indicates to me that electricity transfer speed is not a relevant thing here.

The ship has several antenna, but it has a buffer of 2300 electric charge and all engines running, so the charge never even drops from maximum, and still it says "not enough electric charge":

[toomuchbrew]

Strange. I guess I will have a science experiment to try tonight when I can break free. Sounds like a glitch. On a side note, I have found that batteries with solar panels in direct sun don't drain at 100 time accel and still transmits fine. Might be another bug where battery drain doesn't update at high time accel

[Oddible]

Same issue pops up a lot for me. As I'm screaming through the atmosphere before the immanent demise of my craft I often try to maximize my science by clicking through my hotkey'd science mods over and over to transmit as much as possible. It seems that there is an unlisted factor in electric consumption, amps?

[toomuchbrew]

Not sure. I don't see any instance where they factor amps into the equation. You have given me an awesome idea tho. Hot keying science parts.. brilliant!

Edited October 22, 2013 by toomuchbrew
stupid phone

[Tassyr]

From what I've seen I have two theories:

It seems to me that if at any point the calculated transmission 'cost' in power would exceed that of any battery, the program alerts you.

It doesn't take charge devices (Solar Panels, RTGs, Running Engines) into account.

Though both of these might be totally wrong, I'm leaning towards the former.

[toomuchbrew]

Since the antenna sends in packets, is it possible the capsule or probe is using a high band/high draw and trying to draw more? From what I read, the issue ids not battery capacity. I don't know. I will check it out tonight to see if I can replicate the issue.

[citizen13]

I've seen the same issue. From what I can tell, the lack of power comes from the pod draining first, then being refilled from external battery capacity. If you watch the pod power directly you can see it being depleted rapidly to zero even though you have plenty of total electricity on the whole ship. I actually started using the TAC Fuel Balancer mod configured to transfer electricity into the pod, since it seems to do it at a faster rate than the default game.

I'm fairly certain my antennas are usually connected directly to the pod, so the question of connecting to a battery remains, but I suspect it won't matter. Many of the science/transmit mechanics are tied to the pod. I also don't know how multiple pods would behave, since I usually just use one. That would be an interesting experiment as well, since there is only one "real" pod in command no matter how many you have.

Also, to best replicate this, try using the Mk1 pod with multiple high-draw antennas and spam a few large science transmits quickly.

[nholzric]

I've had this problem too. It looks to me like the antenna its self simply doesn't draw charge fast enough to transmit. It's annoying to get the Out Of Charge messages.

Strange. I guess I will have a science experiment to try tonight when I can break free. Sounds like a glitch. On a side note, I have found that batteries with solar panels in direct sun don't drain at 100 time accel and still transmits fine. Might be another bug where battery drain doesn't update at high time accel

I've also noticed this glitch. If you're transmitting during time acceleration your solar panels will produce power commensurate with the accelerated time but the transmission will draw power in non-game time. In this way your craft effectively gets more power production per unit transmit than it should.

[The_Rocketeer]

AFAIK (could be wrong), battery power doesn't cross non-crossfeed compatible parts any more than fuel does, but you can still transfer across using alt-rightclick. Could this be a design problem?

[toomuchbrew]

AFAIK (could be wrong), battery power doesn't cross non-crossfeed compatible parts any more than fuel does, but you can still transfer across using alt-rightclick. Could this be a design problem?

Not sure on that. I imagine if you have docking ports, turning off cross feed might effect electricity. I don't think so however. As far as putting batteries on structural parts like I beams and stuff, I never noticed that that weren't added in to the vehicles total. So I don't know if that is it either.

[allmhuran]

AFAIK (could be wrong), battery power doesn't cross non-crossfeed compatible parts any more than fuel does, but you can still transfer across using alt-rightclick. Could this be a design problem?

A good thought, but the ship I'm currently working on has no docking ports or other non-crossfeed parts.

[marge]

Having this issue today too. Stumbled onto a temporary solution that seemed to work perfectly.

It seems that it was drawing off the lander can instead of the batteries - so when i right click the lander can, next to the power levels, there's a green triangle. Click it, it turns to a don't enter sign, and it forces broadcasting and science things to draw from other sources. Suddenly no more "low power" messages. It appears this is a way to save batteries. It should now draw off your other sources (in my case it was the 4000 worth of batteries and the nuke generators).