Regenerative braking...

[MaverickSawyer]

I was taking a rover on an extended nighttime jaunt, and realized that unless you hit the brakes, slowing down takes energy, as you're running the motors in reverse, while brakes don't do anything to your power levels. Is there any chance that you could either make the brakes into regenerative brakes, or add that as an action group item? There are times when you face a looooong downhill, and you just don't want to hit the brakes. Regenerative brakes would be of great use there.

[Kegereneku]

I support this suggestion, as it could also solve the problem of too abrupt braking.

Though you would have to make a distinction between :

- Hard braking, when you must absolutely stop.

- Regenerative braking, when you would like to retrieve some energy.

ps : do we bet someone will try to make a perpetual motion machine of the third kind ?

[Captain Sierra]

-snip-

ps : do we bet someone will try to make a perpetual motion machine of the third kind ?

Assuming the regenerative braking is correctly balanced, this should not be possible unless gravitational acceleration (going downhill) is used to add energy back into the system.

[a.g.]

Activating the motor opposite to the current direction of movement should generate energy. I think that is even realistic and happens automatically with the simplest permanent-magnet DC motor.

[austincurr]

I support this- It would be useful to have another way to get electricity and to make it go farther.

[Mmmmyum]

Personally I think it would take too much dev time to get this working, and for what? How any units of charge would this give back?

[Kruleworld]

Activating the motor opposite to the current direction of movement should generate energy.

correct

Personally I think it would take too much dev time to get this working,

I disagree. the game already has to calculate the the electric charge used for accelerating, so slowing down (coast) or braking could use similar coding. So long as the net result doesn't give more charge then we should be good.

[technicalfool]

Consider this suggestion five-starred. It's an awesome idea, and I'm pretty sure that Squad could balance it out to say, 50% efficiency or so, so you don't get Danny2462 inventing the perpetual motion machine (or at least, not using rover brakes anyway).

Are wheels on the floor? Are we moving? Are the brakes active or are we trying to power in reverse? Take current surface m/s, divide by some arbitrary number, add this value to electricCharge. Done.

[Winter Man]

This'd be great to include on later-tiered rover wheels (maybe not the first one).