Difficulty spike to install more than 1 battery on a vehicle

[Yunatan]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Installing one and more than one battery on a car shouldn't have equal difficulty.

Describe the solution you'd like
Require electronics 2 to install more than one power source on a vehicle.

Describe alternatives you've considered
You don't want to know.

Additional context
Installing two and more batteries on a car has pretty much the same difficulty regardless of the number of batteries.

[MrHrulgin]

Wiring batteries in sequence is not more difficult than wiring one battery, though it seems that all vehicle batteries in game are wired in parallel given equal draw across the batteries. Given parallel draw, I'd agree that a second battery should take a little more skill but not have continued scaling of difficulty the way engines do.

[HeadstrongCatgirl]

Wiring batteries in parallel is also pretty easy. I think if someone is able to install one, they won't have any issues with installing more.

[Little-119]

Does this apply to storage batteries, or just motorbike/car/truck batteries?

[tenmillimaster]

Installing more than one battery typically requires a battery isolator to do it right so that one battery doesn't attempt to charge a discharged battery. Maybe each additional battery needs such a mcguffin to be installed?

Typically these devices are just relays, however the same could be achieved with switches (both need to be capable of handling the currents involved).

Batteries installed in parallel without any such protection don't last as long, especially if one battery is used as a starting battery and the rest aren't up to the task.

[Greevv]

Eh, I don't feel that this would benefit gameplay in any meaningful way. As previous commenters have said, wiring up a few or even many batteries in series or in parallel isn't difficult. As tenmillimaster said, doing it without the proper protection circuitry can affect the lifespan of the batteries, but it's not likely to be noticeable on the timescales that we deal with ingame. This website is technical instructions from a company that makes chargers for car batteries. As you can see, they wire up to 4 batteries in one circuit without any protection circuitry. http://www.batterytender.com/connecting-chargers

[esotericist]

So the intent behind this is: swapping out a car battery is easy peasy. Doing anything more involved than that should require some technical know-how.

Gating installing more than one battery behind electronics 2 is an arguably overly simplified abstraction, but I don't think it's entirely without merit.

I have some longer-term notions about power storage devices and their relationships with vehicles that would have a stronger coupling of game purpose to real-world logic, but I think doing this as an interim "at least be this capable" makes a kind of sense.

[Ker-Nes]

Adding a minor electronics requirement to install multiple batteries might be good, although it should not increase further for even more batteries. 2 or 20, same practical difficulty to get it done.

Also, any implementation should remember to not include the difficulty to swap storage batteries in storage cases, for obvious reasons, although it could be included in actually installing multiple storage cases in a vehicle.

[esotericist]

Were I to implement this change, it would not increase past that initial elec requirement. The threshold here is simply "more than one battery"

Also were I to implement this change, I would consider the storage case to be "a battery" for the purposes of this mechanic, and the swappable storage battery would not (since it requires that case).

[eilaattwood]

Batteries with same capacity and voltage can be wired in parallel without any protection and many real-life technical solutions actually using that. However, in that case if one of the batteries in the pack gets damaged or wears out, other batteries in the pack will be affected to (well, we can probably prevent that with a simple dedicated fuse for each battery in pack, so it is not so difficult too). Connecting batteries with different capacity, current capabilities, or, especially, voltage is a lot more tricky and requires at least powerful diodes, at most - power converters, manual or automatic switches, etc.

As batteries behave currently in the game, we can suggest that some kind of automatic switching is used, as batteries discharge one after another, and there is no redistribution between batteries with unequal charge.

So I vote for difficulty spike only when installing batteries of different types in the same vehicle.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically closed due to lack of activity. This does not mean that we do not value the issue. Feel free to request that it be re-opened if you are going to actively work on it