OmegaHaxors
commented
7 years ago This would be a dramatic improvement over the current ugly solution of indoor powerlines and would allow for some pretty interesting interactions. DC-DC converters are very difficult to build in-world right now because of the wire limitations.
It would be even more interesting if metals had different properties and you could mix them together as an alloy to mix and match their stats to fit whatever you needed. This could also open the door for all sorts of interesting solutions based on what resources are available to the player.
Some stats I have in mind for each metals are
- Resistance: How much resistance the line has, and thus how much energy is wasted as heat
- Capacitance: How much electricity the wire can hold and thus how quickly it can change
- Conductivity: How ideal the material is for conducting. Low is good for insulation
- Melting Point: The point which the wire (or insulation) fails
- T.Insulation: How much heat is lost from the wire, high could be good for heat preservation
- Magnetism: The effect in normal wires is noise, but when used as a core determines efficiency.
- Ideal Temp: The range where the wire works most effectively. Superconductors need to be COLD
- Failure type: How the material fails. Wood burns, iron melts, some metals may explode
- Flexibility: How far the material bends. Low flexibility means less sag when suspended
- Strength: How much bending the material can take before failing
- Weight: Heavier wires sag more when held in air, and thus need to be stronger
- Noise: Reserved for more "magical" metals. Random voltage changes which may help or hinder transfer
A lot of these are designed to be scales, with both extremes being desirable. That way, there's a challenge to alloying instead of just putting the 2 "best" metals together, since there's no "best" metal that won't be as big of an issue with this type of system.
Here's the fun part: Once you have your materials set up, you can draw on a 16x16 grid with your components to actually design the wire. The final stats are determined by both the materials you use and where you place them. You can even choose to forgo insulation if you plan to hang the wire anyway. Want to have multiple channels across the same wire? You can. Want a hole to transfer fluids for coolant? Go for it. Tiny wire for basic communications? Do it. Big thick wire for heavy duty power transfer? Rock on.
Here's a little mock-up design for a gold wire, insulated by graphite and rubber, and has a little water pipe on top of it as a sort of heat sink. The purple is empty space, and would represent air. May not be the best design but it's unique.
Baughn
dennis-qt
AMIDIBOSS
So... I would really like to have some sort of machine that I could use to make my own, custom power cables... The reason for this is : The power cables that we have right now are (in some cases) too small! For example a 200v cable can only hold around 2kW, that is just enough to supply one House with power, if the house is bigger(and so needs more power) you will have to either lay down more cables or use a 800v or even a 3,2kV cable into the house. In the first way there would be a lot of cables that just take up space that could be used for other things, also each cable would need its own converter as you can not connect 2 200V cables to one converter and pull full power out of both cables as the piece that connects both to the converter will overheat and pop! In the 2nd way you would have only one cable going from the power station to the house but the problem isn't removed there, you basically just moved all the wiring/connection problems (that I wrote for the first way) into the house, using up all the space in that house!
Also I dont like having to build either a huge converter station for a big city and then trying to make it look nice(not saying that your converters look ugly or something but it doesn't look nice if theres a spot with tons of converters in the middle(or at the side) of a city!) and having to put tons of power cables somewhere underground, or smaller converter stations which are spread in the city and then having to put powerpoles everywhere just to connect them all...
What would be useful here (this would require the machine I suggested to be added) would be a cable with, for example, Voltage:200V/Current:63A/Power:12,6kW, as I would only need one converter which gives me 200V@63A, connect this cable to that and then use the "normal" 200V cables to tap the power for the houses off that big cable instead of having to make one converter for each House and basically filling all the ground under the city with all the power cables going to the houses.... Also, if a House needs more power, I could just lay that big cable directly to that one house and connect everything straight to that instead of having those problems that I wrote in the first half of this issue/suggestion.