A change to APCs, and ghetto battery racks
Created by: Midaychi
A feature request/change/refactor idea?
APCs as they are, work, and that's fine. This is an idea for an alternate way for them to work.
1- Remove batteries and battery handling from apcs. Apcs turn into glorified subnetwork power switches and feed directly off whatever power's in the power network to give it to its subsystems. Yes this means that engineering/solar SMES would be directly responsible for powering everything.
2- Take the atmospherics control computer and copy pasta it into engineering, then refactor it for using apcs instead of air alarms. Then engineers can then access and control npcs that have remote access turned on. Sensitive areas and the Ai core would of course, have their remote turned off by default.
3- You can still have your own little power area though, without fussing with generators or power sources like solars. Make a ghetto battery rack with metal, wire it up, snip the wires and screw them to complete a little portable machine that accepts batteries. Load it and wrench it ontop of a knot to provide power to the area. The downside is that it can't also charge the contained batteries due to voltage fluctuations, and if emp'd, the ghetto battery rack will completely discharge into the power network and blow the lights.
The non-ghetto one doesn't discharge on EMP, and ALSO allows you to charge from that network like an smes, but requires use of a soldering iron to make a board and some capacitors to handle proper voltage regulation. Supports having a deployable terminal for connecting to external power, so you can use it as a buffer mini-smes.