Lifepod Solar Cells
Aurora_Survivor
Naperville Illinois Join Date: 2018-01-04 Member: 234809Members
Naperville Illinois Join Date: 2018-01-04 Member: 234809Members
I have noticed a difference between the charge rate of the solar panel on a seabase and the one on Lifepod 5. The PDA databank entry for the lifepod said something about the pod having some solar cells for power. One solar panel provides 75 energy about the same power reserve as the Lifepod. But somehow during certain times of the day and light level determine the recharge rate of solar panels but the lifepods recharge rate does not charge faster at midday than at night. They should really fix this.
Comments
From a game design perspective, it's an elegant solution to an annoying problem: how to give players enough of a "nest" to be able to start the game, but a strong incentive to get them out of that nest. Since you can't add anything to the lifepod, it means that you have to give up its unlimited internal power feature and move into a proper base - which you have to power externally - to get all the shiny stuff you really want.
Well, then I guess I need to throw this out there: that was a dumb change.
If that's what they're going with - and only they know why on Earth or any other planet they'd pull such a boneheaded move - then you're all right: night-time recovery needs to be removed.
*smh*
Dumb and confusing. Imagine a new player coming in, reading that it says Solar-charged, then wondering why their solar power doesn't charge at night too. Then imagine if a few come here to report Solar Panels being bugged since they're not recharging at night when the Solar charger on the lifepod does?
Options:
1 - Don't call it solar.
2 - Make it stop recharging at night.
Either is fine by me, but if they're going to call it Solar then it really needs to play by the same rules as the solar panels you make.
Actual Solar Cells? Ah, these must be TIE-fighter levels of magi*cough, cough*efficiency. I mean, can you imagine some unforseen interstellar hazard ripping apart a capital class craft in the depths of deep dark space and floating around in your little lifepod with only enough power to maybe pulse the radio once in a while?
Actually, @scifiwriterguy -- in the worst case, how much energy could you expect from true solar in deep space, assuming a magical 100% efficiency?
This aughtta be interesting *rubs hands gleefuly*. It's scifiwriterguy time!
Depends very heavily on a few factors.
The first is the distance to the nearest star and the type of star it is. A red dwarf has a very low solar output (comparatively speaking) even up close, while a blue-white hypergiant really pumps out the joules. The net result is that you'll be able to capture meaningful energy from a hypergiant further out than you will from a main sequence or a dwarf.
The second element is how much solar acreage you're willing to build and loft. As with anything, the more you're willing to put up, the more you're going to get out of it. On Earth, a good 1m solar cell can be expected to put out about 150W per square meter, but those are only 15% efficient. At 100% efficiency, that's 1000W per square meter...on Earth. In broad daylight.
So, to build a comparison, we need to figure out the amounts of light we're talking about.
On Earth on a bright, sunny day, we top out at 100,000 lux. Cool. But at night, without the moon, that drops to 0.002 lux. (Uh-oh.) And that includes a ton of airglow - basically, the conduction of light by the atmosphere from the dayside. Removing that from the equation, you drop down hard, and that's going to ruin your day. Taking away airglow and all other contaminants, with other stars so far away, we drop down to about 0.0001 lux. That's about the amount of light you'll get to play with from pure starshine, so that's about how much, on average, you're going to have as you fly between stars.
Ugh, 0.0001 lux. That means that for every 10,000 square meters of perfect solar cell we're harvesting about...1W. One crappy watt from a solar cell bank the size of a New York City block.
So what does that mean in real terms?
In other words, make sure you buy it on a credit card. You'll have frequent flyer miles for generations to come. Of course, there are more problems.
Soooo...yeah. Not the best plan ever.
So what about the lifepod?
Net-net? A solar-powered lifepod just doesn't work. Sorry.
Better be a fuel cell or something then? Charging some sort of capacitor or regular battery power cell?
Assuming the entirety of the pod surface doubles as solar cells, and that it has better efficiency than current cells. If we approximate the lifepod to a sphere with a radius of 2m, its surface area will be ~50m and a large portion of it will be exposed to the sun.
High tech equipment should also be more energy efficient.
I say it's fictionally viable.
Imho just change it to work as a regular in-game solar cell and it's all cool.
Capacitors tied to a nuclear battery. There are several different designs that would work - thermocouple/thermophotovoltaic, thermionic, alpha/betavoltaic, a handful of others - but a constant-production low-capacity generator tied to a supercapacitor bank would be the most feasible answer; it'd produce energy constantly, independent of environmental conditions, and be a reliable power source for a very long time.
Unless you crack it open, and then your name better be Bruce Banner or life is going to suck in short order. Luckily, it won't bother you for long.
Fair enough.
If we assume the pod is a rough sphere 2m in diameter, surface area works out to 50.27 m2. About, say, a quarter of that is flotation skirt and underwater, so that's functionally useless, leaving us with roughly 37.7 m2. You're never going to get light exposure on all sides of the pod because the star is a single-point source, so there will be, at most, half of the pod in direct sunlight, or 18.8 m2, which is a little short. Water is highly reflective, though, so let's assume the rest of the pod gets...say, 30% nominal exposure, giving us an effective secondary area of 5.655 m2, for a grand productive total of...24.455 m2, more than the 19 m2 dirt minimum I calculated originally. Taking away the big, gaudy, light-up 5 and other odd bits will shave off maybe two square meters or thereabouts, so, in terms of area, it looks like we're good.
Now, another hitch is the pod itself: the thing's white. Classically, solar panels are dark - blue or black.
Lookin' good! Plus, solar cells are really fragile, so we...um...uh-oh.
A lifeboat is going to take some knocks, and that's just lifeboats on oceans here on Earth. A lifepod on a spaceship? You're going to be using them in all kinds of environments. High heat to near absolute zero. Vacuum to crushing pressure. Toxic and corrosive environments. Hard rads. You're going to be dropping them on rock, bouncing them off asteroids or ring systems, peppering them with shrapnel. Heck, just take a look at what happened to our pod in the span of about twenty seconds: it was launched out of a burning ship, smashed into an ocean at high speed, and - tiny detail - was way too close for safety to an exploding freaking starship. And yet, that pod comes through looking like a new penny. The clear implication is that those pods can take some abuse without losing capability. (NOTE: Guarantee does not apply to alien quarantine squids sawing pods open. Any alien interaction voids warranty.) One problem the colorized solar panels have is durability: they cannot handle punishment. After everything Old Number 5 has been through, if it were coated with solar cells, it should look shaggier than a shedding buffalo as huge chunks of the cells have been ripped off.
But, hey, let's just handwave that and say "they figured out the durability problem." They can't make a battery that lasts longer than a sneeze, but they can make a pocketknife that can poke a hole in a submarine, so clearly Alterra quality control is a mixed bag. Let's assume they somehow fixed the solar cell durability problem.
Sooooo...yeah! It's technically theoretically plausible. Change it to work as a regular in-game solar system, let it serve as an intro to the solar power mechanic as @0x6A7232 suggested, and it's all cool.
Regarding the batteries, I think it's another problem deriving from the accelerated game time notion. While on the subject of unrealistic mechanics, how can we justify the Stasis Rifle ?
It’s set a thousand years in the future how knows
Well, this is Subnautica. A lot of unrealistic things are in it, It has already been hinted that humans can reach the Andromeda Galaxy which is over 2.5 million light years away. Meaning humans somehow found a way to travel faster than light to reach the Andromeda Galaxy.
Not only that but humans have been able to go to the Ariadne Arm which is where the kharaa events take place. Even the Precursors could reach Earth and the Ariadne Arm and I'm not even sure if there has been an official name of the galaxy that the Ariadne Arm is in.
Game lore states that they use phase gates. Building one is precisely the original Aurora mission.
I'll give you three other options besides developing ftl.
- 1. Humans found relic alien tech in the form of one or more gates (commonplace in may sci-fi scenarios)
- 2. Humans took the time to get there, with stasis and near light speed the apparent time required for the crew to reach Andromeda and set up a gate would be significantly reduced. In this scenario humans tech stagnates for a long time (also a regularly present scenario in fiction).
- 3. Most game lore refers to the "galaxy" and does not indicate precisely which galaxy. Maybe Andromeda is just some place inside that galaxy.
Maybe it's a combo between one, two or all of the options above.
That's the best part, it doesn't need an answer. It is whatever you imagine it to be, and the mental exercise trying to understand it is very enriching.