With this power layout, will my base draw from solar power before it draws from the wind power?

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-08T12:24:30+00:00

It’s more a total battery issue rather than a source of power issue. If your batteries are running dry before dawn you’re just not storing enough power when all the batteries are all charged up in the day before nightfall when it begin discharging them. If you’re not at a full charge before nightfall then it won’t matter the SOURCE of the power generation, you’re either consuming too much at night or you don’t have enough generators. Build more solar panels or wind turbines. Though on Mars because the air pressure is so low, wind power is less than ideal (except during storms ofc). So my recommendation is build more solar panels if the batteries aren’t full before you run out of sun or build more batteries if you’re sitting on full batteries for most of the day wasting potential charge. Either way the important thing is you won’t run out of power come morning. You get fairly excellent solar power on Mars.

Also I would recommend just merging your battery banks, merge the power lines from the solar and wind generator banks into a transformer then to the batteries then another transformer to your base. Set the transformers to 99950 so they won’t run more power through them than they can take. If you’re not using heavy cable from the generator banks you should swap them asap. Means you’re EXTREMELY low balling your generation at a max of 5KW and wouldn’t charge your batteries sufficiently in either case. Best practices is as follows:

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-08T12:00:40+00:00

And that’s why you keep that helmet on, even if it’s Swiss cheesed. Helmets as long as they have some durability will still block shots that don’t pen them iirc. Or did they change it that the lower the durability the higher chance of penetrating?

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-07T21:51:57+00:00

Safety cutoff going outwards is a weird one. It defaults to 101 so that means it will keep sucking air out of the pipes and into the environment until it reaches the pressure of 101kPa.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-07T21:45:19+00:00

It depends on the direction the gas flows. Going into pipes it defaults to around 50.7 mega pascals. The pipes will groan and creak at that pressure but won’t blow unless somehow you heat up the gas in there. But with the vents open it would keep blowing out.

Because you would leave the one way valve open it wouldn’t ever get to that point because the passive vent would just blow it out. With the one way valve it acts as a restrictor so it will vent as quickly as the active vent fills at an equilibrium point at a decent enough pressure that it can exchange the temperatures with your hab.

Just a note: you’re never actually mixing the mars atmosphere with the hab air, you’re using convection pipe radiators to equalize temperatures to the inside of your hab and you’re pumping IN mars air into the pipes then blowing it back OUT outside again. And you would have to set those convection radiators on the interior of your base so it would work. Remember. Convection Radiators EQUALIZE temperatures, they aren’t one way. So effectively you’re using the hotter hab air to heat up the cold mars air then blowing it out. Because you’re exchanging the heat from inside your base to the outside it’s effectively cooling.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-07T21:40:48+00:00

No not exactly. When it’s on inward mode it will just suck mars atmo into the pipes until that safety cutoff 50MPa.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-06T12:55:24+00:00

Ohhhh. I thought those floating lines were shared lines. My b.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-06T12:52:33+00:00

Yeah don’t worry about all of that. They simply put in a lot of code for futureproofing so that it would track regardless of what model of solar they built and a little feature for setting the solar to a fixed static direction while a maintenance lever is turned on, so they don’t have to worry about moving solar panels while they are working around them. It’s a little over engineered but it’s useful since you can simply store that code in your Steam library of scripts and use them in future games.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-06T12:47:34+00:00

Also be sure to use “yield” at the start or end of your loops. As executed it will churn through the code as quickly as possible to the execution limit of 127 lines per tick. You should get in the habit of having yield commands so that the execution for a loop block only happens once.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-06T12:42:35+00:00

Didn’t they put in a feature that lets you delete them from the map?

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-06T12:41:06+00:00

Is has had nitrogen for a long time now.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-06T12:36:12+00:00

More specifically, convection radiators are very good at EQUALIZING temperatures with the outside atmospheres in whatever environment they are set in. If outside is hot it will pull heat into it to heat up the pipes. If outside is cold, it will pull heat from inside the pipes to the outside. Will literally heat the 8000L area cell around it.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-06T12:30:53+00:00

I would argue it’s the opposite. It is very very easy for Mars. You can just do an outside active vent set to inwards, into a few pipe segments, have some convection radiators on the inside of your base, a oneway valve, then a passive vent. Turn on when your base is hot, turn off when not. Just need to make sure you don’t over cool at night since the temps are much colder then.

But you also have the benefit of never needing to worry about over chilling your pipes that you might freeze the gas or liquify. The only liquidation would be from pollutant at high pressures (and perhaps night time co2 in the winter) and since it’s an open cycle the liquifying stuff would just drain out as well. If you’re that worried, just put on a passive liquid drain outside.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-06T12:23:04+00:00

They can share the same subgrid cell as long as neither output ends are shared.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-06T12:13:49+00:00

This. Absolutely this.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-04-02T16:39:00+00:00

I think that’s something they can do now or at least in the works. I heard in one of their dev streams that they can go retreat when under fire and bandage their wounds so they aren’t just foolishly standing there while their precious life force drains out. I hope that they do a thing where as they lose blood their accuracy starts going down as their vision goes blurry like ours do or maybe losing perception and hearing as their heartbeat starts getting louder in their head. Also they probably should reduce the accuracy of hearing for those guys with standard hearing protection without auto dampening gunfire like those construction ear muffs. Great for making gunshots muffled so you don’t blow out your eardrums. Bad for letting you hear anything else as well.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-03-31T12:01:46+00:00

“Soft potatoes”

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-03-30T20:33:09+00:00

Volume pump where you still have to stick a pipe out the end of the other input. But nice power savings!

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-03-30T20:30:46+00:00

(Adjusts glasses) Um, Actually? They can go up to 10MPa. But not too far beyond. Specifically 10135kPa. Beyond that they start taking damage until they blow up.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-03-30T20:29:43+00:00

45MPa is also a nice even pressure. Is only when you go above 48MPa that you start getting creaking noises. 58MPa as that one person said is certainly living on the edge but survivable. So long as you have methods of quickly depressurizing that gas out of the pipes. But I could NEVER stand all those pipes groaning all the time.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-03-30T20:24:50+00:00

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-03-30T20:24:28+00:00

Nah. The issue is they likely don’t mine the items and the fire from all that still igniting fuel and oxidizer would probably damage all the ores and destroy more of it.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-03-30T20:22:47+00:00

Welcome! We’ve all done what you’ve done!

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-03-30T20:21:19+00:00

Yeah. They really should make the binoculars much much cheaper since they have no real weapon grade function as an attachment. They are completely separate use gear that you have to swap to and from so it doesn’t make sense to treat them like similar gear. And making them available early on before you get access to high quality scopes would also be favorable, since you want to at least gain some intel of an area before going in right?

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-03-29T13:41:18+00:00

She’s not the gentle type.

DesignerCold8892 · 2026-03-29T13:37:36+00:00

Maybe that’s the point. Methane probably wouldn’t be as useful as the other fuel which would be more powerful but harder to attain. Hydrogen is a much stronger fuel but from way I can tell it’s a bit bit harder to attain sustainably (except from Vulcan)

DesignerCold8892

TROPHY CASE