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Topic: Some common doubts about powerlines.. (Read 8917 times) previous topic - next topic

Some common doubts about powerlines..

Today, felo from the ES Simutrans community asked me several difficult questions about powerlines (link) I answer them as best as I could but then I realized that actually I didn't know almost anything about powerlines in Simutrans. I think this is a quite unknown issue. Players know it exists, some of them use it but only a few know the details about how it really works.

I've been searching for information about it here, in the archive, the wiki, ingame help and the official guides but there's not too much technical information, thus I think these questions and their answers will be interesting for the community. Some of them are technical questions so I guess only people from the development team may answer them.

  • What do the numbers next to Power, Net and Available mean? are expresed in any measurement unit (watts, production units, etc..) ?
  • Is there any formula that relates the amount of production units from a power plant and the power in powerlines? for example, each production unit means 100 power units more..
  • When I join several powerplants to the network, is the available power the sum of the powers of the power plants?
  • How do I know how much power does a factory consume and how much does the power increase its production?
  • When the game says Available = 0, does it mean there's not enough power or it's because the consumer is not producing anything in that moment?
  • How do I know if there are more consumers conected to the network than the powerplant can support?
  • Do they restrict or prevent the urban growth? mainly related with problems of space I guess.

Re: Some common doubts about powerlines..

Reply #1 –
I'm no expert, but my experience in playing the game leads me to these conclusions, which may be wrong (YMMV):

Power is MegaWatts currently on the network, Net is an internal ID (it syncs if you connect two separate groups of powerline), and available is a mystery to me.
You know there is more load than the plant can handle if, when a factory is actively producing, the transformer is not going to something near 99% Available.
Availability can be affected, in my experience, by who connected their power line to the plant first.

I have no knowledge of your other questions. I hope this helps at least a tiny little bit, since I have no knowledge of the inner workings of the program.
--Skreyola
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Re: Some common doubts about powerlines..

Reply #2 –
Quote from: vilvoh – on
  • What do the numbers next to Power, Net and Available mean? are expresed in any measurement unit (watts, production units, etc..) ?
  • Is there any formula that relates the amount of production units from a power plant and the power in powerlines? for example, each production unit means 100 power units more..
The correspondence should be 1:1, ie production units = power.
Quote
  • How do I know how much power does a factory consume and how much does the power increase its production?
Should be also 1:1, one produced unit consumes one power unit.
Imho, production increase can be up to 100%:
production = base_production*(1 + (consumed power)/(wanted power))
Here, consumed power is what is available at the powernet, which is between '0' and 'wanted power'.

Quote
  • Do they restrict or prevent the urban growth? mainly related with problems of space I guess.
Yes, cities should not build under powerlines.
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and maggikraut.

Re: Some common doubts about powerlines..

Reply #3 –
Factories do not consume, when they are not producing or are over 75% output capacity. Availability should be properly rather neamed "consumption". Any stuff not consumed within a step is lost (as real electricity).

Re: Some common doubts about powerlines..

Reply #4 –
I think not all factories should consume electricity relative to production at a 1:1 ratio, because some manufacturing processes are more power-intensive. Or is the model mainly that the factories can have lights when powered and so not shut down at sunset?
--Skreyola
You can also help translate for your language with SimuTranslator.

Re: Some common doubts about powerlines..

Reply #5 –
ELectricity was a late element of the game. There are even no cl**** for paoer stations but their name. Thus the ****umption that the production number is linked to electricity consumption. There are also further adjustment parameters: A pak set author could set the output percentage to 10%, meaning it will require lots of energy for production.