Electronics - 101 ( Source, Store & Load )

[Zetronus]

[Zetronus]

Greetings fellow survivors

welcome to a small 4 (ish) part series to help those buddying Rusticians how to really get a handle on the Electrickery in RUST.

Now there is an absolute plethora of resources online, but only a few touch on the Methodology and Practice.

 

Since I have seen such amazing attempts by our fellow survivors to get the best out of the electrical component only to get stuck on a tiny bit and get frustrated - well frustrate no more my friends as I hope to be able to share with you some simple concepts and methodologys to take your Electrical Game to most assuredly the NEXT level.

 

So we shall start with some deffinitions -

Edited May 3, 2020 by Zetronus

[Zetronus]

"Store"

It makes sense to store what you don't immediately use in these apocalyptic times, because simply put power is a resource and like all ressources in the wonderful land of Rust, we have to OWN as much of it as possible.  So the developers of these lands have given us a few options to store electrical power for our uses down the line.

Small Battery

Circuit Delivery 10 Power @ ( 20 minutes )

These little gems can provide a small amount of power for short period of time, while it wont power much it can power something VERY critical or aleast provide a means to control power managment.

Medium Battery

Circuit Delivery 50 Power @ ( 1 Hour 30 Minutes )

This is more like it, with these Medium Batteries, one can now power small critical circuits when power generation fails.

Large Battery

Circuit Delivery 100 Power @ ( 3 hours 30 Minutes )

These are clearly my favourite method of storing un-used power - while they maybe a little pricey on the HQM at first - they pay dividends down the line

 

What to choose ?

We will discover that this will come down to the circuit requirement that these items will power.  Say that your circuit only needs 30 units of power - then the Medium Battery would provide enough for that circuit, where as the Large Battery would be over-kill in that situation and the small battery simply wouldn't deliver the output required,

[Zetronus]

"Load"

This refers to anything that the circuit contains, lights, modules, sentries,  RF equipment, Door Openers even secondary back up systems - you name it, this is the place where all the Electrickery happens.

The "Load" has a power requirement, and it is good practice that you base your circuits with the maximum reserve power output you can achive.  Its all well can good having the potential of 200 rusty power units comming from your Power Generation to your circuit - but if that is  intermittent your circuit can easily fail due to being underpowered - this could be as insignificant to a couple of lights - but in the extreme you could have a total failure and not only left in the dark but at the worse possible times..

 

This brings us to the unique electrical item -

the "Root Combiner"

This one special electrical Item that is exempt from "Load" and doesn't cost any power and that is the "Root Combiner"

Root Combiners are only in use at the "Root" of your electrical setup - that is to say they can only be used ( Connecting FROM ) on Power Generation Items, as mentioned above.  the can "Stack" with other Root Combiners and thus  "Root Combine" as they go.   -

e.g. ( For example if you had 4 Solar Panels, you would use 3 Root combiners to combine the outputs to one output from "Source". )

In the above example two Root Combiners take 20 units of power from each the four Large Solar Panel's and are then combined omce again by a third Root Combiner to provide 80 units of output power

It is important to know that these items ONLY conbine "Source" electrical components and connect (TO and FROM )other Root Combiners.  In the image above you can see that each Source Item ( Large Solar Panel ) provides 20 Units of power. 

Without the Root Combiner(s) this would lead to very wimpy circuits without much load at all, however as you can see these items "stack" and at the time of writting I have created "Souce" outputs with over 5 levels of "Root Combiners" - for those mathy types thats a 5*2^ Power Series

It is important to note that while these items will Connect TO other components they will not connect ( FROM ) Batteries, or any other type of electrical item that is NOT a "Source" Generator

 

Edited May 3, 2020 by Zetronus