Energy/fuel system rework

[Entity]

In order to stop infinite energy/fuel cheese with factories, why not change how this works?

I mean, as much as I enjoy infinite energy setups, it's a bit cheesy to have the recharge of 175+ batteries crammed into 8 batteries worth of space.

Soooooo, instead of battery and supercapacitor, have these 2 block types

 

Reactor

(current batteries become reactors)

• same as what the battery currently does, with the same sizes, except it has no energy buffer (or a very very small one). it just generates energy, and you can run your stuff directly off of it as you can with batteries now.
• charges capacitors using the excess generated energy (the leftover recharge rate after providing power to guns/shields)

 

Capacitor

(current supercapacitors become capacitors)

• same as supercapacitor, except it can (re)charge.
• starts fully charged.
• charges using excess power from reactors. no cap on charge rate, excess reactor energy is simply dumped into capacitors.
• drained only when your reactors can't handle the energy demand of your systems.
• empty when printed with factory, requiring you to let it charge from the parent drone before decoupling if the sub-drone doesn't have reactors itself.

 

For fuel, the exact same mechanic could be implemented.

This completely stops infinite energy and fuel factory cheese without hindering the functionality of any involved blocks for most purposes (sumo still works with just capacitors, etc)

It also makes capacitors more useful instead of just the thing you use for sumo or factory cheese.

 

[Markus]

Actually, this is something he heavily discussed shortly before launching the early access. That we could redesign our fuel/battery system in a way that we have "batteries without recharging" and "rechchargers without capacity" And we would have different types of these rechargers, some need sunlight, others might produce energy by speed, etc. But we did not implement it because we didn't have enough time to properly test it before the big launch  

We still have it on our mind we might implement such a system if we think it adds enough fun and variety to the game. But no fixed plans about this yet  

[Lurkily]

At the very least, start off factory-made batteries and fuel fully depleted.