Talk:Battery

Battery charge lossiness issues

Space Engineers version 01.100.024

Based on my own testing, I believe that batteries are NOT 100% efficient when charging under any circumstances, not even when charging from Solar Panels.

I made a largeblock ship in Creative, put 100 Solar Panels (total output 12 MW, what the battery claims to accept), a Cockpit, and a Gyroscope on it, pointed it right at the Sun (using a non-rotating Sun), then removed the Gyroscope and put a Battery on it. I then switched the game to Survival mode, waited to make sure the Solar Panels were generating 120 kW each (so about 10-20 seconds), then set the battery to Recharge On.

The initial time estimate said that it would take 15 minutes to recharge. I clocked it with a stopwatch at 19 minutes, 40.83 seconds. That's 3 Megawatt-hours in 1181 seconds (rounded off). 3 MWh = 10800 Megajoules. 10800 MJ / 1181 s = 9.1448 MW, or about 76.2% of 12 MW.

So, not only are batteries lossy when charging from any source, the "Fully recharged in" time estimate is lying to us.

I also noticed in other testing that batteries are lossy when charging from other batters, so I think that this lossiness is on any battery charging regardless of where the energy is coming from.

I'm updating the wiki article accordingly.

--Seamus Donohue (talk) 01:34, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes that would be right, batteries only store 80% of the energy used to recharge them. For your game you want to make sure your UPS (updates per second) are running at 60 to make sure your time estimates are really correct. --Draygo (talk) 21:42, 22 September 2015 (UTC)