Original Post — Direct link

Recently I've been wondering why do I even need batteries, turned out that to me personally, they're almost useless. That's because of several reasons including my playstyle.

Mainly, that's because there is no situation when I'd want/need to turn off the reactor (unless docked to a station ofc). So I came to a conclusion that the automated reactor is too reliable and eliminates most of the troubles where batteries would be useful. And these days playing on default auto-mode with a single fuel rod is almost considered noob-only thing to do.

My suggestion: Remove [set_fissionrate] and [set_turbineoutput] wire pins so that we cannot make custom reactor control circuits. Instead, make the built-in automatic control fast and reliable just as we do today. Except it offsets values a little bit with time leading to power shortage or overload. So you need an engineer to visit the reactor from time to time and fix the values. A new mini-game! And the more fuel rods you put inside, the faster it offsets. So it would make sense to use more energy mid fight and more-less actively control the reactor.

What do you think? Am I the only engineer who has nothing to do after a short wiring magic procedure? Or do you enjoy current no-reactor gameplay?

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over 2 years ago - /u/Regalis11 - Direct link

I agree that we definitely need to do something about the reactors. One option I've been thinking of is making automated reactor control circuits less effective by making the reactor react to the set_fissionrate and set_turbineoutput signals more slowly. However, I'm not sure if that's the best way to go either: forcing the engineers to constantly man the reactor to get it to run optimally would most likely just make playing an engineer more tedious. Making the automatic control gradually drift off from the optimal values sounds like a good way to address that problem though, I think we could give that a test!