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The Cable Age

Our best archaeologist team has uncovered an exciting antique technology: the cables! The ancient people seems to use them to remotely power buildings without involving batteries. This shiny miracle is however quite easy to reproduce and they are now a fundamental part of space ship structures, ending the age of manual battery delivery.

Reactors and Capacitors can now power buildings within a distance. Reactors can also charge capacitors and capacitors will try to balance against themselves.

Reactors have a flow rate higher than their power generation speed, meaning they will slowly fill themselves if power generation is above power consumption and they will be drained if vice versa. Capacitors have a flow rate of 12/s.

Reactors have a supply distance relative to their sizes. Capacitors have a supply distance of 8. The ship designer will display an icon on buildings that require power and are in range of any reactor or capacitor.

This mod is inspired by MMCT - Power Rework, Cables and Stuff and even goes further than that. You don't need to add anything to your ship to automate the battery delivery. It becomes a fundamental feature.

Do NOT enable this mod and MMCT simulteniously. You don't need both at the same time.

WARNING: This mod significantly breaks the balance by eliminating the need of manual battery delivery, rendering 90% of the crews useless. Your fleet size is also less restricted to the maximum number of crews you may have. It's recommended to tune down the crew cap in career mode, or you will have access to larger ships much earlier than expected. Existing ship designs can still be loaded, but they are probably not designed with Built-In Cables mod in mind, rendering them less efficient designs.

In theory, this mod, similar to MMCT, can power all mod ship parts that require power, unless for an unknown purpose the latter's author has made it in a way it can't be automatically powered.

Galactic Allegiance (2x1 reactor)
Jani's Shipyard (6x6 reactor and 1x1 reactor)
More Power Storages
Medium Hyperdrive
Medium Hyperdrive (TechTree)
Corvettes and Components (1x1 Reactor, 2x1 Hyperdrive)
Fighters and Components (1x1 Reactor, 1x1 Hyperdrive, and 1x1 reactor + hyperdrive)

Reactors and capacitors not listed here might not be able to transfer power to buildings.

Hyperdrives only request power when it is charging for a hyper jump and it uses battery storage as a wind up meter. It empties its battery storage when it is not charging for a hyper jump. However, unlike crews, our reactors and capacitors could not help feeding them even when they are not requesting power and all batteries fed to them are just wasted. To resolve this issue, this mod adds a battery buffer to hyperdrives and its wind up meter draws power from its battery buffer only when charging for a hyper jump, avoiding the bottomless power drain. Hyperdrives not listed here might still have the said issue.

The Cable Age + Tiered Parts

Engine Rooms powered by cables can't power thrusters. Engine Rooms request manual delivery of batteries and teleports it to adjacent thrusters if they have fewer remaining power than itself, but if its power comes from the cable, the teleport just don't happen. To power thrusters, include thrusters within power supply range of your reactors or capacitors.

Shields powered by cables are very dificult to take down without some weapons as powerful as nukes. Even if a shield is overrun, it charges up again within one second. To mitigate this issue one can install the Shields Cooldown mod, limiting the reboot speed of taken down shield generators.

Q: My crews are still delivering batteries!
A: Either revoke door access to your reactor or edit your crew roles to tell them not to power parts. If some parts become unpowered afterwards, leave a comment which mod is it from and I will take a look.

Q: I don't like the supply range you determined and I want to make them power stuff even farther.
A: I made this mod in a way that the values can be changed easily without needing to know much about modding. Head to the mod files directory and edit "stats.rules". It should be straightforward once you made it there.

Q: Some mod parts that use power cannot be powered by the cable.
A: Here is some technical info that may help you. Either its battery storage component isn't named "BatteryStorage", or it is lacking the tag "uses_power", or it does not inherit ReceiveableBuffs from base part. Hope this can help you making a compatibility patch. If you still have no idea why it is not working, you can leave a comment which part is it and which mod is it coming from and I will seek a moment to take a look.

Q: I am the author of ______ mod and despite being listed as compatible, my local copy of the mod isn't compatible with your mod.
A: Due to the current status of Cosmoteer modding, this issue cannot be resolved in my end. You either subscribe your own workshop item and enable it for your plays instead, or apply the patches to your local copy of the mod. The latter would crash the game for users not using The Cable Age mod; to avoid this, add the following actions to your mod.rules.