Engineering room

The engineering room allowes you to redestribute power along selected routes. A power destination will receive more power than normal, and may have increased output. A power source offers its power to be stolen by destinations. A disabled module doesn't take any power and thus saves your energy for more important things.

1. Creating a route

Walk into your engineering room. You will bring up a new screen which is a diagram of your ship. Clicking modules rotates them in and out of 3 different categories:


 * Power destination
 * Power source
 * Disabled

You can only save one configuration per route and to get more routes you need either more engineering rooms or better engineering rooms. A very simple ship setup might only offer a single route, forcing the captain to choose ahead of time where emergency power can be routed during combat. Does your ship benefit from a burst of speed? or do you anticipate needing extra shields? Maybe you have a missile ship and you just want the option to toggle missile factories on and off. Each of these ideas would constitute a "route" and each would be represented by a single toggle on your navigation screen.

2. Using a route

Every ship has 1 route active at any given time. Route 0 is normal power functionality. If you have additional routes available you will see toggle buttons which you can click or activate with a hotkey to change your active route. You will know what each one does, because you will create it before you can activate it.

3. The underlying mechanics

Every power update has been divided into 2 phases. Previously, a single power update phase allowed all of the power using modules to take power across the power grid from modules that provide power such as reactors and capacitors. Within the confines of a single update, conduit use was recorded so that overall power transmission would be limited by the maximum transfer rate of each individual conduit. Once some module had put 10 energy through a conduit segment (T1), that conduit was capped out for the rest of the update cycle and no other modules could draw power through it.

With routes, there is a second power update in addition to the first one. After all modules have taken the power they want, modules designated as power destinations are given a 2nd chance to take power from the grid using the same conduits, but with added conduit capacity which depends on the quality of the engineering room assigned the route. The catch is that they aren't allowed to take from reactors in this 2nd phase, because the reactors have already done their duty so to speak. Instead, a new list of power sources is provided in the form of the source modules designated by the route.

Since the engineering room effectively doubles the number of power update cycles (to a degree depending on the extra flow capacity) it can be very effective at increasing the output of energy craving modules. It also has an added effect of triggering an overpower mode on some modules which allow them to use energy faster for higher output. That effect will vary on a module by module basis, but a good example is engines which will try to operate above 100% output providing more thrust for more energy in exactly the opposite way as they do when providing less thrust in response to having less energy.

Routes also follow slightly different rules because you manually assign power sources. Namely, you can take power from any power using module. This allows you to do creative things like direct energy to move directly from one module to another to power one of them even when the entire tree is disconnected from the main grid, or so that you can daisy chain modules to a certain degree.