Where's my energy?!?

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 5:07 am

I've had (again) some very strange thing to happen to me. My naval energy unit was damaged in combat, resulting in my energy being drained down to zero without being hit.

Before someone asks wether this is a thing with my own trunk build: Could please someone who's able to damage that eq during flight via debug console take a Caduceus for a test flight?

1) Get a little shield damage...yellow is enough
2) Damage the NEU

...and let me know what happens? Currently I don't even know for sure where to look.

To avoid any questions: Cloak/MASC/Turrets were switched OFF - no energy drain from there.

EDIT: With full shields energy is VERY slowly recharging. The recharge rate is not even high enough to power a military laser (firing it will cause energy to rapidly drop) - I've really no idea what's going on!

Screet

Post by **Kaks** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:35 am

It could be the caduceus using energy while trying to self-repair...

Having said that, I don't seem to be able to replicate your problem. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

Makara · Post by **Makara** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 10:57 am

Don't think this is a Caddy quirk, Screet. I remember this happening in my Morrigan (Oolite 1.73.3) after NEU damage - I wasn't even able to fire lasers although the ship didn't go pop. Eventually the energy banks started recharging - did they not do this with yours?

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:29 am

Makara wrote:
Don't think this is a Caddy quirk, Screet. I remember this happening in my Morrigan (Oolite 1.73.3) after NEU damage - I wasn't even able to fire lasers although the ship didn't go pop. Eventually the energy banks started recharging - did they not do this with yours?

There was only a VERY slow recharge after the shields were restored - before that the energy did drop to zero rapidly. Receiving one shot, even with shields up, did result in death during earlier situations like this, but this time I managed to escape from the thargoids in Witchspace and then run successfully from a horde of pirates at the W buoy...but the recharge rate was much slower than on any ship I've seen so far, and I've seen very bad rechargers already.

I did suspect that the Caddy script might drain energy, but could not find anything like that in there.

Thus my guess is that a damaged NEU somehow can cause a constant energy drain, which even cripples the naturally high recharge of the Caduceus.

Screet

Post by **Kaks** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 12:24 pm

If you can replicate, can you check the recharge with or without MASC?

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 1:55 pm

Kaks wrote:
If you can replicate, can you check the recharge with or without MASC?

I've never used the debug console, which is my biggest problem in replicating this one...but I've had it several times.

One thing is that the MASC would switch itself off on low energy, but I manually had it disabled before these things did happen. I also did disable turrets, but the problem did not go away.

Strange is, that I did have a damaged NEU in my inventory. After docking at a planet of too low tech, I could, of course, not repair it...but was offered an extra energy unit. Sadly I did not check wether the NEU still was listed as damaged but bought the EEU instead - and then noticed that I did not have the damaged NEU anymore.

Maybe I'll modify some script to damage the NEU during combat explicitly...that, at least, I do know how to test

It really did look as the recharge rate was not lowered to that of a normal Caduceus, but far below that of any ship with weak recharge rate. When shields need to be refilled, that instantly results in quick energy drain down to zero

How little the recharge rate was afterwards became clear by firing the military laser while the shields were full: it did cause highly visible energy drain, while usually even slowly recharging ships won't show much of laser energy usage...

Screet

Post by **Eric Walch** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 2:21 pm

Screet wrote:
Strange is, that I did have a damaged NEU in my inventory. After docking at a planet of too low tech, I could, of course, not repair it...but was offered an extra energy unit. Sadly I did not check wether the NEU still was listed as damaged but bought the EEU instead - and then noticed that I did not have the damaged NEU anymore.

Yep, buying the EEU is a bad choice in this case. Because now you need to pay the full price to get a NEU and you can't go to one tech level lower for repair.
Only advantage it that you have a better energy unit than none until you can buy the NEU.

Post by **Kaks** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 3:34 pm

Oolite does warn that the newly bought EEU will completely replace the broken NEU, and it's expected behaviour.

If the NEU is not broken, Oolite won't offer EEUs for sale.

The EEU & NEUs affect a multiplier to the ship's recharge rate. That multiplier is never below 1, so you still should recharge faster with an EEU than without. You can damage the EEU to double check.

Lastly, if you want to help more with the debugging of Oolite, I'd definitely install the debug oxp & run the debug console.
The debug oxp doesn't seem to impact performance, and the console allows to test stuff extremely quickly.
Personally, not running it would seriously hamper any bug search I'd be trying to do.

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 5:51 pm

Test confirms: Damaged NEU does cause the Caduceus Omega with Recharge 5.8 to drain energy when shields are recharging - and even with full shields, the laser does visibly drain energy.

Turning ON the MASC causes further drain to the energy, but even with MASC off it's really bad.

Now the question is: Is this normal behaviour when a ship has a natural 5.8 recharge rate?

Screet

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 6:13 pm

OK, looking at the code reveals that shield recharge does drain up to 6 energy, thus at least that one is normal to drain energy down to zero

This only leaves the question wether the recharge rate itself should not be higher...reading comments, it says that without extra energy units, it should use the specified recharge * 1.8 - and that would exceed the shields drain, thus it's probably not as high as the comment says.

Screet

Post by **Eric Walch** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 6:14 pm

Screet wrote:
Test confirms: Damaged NEU does cause the Caduceus Omega with Recharge 5.8 to drain energy when shields are recharging

This can be correct behaviour. When you have the military Shield Enhancement, your shield recharge rate is 3 per shield. When both shields are recharging it drains away 6.0 energy units while your base rechargerate of the energy banks is 5.8

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 6:25 pm

Screet wrote:
This only leaves the question wether the recharge rate itself should not be higher...reading comments, it says that without extra energy units, it should use the specified recharge * 1.8 - and that would exceed the shields drain, thus it's probably not as high as the comment says.

...and it turn's out that "normal" is thought to be "extra", thus it's really normal behaviour that shields drain the energy so that the ship cannot fire it's lasers

Screet

Post by **Kaks** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 8:12 pm

Well, I assume that the Caduceus creators saw fit to set recharge rates as they did.

I suppose either Cmdr Wyvern or ClymAngus will tell us if this is indeed a bug, or working as designed...

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 8:32 pm

Kaks wrote:
Well, I assume that the Caduceus creators saw fit to set recharge rates as they did.

I suppose either Cmdr Wyvern or ClymAngus will tell us if this is indeed a bug, or working as designed...

It will be even more of an impact to any ship with MUCH lower recharge rate, like a Python and such.

These ships apparantly won't be able to defend themselves once the shields are scratched.

For me, it was really luck to survive, as I could not fire my laser and my fuel injectors were damaged, too...and with such few energy, neither ECM nor Cloak can help.

Screet