I want some specific behavior for power poles in the game so I can reduce the burden of building my power network the way I like. If a mod like this already exists I'm happy to use it. If not I'm happy to try my hand at creating it. If I do wind up creating it I'm also looking for suggestions that would make it useful for other people.
First, what I do in the game. I create heterogeneous power generation systems with a control system to prioritize power generation and perform load shedding when there are power deficits. For instance: run on solar power only unless solar generation can't make up full demand then run on nuclear power then run on coal and if that still can't meet full demand then turn off electric furnaces followed by miners and finally under the worst case scenario disconnect everything besides a core power network that it used to get everything running again. It's all working pretty well aside from what a pain it is to maintain the isolation between vanilla power poles and run the circuit network wires everywhere for the load shedding.
I'm thinking I can solve my problems well with dedicated power transmission poles. They would work like normal power poles except they would only automatically form copper connections between each other and they would always form a circuit network for use in SCADA. I'm not entirely sure if they should always have normal red/green circuits or if they should form a third SCADA specific circuit network with red and green inputs/outputs at each pole though I'm leaning towards the third SCADA network. Also the transmission poles would have no power delivery area so you can place them in proximity to entities that use power with out actually powering them to further increase isolation.
I'm thinking it makes sense to have a transmission version of the medium and big power pole with possibly an even larger pole enabling longer spans between them than a big electric pole. Going with a dedicated SCADA circuit network I'm thinking they would have a red/green pair for circuit network output and another pair for input. The SCADA circuit network behavior would be to form a union of all signals present at the inputs and if signals are duplicated then sum them. This set of signals is then provided to both the red/green outputs available at each transmission pole.
My envisioned usage is to run transmission poles around the base and place a power switch next to the transmission pole at each place where I want to perform something like load shedding and then form a manual copper and circuit network connection to a vanilla power switch. Having this would reduce so much headache in my base designs.
So now my questions:
- Does a mod like this exist?
- Is there better behavior for transmission poles than I've described?
- Any other desirable features people can think of?
