Ships Batteries

Battery banks allow power to be stored for use when the engines are offline. This is useful for emergency situations or for instances when you wish to reduce your visibility (as both warp engines and fusion reactors radiate very visible magnetic fields).

Battery banks come in a number of sizes and are measured in MegaWatt Hours. A small battery might only be 1,500 MegaWatt hours, that is it can provide 1,500 MegaWatts for 1 hour, or 750 MegaWatts for 2 hours and so on. Reducing the draw on the battery allows it to operate for longer.

Batteries can be be charged by fusion reactors, solar arrays or the warp core. 

Damage to the battery bank reduces the current capacity by that amount. For example a 1,500 MegaWatt battery that has 7% damaged (93% health) is capable of storing 1,395 megawatt hours of power. Subsequently repairing the battery bank only increases the capacity of the batteries; it does not increase the actual charge until the battery is charged from an external power source. The battery banks can charge or discharge at a maximum rate of 1,500 megawatts per hour (although this can be improved with research).

When the starship is docked at a starbase, the starbase will automatically start charging the batteries (if they are not at full charge) with the umbilical docking connection. If the starship docks with another federation vessel then one ship can charge the other ships batteries (to get system back online etc.).

Likewise, the starship can route power to an umbilical docking connection and power up the other ships systems if it is in distress.

If the Batteries are discharged, then they can be switched to “Charging” mode, which will draw up to 1,500 MW per battery bank.

Battery bank technology can be upgraded to provide higher capacity and charging speed. They can also be upgraded to decrease their size/mass.

Dev Notes

The battery banks also need to have regular maintenance carried out on them. Ten days after the last maintenance, there is a 1% chance per day that the battery bank will suffer a 1% drop in health/efficiency.

Switching three 1,500 MW banks to charge at maximum rate (1 hour to full charge form empty) at the same time would draw 4,500 MW of power from the ship systems. To help with power management the charging rate can be specified. E.g. Setting a battery bank to charge at 150MW would cause less of a draw on the systems, but would take 10 hours to charge the bank fully (from empty).