Hello, and welcome to my first blog page, and also, hopefully, the first part of a series where I research topics that aren't common knowledge to most Space Agency players.
This blog will be about Power capacity. While we all deal with Battery charge at one point in either Career Mode or in the Sandbox, there isn't much knowledge about how many "units" of Power one battery contains. So I decided "Hey, let's solve that, shall we?", and also decided to give a step-by-step explanation of how to replicate it.
Note that for math stuff, it's put in tables so that it's easily visible.
Before reading further, I'd like to say that one unit of Power is equal to one kilowatt per second (kW/s), thus equal to one kilojoule (kJ).
The Research[]
1. Requirements[]
- A Resupply Module Dockable, with one Battery in it
- The Power tab
- A station (recommended)
2. The Steps[]
STEP 1: Make it so that the energy consumption is 9 kW/s.
This is done by having a Resupply Module, and turning on its NaviComp.
STEP 2: Read the amount of power charge depleted after 1 minute (in percent).
Use the Power tab for this. It's very handy that you have 100% charge on it. If connected to a station's power grid, disconnect it from the grid for starting step 2.
In my case, I read about 4% charge depleted. This will be used in the next step...
STEP 3. Calculation.
First, I calculated the total energy used up in that minute via:
Which is equal to 540 kJ in this case, as 540 * 1 = 540.
However, that is only 4% of the charge! So I used the following math:
3. The Conclusion[]
So, the answer is that one Battery has a Power capacity of 13.5 MJ. May sound quite a lot... until you realize that it is about 3.75 kWh, which only costs €0.83. (Or at least, where I live.)
End![]
Hope you liked reading through this research!
NEXT UP: Oxygen propulsion. Though it is nothing special - it is simply letting out air - it can somehow propel things that aren't even supposed to boost you into space. My job is to figure out how fast it can go, acceleration-wise, and to figure out for how long it can propel before either of the power sources is fully depleted.