Thermal electric gear power consumption

[mark-ik]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Thermal electric gear's power consumption is too high to be usable. The outfit drains a medium rechargeable battery in under an hour, and the subcomponents of the outfit also run out in similar timeframes. You can add a UPS conversion mod to them, but they'll kill that big tool battery in your UPS really quickly too, so just using bigger batteries is not a solution.

to check:

1. make a player, spawn thermal electric outfit, suit, balaclava, gloves, socks
2. reload each with the largest available battery
3. turn them on, wait an hour
4. battery is empty and survivor is cold :(

Solution you would like.

Two possible solutions:

1. different heating modes: low (15 warm, lasts 12 hours on one medium rechargeable battery), medium (30 warm, six hours), and high (45 warm, three hours). Or just two modes, low and high.
2. lower power consumption across the board, with socks/gloves having the least consumption, then the balaclava, then the suit and last the outfit having the most. All should last between 8-24 hours off a medium battery.

Describe alternatives you have considered.

It's possible that you aren't intended to be able to use the thermal electric gear for more than an hour, but it seems useless in that case.

Additional context

No response

[RenechCDDA]

All should last between 8-24 hours off a medium battery.

According to what?

[mark-ik]

Usability; I'm alright with that range being lower, but nobody would buy such an outfit to keep warm for one hour before they have to replace the batteries. Of course, I defer to your judgment.

[harakka]

Figuring out how much power something like this would take irl would be a good start. That is what we're interested in, not some made up power draw for balance or usability.

[mark-ik]

https://help.ororowear.com/article/de7b4lu1rx-how-long-does-the-heating-last

That's all I could find, do you have any recommendations? I only play the game, so I don't know what would be appropriate. Not criticizing, but do y'all think those items are working as intended?

For a 4800mAh battery,

High setting: Up to 3 - 4 hours of heating.
Medium setting: Up to 6 - 7 hours of heating.
Low setting: Up to 8 - 10 hours of heating.

[mark-ik]

In these screenshots (experimental build 2024-12-27-1919), the thermal electric outfit didn't last ten minutes on with a medium rechargeable battery. Seems too fast to me, but I'm open to hearing the justification for why it's like that.

[IdleSol]

For most ORORO products powered by the Mini 5K Battery (4800mAh):

5Ah * 4 V ~ 20 Wh = 72 kJ. Slightly more than our medium battery of 56 kJ.

Assumption. The battery voltage is taken to be 4 volts. Basically on smartphone batteries (3.8V, 3.9V) and rounded to the whole.

• Based on comfort, the suit should last 8 hours (sleep time). Or its consumption is 56,000 / 8 / 3600 = 1.944(4) ~ 2.0 watts
• Putting usability aside, the battery life can be reduced to 4 hours. Or raise the suit's consumption to 4...5 W.

This is the consumption of a thermal electric outfit:

Cataclysm-DDA/data/json/items/tool_armor.json

Line 2821 in a014c17

"power_draw": "130 W",

It consists of:

name	power_draw	NEW power_draw
thermal electric balaclava	Cataclysm-DDA/data/json/items/tool_armor.json Line 835 in a014c17 "power_draw": "7500 mW",	5% x 5W = 250 mW
thermal electric suit	Cataclysm-DDA/data/json/items/tool_armor.json Line 727 in a014c17 "power_draw": "120 W",	88% x 5W = 4400 mW
pair of thermal electric gloves	Cataclysm-DDA/data/json/items/tool_armor.json Line 781 in a014c17 "power_draw": "7500 mW",	3% x 5W = 150 mW
pair of thermal electric socks	Cataclysm-DDA/data/json/items/tool_armor.json Line 673 in a014c17 "power_draw": "7500 mW",	4% x 5W = 200 mW

An additional change:

Cataclysm-DDA/data/json/items/tool_armor.json

Line 715 in a014c17

"default_magazine": "light_battery_cell"

For the suit, you need to replace the light battery with a medium battery. Since the outfit is already using the medium:

Cataclysm-DDA/data/json/items/tool_armor.json

Line 2804 in a014c17

"default_magazine": "medium_battery_cell"

[mark-ik]

Thank you for the detailed reply and well-considered recommendation, IdleSol! And thank you to everyone else for setting the proper outlook on this issue.