Generator Unit Rate Capped at 25%?

[Vaulk]

I have a....VERY LARGE ship, pushing the bounds of the 2 billion voxel limit. I'm using 262 individual triangle thrusters, all of which are operating just fine. The ship flies beautifully and, when complete, will hopefully hold about 2,000 ore crates.

The issue I'm having is with my Generator Unit Rate capping at 25.423. Every Generator is capping at that limit despite all of their limits being set to 100 in the settings. Test flight is resulting it dead batteries, of which I have 192. All batteries are connected, all generators are connected, propellant and fuel cell consumption are as expected but my battery banks are dying after 3 minutes of flight because my generator unit rate is capping at 1/4 capacity. I have NO YOLO CHIPS INSTALLED and don't plan on using them.

In addition to this issue there's some small quirks popping up, battery drain rate isn't flowing the way propellant and fuel cell does. Battery, propellant, generator unit rate and fuel cell PanelVariableResolution are all set to 0.001 to show accurate rates but the battery rate is chunking down then freezing and chunking again over and over. Battery rate goes from 10,000 to 9,223 and then leaps to 8,456 and so on and so on instead of flowing down and showing usage rate. Additionally the generator unit rate WILL spike up to 100 and the leap around from 30 to 80, back to 100 and then down to 25.423 when making sharp turns or just about anything involving the maneuver thrusters.

I have:
16 Fuel Chambers
48 Generator units (3 per Fuel Chamber)
16 Generator Cooling racks
26 Radiators (Each with 2 extensions)
262 Triangle Thrusters (99 for rear thrust and 32 for maneuver)

Anything helps, I tried Alt-F4 to no avail.

 

[Womble]

Your heat output (if none of your generators are next to any other generator) is 6400. Your heat sink is (300 x 16=) 4800 from Cooling Racks and (3x26x90=) 7020. My back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest that by default the cooling load is split evenly between the two systems, so you should have enough in each to cover the 3200. So it's not overheating that's the problem.

Unless some or all of your coolant packs are depleted, which can happen even in the designer, IME, unless you delete and replace them periodically.

[Edit: Or your generator units are all crammed together and producing 3 or more times as much heat as they ought to, but given your ship has a large internal volume, I don't imagine you've been forced to include that inefficiency.]

 

[Vaulk]

I've attached two screenshots of the Fuel Chamber and Generator setup. Although your mention of heat generation is making me look into spreading out my setup, I've had this issue of generator unit rate before and AFTER I added the 26 Radiators. I've checked the coolant setup in mid-flight and I'm not burning it all out, the generator won't spool up past 25% even while idle.

 

[Womble]

Looks like it might be overheating. The wiki says a single pipe board can only handle 3000 heat, and it looks like you only have the one. Having your gen units grouped that tightly will greatly increase the amount of heat generated above 6400. I would guess that it's about doubled, since that single pipe board's 3000 is a quarter of the total heat output, which limits your energy output to a quarter of what you are expecting.

Have a look at the wiki page on generator construction: https://wiki.starbasegame.com/index.php/Generator_(Assembly)#Heat_and_cooling; you should be able to work out how much heat those bunched-up generator units are actually making.

 

[Mur]

You are overheating. If you have 16 tier1 O-G-G-G generator (one chamber and 3 generator units) which each setup not touching one another then you are producing 8,080 heat and you need 90 radiators.

 

[Womble]

I came back to this because I realised the pipe board only has to handle the half of the heat that the rads are meant to have to deal with, and that 3000 is nearly enough that you wouldn't be gimped to 25%. So I did the numbers for that chonking cube of generators.

You have
8 with 3 adjacencies, producing an additional 95 heat each
20 with 4 neighbours, making 145 extra per
16 with 5, giving 205 more than they should
and 4 completely surrounded on all faces, generating nearly four times the heat they ought to.

Including the fuel rod chambers, you're making a grand total, I think, of 14460 (yes, fourteen and a half thousand) heat.

Your radiators would be able to handle a bit less than half that (7020), if they weren't bottlenecked by the pipe board and your cooling racks (4800) could deal with another third or so.

Spread them out a bit in that massive volume, even make some T-shaped reactors that have no adjacency penalties. Or do the sums and split the bunch up so that their separate pipe boards don't bottleneck anything. Just going for 2 8-frontage blocks with a pipe board each might even cut your overage in heat by enough that your established cooling can handle it. I'll let you do those sums.