Quarries on HV network did not start when expected.

[dennisjenkins75]

Observed on pandorabox.io

Network description:

• 12 nuclear reactors, but only 1 was fuelled and operating.
• 1 switching station (reading 110k supply, 600k demand).
• 1 HV battery, full, reading 1000k/1000k
• 60 quarries.
• ALL HV cable was digi cable.
• 2x HV solar arrays.
• 1x Jumpdrive, 4 blue energy crystals, fully charged to 3MEU.

Also on the "digi" network were 1 LUAC, 1 LCD, 1 touchscreen. The LUAC is there to turn the quarries on and off in groups. it has a function linked to a button on the touchscreen to turn all 60 on at once (They are in 12 groups of 5 each).

What happened:

• The battery and JD were fully charged. No nukes were started yet.
• I jumped the ship (R15) from my dock to out over water (Y=101).
• I tested that I could manually enable 1 quarry, and that worked.
• I tested that the LUAC could set the radius of all 60 quarries (worked).
• I inserted 6 fuel rods into one reactor, started it up.
• I verified that the switching station read "supply: 110kEU" (100k from reactor, 10k from 2x solar arrays).
• I used the touchscreen/luac to enable all of the quarries. This sent 12 digiline messages out (12 groups of 5 quarries each).
• The switching station shows demand of 600k now.
• All of the quarries formspecs read "Digging 3 nodes above..." but did not change.
• Mouse-over on a quarry showed "HV quarry unpowered" (or similar).
• The battery was NOT fluctuating in stored energy.

What I expected to happen:

• All 60 quarries would probe 1-node, consuming 600kEU from the battery.
• The Quarries would then pause, as there was not enough energy on the network to run another step.
• The Solar + Nuclear would replenish the battery, and when it reached >= 600kEU, the quarries would run another step.

Remediations attempted:

• I dug and put back the switching station (in the exact same location). No effect.
• So I then fuelled a second reactor, bringing supply to 210kEU and the network started operating as expected.

Random musings:

• The calculation for if the network can run in that server step failed, even though the 1000kEU in the battery should have been enough energy.
• The HV network was somehow glitched from the jump (as SX suggested in the in-game chat), but adding the second nuclear reactor forced a rebuild.

[S-S-X]

This might possibly have connection to battery performance updates, some bugs found after that.
#108 and commits from #113 and #126

[S-S-X]

This is due to battery short circuit protection which steps in at 400kEU for HV batteries. That means if you have 110kEU supply and 1 HV battery you can draw at most 510kEU from network or battery will shut down and wont provide any output.

Tested and system works as expected starting immediately when below limit and stops when demand goes over limits.

[S-S-X]

Actually keep this open as I believe this feature is not documented in any way.

• DoD documentation for this available here https://github.com/mt-mods/technic/tree/master/technic/doc

Maybe add new file called battery.md or something like that that. Also #53

[FeXoR-o-Illuria]

Limits of Battery boxes EU/s are pretty clear in the code but not in the documentation (or the Pandorabox tutorial), yes.

[OgelGames]

Perhaps a some text displaying the "max discharge" could be fit somewhere in the formspec or infotext? Maybe even display all the values in the formspec, something like:

Current charge: 123.4kEU
Max charge:     1000kEU
Max discharge:  400kEU/s

Looking at the formspec there's a lot of room... also quite a messy formspec... 👀

[S-S-X]

Dump that to infotext instead and then do the same for switching station but with total max discharge rating for network.