the extra pip....how can it be an exploit? it is working as intended. (it's a stupid gamey mechanic and I never liked it but it is what it is)
To get the extra PD pip I would need to be running a second gaming PC at the same time, consuming twice the electrical power, at least another >120W with it's GPU. This is absolutely out of the question, as I am an energy conservationalist. I have a wattmeter setup to monitor my desktop power consumption and it currently reads 22.65KWh after just 17 days of playing Elite more frequently now.
Before I got back to playing the game the other month I was only using my office machine which just uses <30W including the monitor, so just a handfull of kilowatt hours per month for my desktop power use. Since coming back to playing the game my household energy consumption has more than doubled from averaging around 1KWh/day to 2-3KWh/day.
Maybe I should consider getting solar panels?
lol i keep meaning to do it, not because of the pip but because i want to see other characters in my ship. i guess at the same time i could give my lad some credits not that he is remotely interestedi nthe game (yet) maybe one day!.
if i did i would run it on my steamdeck so negligable energy costs.
it is a bit of a faff with multiple accounts on pc. it was far easier on console however you are stuck with the old version if you do that.
as for solar panels.... if you are not moving house in the next 5 years do it! its a total no brainer... its also addictive, i got them in 2021 along with house battery.
i now have 2 EVs and even charging both those and with gas heated hot water my May energy bill was MINUS £7 - and that is in England!.
my system cost £8500 and is pretty mediocre by todays standards but will pay for itself easily within 7 years and even if i did have to sell up will add value to the property.
Yeah OK, but it's not just about the financial investment where one has to break even. It's also the initial sheer cost of energy invested in manufacturing solar panels and EV's. Like you said it's about 7 years for you to break even financially, but probably a few more years for the energy break-even point to be reached especailly for EV's with large batteries. How long do you think your EV will go before you need to replace the battery or, trade the car in for a new one? Most people don't keep new cars for much longer than 7 years, and wear and tear is even higher now that most manufacturers are designing stuff with very short-lived obsolescence in mind.
Some of the other problems with panels if you have a lot of roof space and are feeding your excess production to the grid with your tarriff is: 1. You typically only get half wholesale value for the electricity. And 2: Small scale domestic solar facilities are a PITA to manage for the engineers who are running the grid, and your output will often just get switched out for grid smoothing reasons, meaning you are likely often over-producing power that isn't going to get used after your domestic battery has been topped-up. Depends on where you live, what your household uses, and what the demand for electricity nation-wide is at that particular time.
Panels are best left to large scale facilities IMHO, where they can be better managed by the grid engineers, as grid smoothing is a difficult problem to solve, with practical storage solutions not being very economic right now. For example, here in the UK we don't have much potential real estate for pumped storage like they do out in China (unless people don't mind the governemnt blasting gigantic holes out of the top of Scottish mountains that are positioned next to lochs), so storing up energy that has been produced intermittently from wind and solar isn't very practical, which makes wind and solar energy less practical as the engineers have to dial up or down our combined cycle gas turbine plants when solar/wind output increases or decreases, and those plants get even less efficient when not operating at full capacity.
I suppose right now, for most people it's down to what things cost to invest in financially, so if you are definitely off-grid or semi-off-grid with no gas inlet then panels/batteries/heat pump combo is OK, and for small domestic systems so long as you aren't over-producing electricity and your panels are just supplying your home usage, and you have the money to invest initially it's still viable. But very costly up-front.
Personaly I won't be bothering with panels for my current home, as I am on-grid, have a gas inlet for hot water, heating and cooking, and I don't have the money to invest in solar, nor the need for a heat pump. But other households are differrent, sometimes only having electricity, and everybody has differrent needs, with every country having differrent energy grid setups, so I'm not totally against panels for domestic use when on-grid, and not totally against the use of EV's as they can draw their energy from a very wide range of sources, not just mineral oil or biofuels. But those batteries aren't cheap to manufacture remember, and a lot of diesel goes into mining the raw materials to make them, let alone the cost of coal-based energy that China uses that goes into those factories to factor in. So they certainly aren't emission-free, and shouldn't be considered so.
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