Fix megawatts and megajoules (MW, MJ, MJ/s)

[Uthael]

TL;DR - Joules are a measure of energy quantity and Watts are a measure of energy transfer speed. Please, fix.


A small lesson in measurement units:
1 J = 1 Ws
One Joule is the same as 1 Watt for 1 second. This is energy quantity. For Americans, think as just gallons of fuel.

1 J/s = 1 W
One megajoule per second is the same unit as one megawatt. This is energy flow. Quantity per second. Think of flow as gallons per hour of fuel consumption.

Write it as MW or MJ and you get 1,000,000 of those. Mega = million.

Attached are some examples of ingame UI:

• Power Distributor shows capacity (quantity) in MW, which is wrong. It also shows recharge (flow) in MJ/s, which is correct, but also more commonly written as MW.
  
  
• Plasma Accelerator shows distributor draw in MW, which is misleading. It should show how many MJ of distributor energy it uses each shot. If it's really showing MW, then it's actually less useful because in that case the player needs to account for fire rate and reload time.
  
• Beam Laser shows distributor draw in MW. This is one of the rare proper uses of energy measurement uses in the game, but only because it's a continuous use weapon with no reload. Its damage is listed only as per second and so is its thermal load.
  

Please, fix that all around the ingame tooltips. It's confusing.

 

[Mohrgan]

So, where do the guns go?

 

[SlickPBW]

This has been brought up many times since just after the earth cooled.

 

[Uthael]

This has been brought up many times since just after the earth cooled.

Huh. It must be tangled in some major spaghetti code if it's often requested but they hadn't fixed it yet.
It's nothing game-breaking but it does look a bit unprofessional for an otherwise serious-looking game ambience.

 

[SlickPBW]

Agree with all, but in the end, it’s just an incorrect label with no consequences. FD have a way of breaking things that are seemingly unrelated to the actual thing that they are trying to fix, so there’s always that risk that might not be worth it for this case. I’d consider the recommendation in the OP extremely minor and should be prioritized near the bottom of the very long list of known bugs.

 

[oblivionmanman 2476]

none of it makes any sense to me,i just go by what is is in the games ship armour and shield specs,thermal,kinetic,higher or lower youre choice,change shield booster to compensate you own choice or shield engineering to youre own choice all works the the same.why get tekky over it,

 

[Ameeleean2]

Another thing to note is ship power capabilities vs suit power capabilities. Apparently there is little difference between two since in both cases power usage/capacity is measured in MW/MJ leading to ridiculous situation when footman combatant is nearly as deadly as ship based one (while later one being much bigger target) since both are using MW and MJ. I think proper values for suits should be in tens or at most hundreds of KW and KJ. I also know it is possible to wipe out entire settlement with rockets etc but ship shield going down in seconds while getting fire from 4-5 footman enemies is kind of silly imho.

 

[Uthael]

Another thing to note is ship power capabilities vs suit power capabilities. Apparently there is little difference between two since in both cases power usage/capacity is measured in MW/MJ leading to ridiculous situation when footman combatant is nearly as deadly as ship based one (while later one being much bigger target) since both are using MW and MJ. I think proper values for suits should be in tens or at most hundreds of KW and KJ. I also know it is possible to wipe out entire settlement with rockets etc but ship shield going down in seconds while getting fire from 4-5 footman enemies is kind of silly imho.

It's good that we don't have access to kiloton- level weapon yields. That would be measured in TJ, 2 orders of magnitude above MJ xD
Maybe some combat-only megaship's weapons someday.

Edit: Nah, taking into consideration suit power capabilities, a small-scale nuke would probably be "500MW" each use.

 

[Brrokk]

Another thread recently pointed out that Power Distributors can distribute more power than they get from a Power Generator.