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Talaria Thruster Power Management

In Greek mythology, Talaria were winged sandals that granted the wearer great speed and the power of flight. And now, we at Mighty Mage Industries have harnessed this awesome Divine power to give your ships the stellar performance they deserve.

Pretty much every conventional-drive ship reserves some reactor power for turning -doing otherwise puts your reactors in overload, draining the thrust of all of your engines and killing your maneuverability. But reactors are heavy, so every kilowatt you don’t use is just dead weight slowing you down, only useful in a turn. If only we could cut that margin down a bit -have the power for turning when we need it, but not have to carry all that spare reactor weight around when we don’t need it!

Enter the winged sandals.

The Talaria script gives you the ability to run your ship on a tighter power budget by shifting power around when and where you need it most. When Talaria detects that your reactors are overloaded, like in a high-energy turn for instance, it steals power from a few user-selectable forward thrusters and gives it to the maneuvering thrusters. Talaria takes only just enough power to get out of overload, reducing the forward thrust slightly but ensuring your maneuvering thrusters get all the go-juice they need. When the turn is done, Talaria returns that power to the forward thrusters, and off you go!

Talaria allows ship designers the freedom to give their ships a much smaller power reserve than most conventional ships would need -which means they can be lighter, faster, and more maneuverable than their over-budgeted brethren. And in a race or a dogfight, that little extra edge can mean the difference between glorious victory and crushing defeat!


Installation Instructions:
1) You’ll need a programmable block, of course, and a timer block set up to Run on the programmable block (no arguments) and Trigger Now on itself.

2) Set up the thrusters you want Talaria to steal power from by naming them individually or adding them to a group (you can set the name inside the script). Normally this would be some of your forward thrusters. Remember that Talaria doesn’t make extra power, it just redistributes power more efficiently, so if you want it to work properly you need to give it enough thrusters to steal from that it can balance out any demand it might see.
---For example, if you have six forward thrusters and two side thrusters and you want to make sure the side thrusters get all the power they need while turning, you would need to give Talaria at least three forward thrusters to work with. (2 side thrusters * 1.5 normal power for inertial damping = 3 normal thrusters’ worth of power).

3) You’ll need to set the power threshold that will tell Talaria to release control of your thrusters. This is what power levels drop to after you’ve completed your maneuver, and depends on how many turning thrusters you have. This parameter is set inside the script, and it’s very easy to find so don’t let the code scare you if you’re not familiar with scripting! I find that 92% works well, but you’ll want to tailor it to your own ship for best results.
---Note: I recommend that you have at least 3% reserve power left on your reactors when running all your forward thrusters at once. Talaria won’t do you much good if you’re in overload all the time!

4) Start the timer block, and fly!

CAUTION: If you set all of your forward thrusters to be controlled by Talaria, your ship may not decelerate immediately when you release the forward key. This is because scripts currently can't read keyboard input, so Talaria has to guess what you want to do by your ship's power demand. If you give Talaria all of your forward thrusters, it can't make a good guess, and there might be a 2-3 second delay before it hits the brakes.


Want an example of how Talaria works? Check out the Hermes racer that uses this script:
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=524583940


-- Special thanks to Craig Perko, who graciously provided some of the utility functions that make this thing go. Check out his page!
http://steamproxy.net/profiles/76561198015244798/myworkshopfiles/?appid=244850


Known Bugs/Issues:
1) No support for batteries -- Unfortunately there is an issue with how batteries report their power output that sometimes causes Talaria to stutter, or flash the engines on and off very quickly. Until I figure out why, Talaria won't work with ships that only use batteries. (If you use a mix of batteries and reactors, that should work fine).

Found a bug? Tell me in the comments below! And please, try to give me as much detail as possible about what you were doing, what happened, and how your ship is configured. That will really help me figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it!

Happy flying!