Cable limits

A bang, smoke, and half the base is dark: a piece of cable has burnt out. That does not happen by chance but by a clear rule – and a chip can watch it.

What a cable carries#

When it burns#

Every tick the game compares the flow of a network with every cable and every fuse in it. The flow is the smaller of generation and demand. If it is above the limit of a part, one part breaks – the weakest link decides, and at most one breaks per tick, chosen at random. A fuse that trips destroys its piece of cable along with it.

Two consequences you need to know:

• A single piece of normal cable in a heavy line limits the whole line to 5,000 W.
• Battery to battery without a transformer burns: a game battery asks for its whole free capacity and offers its whole content. That quickly makes the flow larger than any normal cable.

Measuring the load#

The cable analyzer reads what is flowing right now with PowerActual. Divided by the cable limit that gives the utilisation:

lbn load METER HASH("Hauptleitung") PowerActual Average
div share load CABLE

A traffic light makes the situation clear at a glance: green up to 80 %, yellow above, red from 95 %.

Distributing the load#

Before it burns, the chip takes a consumer off the network. That is load shedding, this time not because of the battery but because of the cable. With hysteresis, so nothing flutters:

slt tmp share SHED
and on on tmp
slt tmp share BACK
or on on tmp

In the long run this is only an emergency fix. The right solution is to spread the load over two lines, lay heavy cable or put a transformer in between whose Setting stays below the cable limit.