Energy in Subnautica
gamer1000k
Join Date: 2017-04-29 Member: 230121Members
Join Date: 2017-04-29 Member: 230121Members
In another post, I did a quick calculation on what one energy unit might be equivalent to in Subnautica.
To summarize the calculations, per the PDA description each ion crystal supposedly can store the equivalent energy of a small nuclear detonation. An ion power cell requires two ion crystals and stores 1000 energy units. Using an extremely conservative estimate of 1 kiloton, we get one energy unit having the equivalent energy of 2 tons of TNT, or 2.3 MWh.
A standard battery holds 20 energy units, or 46 MWh of energy. The flashlight loses one percent battery about every 8 seconds, for a total runtime of 13.3 minutes. Assuming the planet has close to a 24 hour day (the player's hunger/thirst needs seem to support this), which in the accelerated timescale lasts 35 minutes of real time (correct me if I'm wrong), the flashlight lasts about 9 hours of game time. This means that the flashlight is putting out 5 MW of constant power. For comparison, the strongest light beam in the world (the Luxor Sky Beam) uses 0.315 MW of power. This would be a weapons grade light that could easily cook fish in a sizeable cone in front of the player (and would permanently blind them from the first use animation, not to mention the danger reflections would pose).
A sonar pulse uses 10 energy units. This is the equivalent energy to 20 tons of TNT. Depth charges in WW2 used about 200 pounds of TNT. This would be quite deadly to anything nearby, including yourself.
According to the Subnautica wiki, the Cyclops can travel 4450m on 1200 energy units. This means that it uses 3.7 energy units per meter, or about 8.5 MWh of energy per meter. Maximum speed is 7.4 m/s, which means the Cyclops will completely drain its batteries in about 600s, for an average constant energy use of 16.5 GW. According to Wolfram Alpha, this is 1.4 times the energy rate as the Space Shuttle at launch (main engines plus boosters). Despite this incredible energy usage, the Cyclops can only manage a top speed of 14.4 knots. This means that the Cyclops engine is incredibly inefficient. Not to mention the energy usage of the lighting.
A solar panel produces 25 energy units per minute, or 3.45 GW. To have the solar energy density to produce this kind of power, you would need to be much, much closer to a star. Close enough that you wouldn't be on an ocean planet anymore, much less a habitable one. On earth, we get about 1kW per square meter on a perfect sunny day near the equator. Solar panels in Subnautica look like they have an area of about 0.5 m^2. At most they could produce 500W when placed on the surface. Underwater, the available sunlight drops off very rapidly.
The only way this might make even the slightest bit of sense is if we assume that the PDA description is complete hyperbole to the point of being absurd, or the fabricator was extremely inefficient at utilizing the ion crystals and was only able to capture a very small fraction of their potential in the ion power cells and batteries.
I understand that games often take liberties with reality for gameplay and simplicity reasons, but it does bother me when they do so to this extreme and throw any notion of reality completely out the window and use impressive sounding descriptions of things ("stores the energy of a small nuclear detonation") without actually thinking about what that means in the game universe.
To summarize the calculations, per the PDA description each ion crystal supposedly can store the equivalent energy of a small nuclear detonation. An ion power cell requires two ion crystals and stores 1000 energy units. Using an extremely conservative estimate of 1 kiloton, we get one energy unit having the equivalent energy of 2 tons of TNT, or 2.3 MWh.
A standard battery holds 20 energy units, or 46 MWh of energy. The flashlight loses one percent battery about every 8 seconds, for a total runtime of 13.3 minutes. Assuming the planet has close to a 24 hour day (the player's hunger/thirst needs seem to support this), which in the accelerated timescale lasts 35 minutes of real time (correct me if I'm wrong), the flashlight lasts about 9 hours of game time. This means that the flashlight is putting out 5 MW of constant power. For comparison, the strongest light beam in the world (the Luxor Sky Beam) uses 0.315 MW of power. This would be a weapons grade light that could easily cook fish in a sizeable cone in front of the player (and would permanently blind them from the first use animation, not to mention the danger reflections would pose).
A sonar pulse uses 10 energy units. This is the equivalent energy to 20 tons of TNT. Depth charges in WW2 used about 200 pounds of TNT. This would be quite deadly to anything nearby, including yourself.
According to the Subnautica wiki, the Cyclops can travel 4450m on 1200 energy units. This means that it uses 3.7 energy units per meter, or about 8.5 MWh of energy per meter. Maximum speed is 7.4 m/s, which means the Cyclops will completely drain its batteries in about 600s, for an average constant energy use of 16.5 GW. According to Wolfram Alpha, this is 1.4 times the energy rate as the Space Shuttle at launch (main engines plus boosters). Despite this incredible energy usage, the Cyclops can only manage a top speed of 14.4 knots. This means that the Cyclops engine is incredibly inefficient. Not to mention the energy usage of the lighting.
A solar panel produces 25 energy units per minute, or 3.45 GW. To have the solar energy density to produce this kind of power, you would need to be much, much closer to a star. Close enough that you wouldn't be on an ocean planet anymore, much less a habitable one. On earth, we get about 1kW per square meter on a perfect sunny day near the equator. Solar panels in Subnautica look like they have an area of about 0.5 m^2. At most they could produce 500W when placed on the surface. Underwater, the available sunlight drops off very rapidly.
The only way this might make even the slightest bit of sense is if we assume that the PDA description is complete hyperbole to the point of being absurd, or the fabricator was extremely inefficient at utilizing the ion crystals and was only able to capture a very small fraction of their potential in the ion power cells and batteries.
I understand that games often take liberties with reality for gameplay and simplicity reasons, but it does bother me when they do so to this extreme and throw any notion of reality completely out the window and use impressive sounding descriptions of things ("stores the energy of a small nuclear detonation") without actually thinking about what that means in the game universe.
Comments
I think you nailed it with the "description" part of the ION crystals. Maybe they should rewrite it with something still impressive but not Nuke-impressive or extend it, like you suggested, that we can only hope to harness a fraction of the stored energy with our in comparison simple technology OR they could rework the whole energy balance.
My bet would be on the first or second solution.
I think the more you know the more must video game logic and its necessities seem a bit dull. I think and hope all knowledge and logic aside, that you still have a good time playing Subnautica. Because in the end that is all that matters. If a game fails to entertain you despite it's edges and little flaws then there's something wrong. As long as we talk about a game which theme interests you...not all players like all kind of games of course.
Thanks for the compliment. I get a bit nerdy at times with physics calculations (wolfram alpha makes them relatively simple with all the built in constants and unit conversions).
Editing the description would fix a lot of this issue. Most people don't have any real comprehension of how much energy nuclear weapons contain so I can understand the devs overlooking this and thinking they were being clever with the description. Hopefully they'll notice this thread and rethink some of these things.
I wouldn't mind a full energy rebalance (maybe later I'll do some analysis of the relative energy usage of different systems), but given the stage of development I don't see anything more than a few tweaks happening before 1.0.
I still do have fun playing Subnautica and other games, but I do cringe when I see certain liberties taken. The worst offender is sci-fi tech that somehow manages to be significantly worse than what we have IRL without any real reason or explanation. That and internal inconsistencies.
My hope is that we'll get decent mod support after release so I can tweak the game closer to my liking if needed.
One could thoroughly drive oneself crazy with trying to constantly use logic to justify science fiction/fantasy video games...
Or at the very least, eventually end up going back to just reading a good book.
That won't necessarily tell you the size of the planet, merely give you an idea of what the gravity is. Gravity is based on the mass of the planet, which is affected more by density than size. We could make some assumptions on the density based on Earth, but it still would be a lot of guesswork.
It also doesn't help that gravity in Subnautica doesn't necessarily work the same way it does IRL. Every time I've jumped off of a high place, the player seems to fall at a constant speed, but gravity is supposed to be a constant acceleration. The other possible explanation of this is that the planet has an extraordinarily dense atmosphere, resulting in a very low terminal velocity. This is not backed up by the trajectories of items launched from the propulsion cannon however.
The initial acceleration up to the constant speed appears to be roughly equivalent to 1G, and given that the player is able to walk, move and jump around normally, this also implies that the gravity on the planet is close to 1G. If we assume a similar density to earth, this would give us a roughly earth sized planet. This is a big assumption though, as we don't actually know the true structure of the planet. If it's less dense than earth, then it would potentially need to be a lot bigger, and if it has some magic superdense core (like Kerbin apparently does in KSP) it could easily be a lot smaller.
At the end of the day, we don't have enough information to try to actually estimate the size of the planet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still perfectly capable of suspending disbelief and enjoying games even when they throw reality out the window. I still do enjoy playing Subnautica and many other sci-fi and fantasy games, despite the games often playing fast and loose with logic at times. This issue in the OP is mostly a minor annoyance, and the calculations were mostly for fun to see what the implications of a real nuclear battery would be.
A good book wouldn't necessarily solve this particular problem. Many sci-fi and fantasy books do exactly the same thing with regards to throwing logic and real world science out the window.
I do get where you're coming from, and yes if I tried to rationalize everything and have it make logical sense it could easily drive me crazy. Suspended disbelief works wonders for enjoyment, although I still wish I didn't have to use it nearly so much.
Agreed! There's nothing wrong with expecting or, when that fails, attempting to figure out the science for fun. After all, half of the genre's name - science fiction - is science after all.
Besides, if we take the science out of science fiction, what're we left with?
...so, Voltron?
On topic-ish, have I mentioned that a stock cyclops is worse in every metric than a U-boat from WWI? Yes, that's right, not even the second world war, but the first. Back when photographs were still a weird new thing, a lot of ships still ran on cylinder-expansion steam engines, and penicillin was still just bread mold, they had better submarines than they have in subnautica. Because logic.
That's not entirely true about the Cyclops. According to wikipedia, WWI U-boats are slower (9.5 knots for the U-boat, 17.3 at flank speed for the Cyclops) and the Cyclops can dive MUCH deeper (the WWI U-boats could only go down 50m).
However, the Cyclops can only manage about 4.5km with standard power cells, but the U-boat could travel 150km underwater on batteries (which is pretty impressive considering the archaic battery technology that was available 100 years ago).
Your point is still valid though, the Cyclops is pretty terrible compared to real life subs despite the supposedly advanced technology in the game.
... ... ... ???
Naaaww, that couldn't be it.
I use it sometimes when its the sub which, currently for me, can dive the deepest.
But most often im just better of grabbing the seamoth.
The cyclops power usage is beyond madness, its visibility is utter lacking, and it takes far to long to get any new power cells going. I dont wanna travel with a enormous load of powercells in stock.
This was before the new update.
Doing some more researching, I found that most of them seem to have pretty much the same speed as the cyclops flank speed when surfaced. Since the cyclops moves at the exact same speed wether surfaced or submerged, it's fair to compare the cyclops to the speed of a surfaced U-boat, and so they are roughly equal in speed.
Where depth is concerned, the only available information on those wikipedia articles says test depth, not
max depth. Doing some more research, it looks like maximum depth was closer to 80 meters. That still has the cyclops winning, but not by quite so much (If I recall correctly, default crush depth used to be 150 meters, no idea if that's been changed).
And finally, I am 100% certain that no WW1 U-boat was ever lost to a shark attack.
Agreed. I'd be happy if they made the Cyclops either only vulnerable to larger creatures, or be able to scare away smaller creatures with the horn.
I saw the surface speed listed in the wikipedia article and intentionally didn't list it since we're comparing them as submarines, so the submerged speed made more sense to compare.
The Cyclops crush depth without any upgrades is 500m, which is still much more than 80m.
There's no dispute on the point about shark attacks. I'm not fond of the current Cyclops damage system either.
To help keep this thread on topic, we can continue the Cyclops vs real world subs discussion here: Cyclops vs Real World Submarines
Do you know that for some these calculations are part of the fun and they can still have fun with the game? And do you know that just because they enjoy things you don't they're not becessarily worse than you?
The more you know
... back probably before most folks around here were born.
And that my whole post was a joke, that the "...Just Reading A Good Book" ending, was supposed to indicate.
"The More You Know..."
... the less ya pay attention.