Vehicle charging station.

[kevingranade]

A vehicle component with the CARGO tag. If you place items with the "rechargeabe" tag in it, it consumes vehicle power periodically (at the same time as solar panel charging happens, for simplicity sake?) and stashes it in the rechargeable items.
In order to not turn this into a battery vending machine, prevent items with the rechargeable tag from being unloadable.
Candidates for rechargeable tag:
UPS (Not advanced, we're not making plutonium here)
Welders
Manhacks (these should probably run down over time, which is really a separate issue)

[NaturesWitness]

This is brilliant! This would be a great way to expand our options for renewable electricity until we get the whole rechargeable power-cell thing worked out. I'd suggest adding an item "rechargeable battery pack", that can be used in crafting recipes with the item we want to be rechargeable to switch to the rechargeable variant. We'll need an exception in crafting.cpp though, so when crafting a regular item into a rechargeable one any batteries in it get unloaded, not transferred to the new item.

[dwarfkoala]

Utter agreement. I've always found stuff like coilguns too costly to power to be worth it.

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

Do manhacks really need to be any less effective?

As they are right now, they can easily get killed by a squirrel.

[kevingranade]

Really? I didn't know manhacks were THAT bad, anyway, that was a side issue.
Making an item optionally rechargeable would require duplicating the item and recipe to have the variant, so I'm not a fan of that idea.

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

Manhacks have a single hitpoint. I think that's their biggest problem.

[NaturesWitness]

If we could work out a system where all this could be achieved with a tool mod "rechargeable battery pack" that functions similarly to the "extra battery" tool mod we could greatly cut down the item redundancy this would generate. Not sure how feasible that is though.

[kevingranade]

That basically requires changing the entire ammo handling system, out of
scope for this issue.

[NaturesWitness]

Hmm good point, maybe we should just do rechargeable variants of a few items first, and if they work well we can expand to variants of other things later.

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

I saw the title of this post and thought of charging points for electric cars.

Seriously, with all the electric cars on the roads, wouldn't it make sense for gas stations to have a 'pump' or two on one end that dispenses electricity into vehicles?

[kevingranade]

Sure, but like everything else that uses grid power, it wouldn't work.

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

If we were following that to the letter, the gasoline pumps wouldn't work either. Old fashioned gas dispensers used to be mechanical, the modern ones only operate when they have electricity.

I used to work at a gas station, and I've had the joyous task of standing in the rain and turning customers away because we had a power outage and none of the pumps would work.

But then again, if we were following it to the letter, the pumps wouldn't explode when struck by a vehicle or shot at either, since they all have automatic shutoff systems - I got to see a car wipe out two at once one night, and the pumps only lost about a pint of gasoline each.

[i2amroy]

If we were following that to the letter, the gasoline pumps wouldn't work either. Old fashioned gas dispensers used to be mechanical, the modern ones only operate when they have electricity.

I know that in New York at least, there is now a law that requires a mandatory generator at all gas stations in case the power grid goes down (they got fed up with emergency vehicles being unable to help in disasters). It's not too big of a stretch to imagine that all of the stations have power generators running already (though then we should probably give them indoor lights).

[kevingranade]

Addressed (even better than my idea) by #5054