(Ready) Craftable vehicle batteries

[NaturesWitness]

Adding items and recipes so that you can build your own vehicle batteries! This is very much a work in progress, in particular the recipes are mostly guesswork.
In particular, I could use advice on:

1 - Should the battery case be built from plastic instead of scrap, and need the plastic mold to be built?
2 - How much acid should be in each battery?
3 - How much lead should be needed to craft each plate?
4 - What should the skill difficulty be, and should fabrication be needed as well?
5 - What books should these be learned from, and at what level?
6 - How much time should these take to craft?
7 - Should Comedy Central bring "Brickleberry" back for another season?

If you have any opinions on these or anything else about this mod, please comment!

[KA101]

1. IIRC car batteries have plastic components. Require both!

2. Check up the volumes, etc. 1 volume is 250mL or roughly a human fist/paperback novel.

3. as 2.

4. Fabrication should certainly be needed as there's gross-detail metalworking involved. Mechanics is fine-detail only. (When in doubt, add fabrication.) Not sure re skills, but it seems like something you'd need some skill to do properly, so not less than 3 (talented amateur) IMO.

5. Booking involves thinking out how you'd learn it from that book. If the book would contain "How To Build A Car Battery", with steps and photos, that's a point easier than actually building the recipe. A book talking about the relevant chemistry (lead and acid's electrical properties) would be about the same skill. A book about something not immediately related, but which could spark the idea in passing or might list it in difficult-to-follow language (welding_book or atomic_survival, for instance), would be a point or more higher.

(For that matter, the AAA Guide idea I was talking about the other day needs rethought: it would teach stuff based on one's Driving skill. I'll take care of that after 0.A.)

6. Look at other items and base it off that. Time is in hundredths of a minute, I think. @Rivet-the-Zombie might know that better.

7. I don't get cable/satellite so no opinion.

[John-Candlebury]

You could also add the recipe to the mechanical engineering book, the one called Mechanical Systems/Mastery huh I don't remember how its called.

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

1. Yes. If the outside were conductive, car batteries wouldn't work.
2. Probably a measure or two of acid plus twice as many measures of clean water. Most car batteries use about 1/3 acid to 2/3 water. Perhaps two acid and four water per 'size step' of battery.
3. For simplification purposes, I'd say two plates per 'size step' of battery.
4. I'd say a couple points of electronics. Maybe a single point in fabrication or mechanics to cover the aspects of actually making the case and electrodes and such.
5. Books about electronics or anything involving cars/engine repair stuff.
6. Probably an hour or two. The inside of a wet cell has lots of fiddly layers and bits. Might want to include some paper or rags in the recipe as well, to cover some of those baffles and such.
7. I don't know what that is, but sure, why not?

Where's the recipe for normal full-sized storage batteries? Also you might want to give us a secondary recipe using a crucible or something to melt down lead plates from batteries in order to make the lead material that's used in reloading bullets.

[KA101]

The Storage Battery isn't much bigger but has hella better storage. Probably some sort of lithium-ion or other thing that's not easily craftable, rather than lead-acid, I'm thinking.

[NaturesWitness]

i based the number of plates on the storage capacity, at a rate of 1 plate per 1000 power. Looking back though, that might be excessive, as now a truck battery has 50! plates in it. I guess I need to totally rethink the weight ratios for the lead plates, I just can't seem to get the numbers to balance, especially with the small storage battery being so light.

Good idea on the paper and rags, I'll add that in soon.

I didn't do the full battery because it's so much more efficient than the other batteries, I assumed it was probably a Li-ion battery or something, and making it out of lead plates wouldn't make sense.

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

Real Life wet cells use a pair of lead plates. That's what the electrodes on the top attach to - one contact per plate.

Since we only have one size of plate (IRL bigger batteries use bigger internal components) you could just increase the quantity of plates, and rather than requiring 50 for a truck battery you might want to try adjusting the rarity/mass/requirements for individual plates instead.

[NaturesWitness]

I guess I should just forget trying to balance this with the small storage battery and just base the values between the other three batteries.
I don't really want to add a whole ton of different plate sizes, it feels needlessly confusing. I think for simplicity's sake, we can just assume the large batteries contain a lot of small cell arrays in series.

[KA101]

Storage batteries probably both use lithium-ion tech. Will make a note in the googledoc.

Small/medium/large plate seems simple enough?

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

I'd keep it at one type of plate and just use 2/4/6/8 per battery, increasing the number as the size goes up.

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

[ "scrap" 2 ]

should be

[ "scrap", 2 ]

[NaturesWitness]

Oops, thanks. I'll get that fixed. Not sure if I'll get another PR up tonight or not. I still need to do a build and test all this too.

[NaturesWitness]

Well, I finished this up, but now my github client seems to have failed and I can't upload it :< Sorry, I'll try and fix it.

[NaturesWitness]

Switched to another computer, managed to get the commit up. This should be ready to go, I tested it and it was working fine on the other computer before GitHub blew a gasket.

[KA101]

Uh, I thought small-storage wasn't supposed to be craftable? Just checking that.

[NaturesWitness]

No, you just can't make the huge storage battery. Being able to build the small one is actually why I started the PR in the first place; it's required to build the rechargeable battery mod for tools, and is almost impossible to find.

[KA101]

Noted; merging now.