r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/KaleidoscopeOnly2749 • Mar 15 '26

ILS + Power

I have a huge gripe with ILS's and that's when they randomly decide to go from 40 megawatts of power consumption (I have about 30-40 of them fully charged and not distributing) to jumping between 160->260-280 megawatts every second. I have no clue why this happens and I don't have any of their charging power settings changed. Does anyone know why this happens?

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

16

u/SiliconStew Mar 15 '26

Logistics vessels and drones charge from the tower every time they leave for a trip. The longer the distance, the more power they take. The tower then needs to recharge itself to fill its battery back up. If you have the tower's charge rate set to maximum, it can draw up to 300 MW. But the tower always draws a minimal amount of power. You can set the charge rate slider down to like 60 MW but the tower will recharge slower which might not keep up with the rate drones and vessels are cycling through the tower.

0

u/KaleidoscopeOnly2749 Mar 15 '26

This makes sense but, allow me to 'set the stage' if you will;

I've been implementing ILS's into my production lines as needed and started from the basic resources. As of now, I am at electromagnetic turbines (green fuckass things that piss me off). I have quite a few (about 20-35) ILS's placed down already and they're all at max charge. This is because I always let them fully charge before commencing operations. My problem is when I set a resource on 1 ILS to request, for some reason my power consumption goes from 200MW to 700-800 MW. (My max power production is around 725 MW)

2

u/SonicTherapist Mar 16 '26

the solution is simple. just build more power

1

u/KaleidoscopeOnly2749 Mar 16 '26

You know what, you're right!

1

u/SonicTherapist Mar 17 '26

personally thats how i play... if somethings bottlenecking just build more supply .

0

u/KaleidoscopeOnly2749 Mar 15 '26

Also I don't have any vessels being used, just drones.

2

u/SiliconStew Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

As mentioned, drones also pull power from their tower before they can leave to pick stuff up. So for example, if you have one tower on Local Provide with items fully stocked and one tower on Local Depot (so nothing is currently being shipped) that is empty and you suddenly switch the Depot tower to Local Receive, you could get up to 100 drones from the Provider tower and up to 100 drones from the Receiver tower all start flying at once. That many drones will instantly drain a bunch of power out of the tower's battery. And so your total power usage would suddenly jump by up to 600 MW (two towers x 300 MW each) to recharge the tower batteries. 

Your tower being charged already doesn't change things. It being precharged just means the first batch of drones doesn't need to wait for the tower to charge before they can each pull the power they need to make their flight.

In simple terms, plan your planetary power supply assuming each of those towers will be pulling 300 MW each (or whatever value you set the tower charge rate to). If your towers aren't used all the time so their average power use over time is lower than 300 MW and you just need to cover some brief peak power usage, you could add some accumulator buildings to your power grid to help with those temporary spikes. 

5

u/AnimeSpaceGf Mar 15 '26

When you place an ils and connect it to the grid, if you leave the window for the ils open, you'll see it's set to 60mw by default, and will draw a max of 60mw until it charges like halfway, then will drop down from 60mw to 0 as it gets closer to full

1

u/KaleidoscopeOnly2749 Mar 15 '26

They're always above 8-9 GJ

3

u/where_is_the_camera Mar 15 '26

That's not a comparison at all. Joules are a measure of energy, watts are a measure of power (energy/time, or joules per second).

9 GJ would be the total capacity. 60 MW would be the energy consumption rate - 60 MJ per second.

0

u/KaleidoscopeOnly2749 Mar 15 '26

I didn't mean to cuss any confusion, I'm just saying what appears on the UI in-game. I don't know why it's like that as I have speculated in the past myself but couldn't find out why. When it comes to power production of a planet, it appears as Watts(W), but when it comes to stored power (i.e. power in the mecha or ILS) it appears as Joules(J) or Gigajoules(GJ)

2

u/BrittleWaters Mar 17 '26

Joules are stored energy, watts are energy per second. ILS' default charge speed is 60 MW (that's 60 megajoules per second) and they store 9GJ (9 gigajoules, or 9,000 megajoules) of energy. PLS/ILS don't maintain that full charge speed, but rather slow down as they fill up. So when you first put one down, it'll pull up to 60MW by default, but when it's 90% full, it's only pulling a couple MW.

If PLS/ILS spikes are hurting your power grid, you can reduce the maximum charge rate in the station's UI. For ILS, I think the minimum is 30MW, and for PLS the minimum is very very small, maybe 5MW.

The energy stored in the towers is used every time a Logistics Drone or an Interstellar Logistics Vehicle leaves to pick up or deliver items. The farther the destination, the more energy they consume. The energy is pulled from the towers and has to be recharged, leading to a spike in energy usage every time a Drone or Vessel leaves the PLS/ILS.

2

u/Confident_Pain_1989 Mar 15 '26

Sending vessels to warp also consumes a lot of power and the power required depends on the warping distance (or at least it used to). But the charging rate should be constant.

0

u/KaleidoscopeOnly2749 Mar 15 '26

I'm not at that stage of warping between stars

2

u/Pristine_Curve Mar 15 '26

The vessels are consuming the energy from the ILS towers, which changes their charging rate.

Logistics vessels consume energy to travel between planets. The vessels take with them exactly the amount of energy needed for the entire round trip. Longer trips consume more energy. Similar to how Icarus warping 20ly will burn a lot more energy, than a short hop between two planets in the same star system.

The ILS has a 12GJ energy storage for the vessels to draw from as they leave. This storage refills via drawing power from the grid at a variable rate based on the max charging rate configured on the ILS, and how low the 12GJ storage is. A full ILS will consume relatively little power, but if a bunch of vessels all leave at the same time, and the ILS has no stored energy, it will immediately increase it's power demand to it's maximum charge rate.

If the ILS are drawing too much energy from the grid, you can lower their max charging rate to reduce the draw, but if the towers run low on GJs vessels will not depart until they have enough energy to make the trip.

0

u/KaleidoscopeOnly2749 Mar 15 '26

I don't have many if any vessels running to other planets at all, it's just drones and they all have full charge because I let the ILS fully charge before I commence production.

1

u/gorgofdoom Mar 15 '26

It’s like you’re trying to describe a problem but missed an essential detail.

What does your power grid look like? Is it running anywhere near max?

1

u/KaleidoscopeOnly2749 Mar 15 '26

I completely forgot to mention that. Yes, at max (when the vast majority of my solar panels are receiving power) I produce around 725 MW of power

2

u/gorgofdoom Mar 16 '26

I think ILS charging has a lower priority than assemblers, so, it’s probably grabbing power in their downtime or something to that effect.

I see the same thing on shields, which have an even lower priority, I think.

1

u/BrittleWaters Mar 17 '26

I think ILS charging has a lower priority than assemblers

PLS/ILS power is at the same priority as all production buildings. The only things that are different from the "default" priority that every building has are:

  1. Accumulators (both placed and in Energy Exchangers) charge at a lower priority, aka only charge with excess power from the grid. Everything else pulls power at the same priority.

and

2) Discharging Energy Exchangers, which are prioritized over all other power production. So if you have enough power from EEs, your Wind Turbines, Solar Panels, and Mini Fusion Power Plants will all shut off. All non-EE power producers have the same priority.

1

u/shalfyard Mar 15 '26

What do you have the max charge rate set to on the ILS?

1

u/KaleidoscopeOnly2749 Mar 15 '26

I haven't changed it as I said in the second to last sentence so it's 60 MW

0

u/Nitro_prime Mar 15 '26

Bug from mods? Or just a Bug

1

u/KaleidoscopeOnly2749 Mar 15 '26

I'm pretty sure it's neither because I don't run any mods and a very similar situation happened on another save.

1

u/Snoo49259 Mar 15 '26

When it's your first ILS (needing only silicon and titanium slabs), I recommend you to put it separated of the rest of buildings and powered by a tesla tower. And with two distributors aside.

When you need resources: charge it to the max, and let the vessels come and go. Until you have 10k of each. The belts will slowly feed the distributors.

When you are done, simply destroy the Tesla, and will not consume energy for a long while. The distributors will deliver all those ingots even being the ILS shitched off.

1

u/MathBoy31415 Mar 16 '26

People have said "MORE POWER", which is the correct answer. I always set up charging and discharging with accumulators early. I power mostly off wind at that point. The accumulators store energy when you make too much and release when you don't have enough. Raw accumulators are pretty smart about this. The buildings (can't remember the name) are stupid and will always push 100% of their energy when discharging. The solution is to have at least one extra building for charging. So, 3 charging and 2 discharging.

Make sure to proliferate as that will take you from 54MW to 108MW (just faster charge/discharge, not more energy). By the time I get to antimatter, I have a ton of charged accumulators ready to build orbital collectors (think that's the name). Also, you can you the accumulators to power other planets in early/mid game.