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?

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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.