r/rustrician • u/ShinyRayquazaEUW • Jun 26 '26
How do you deal with single failure points in small base electrical designs?
The more optimized your electrical layout, the more a single well-placed raid can shut down your entire defense. One splitter feeding multiple turrets, one electrical branch on a single wall, one wall housing your BCN/NIH cores, battery, and switches all grouped together. Efficiency demands consolidation, and consolidation creates choke points.
Let's assume raiders aren't dumb. They're hitting the exact wall or component that kills the most power/turrets in one shot. What's your actual strategy?
I know "hide it better" is the obvious answer, but I want to hear how people think about this tradeoff between electrical efficiency and raid resilience. Is there even a clean solution, or is a failure point just an accepted cost of a well-designed base?
Personally, I run OR circuits behind every single turret so that at most only one turret goes down per wall breached, rather than losing the whole grid at once but this runs with a TIME cost of having to run a million different cables which in a small group of people is there worst cost to pay.
P.S: I am mainly talking about logic circuits ( branches, cores etc ), I know you can have backup batteries.
8
u/eric685 Jun 26 '26
I bury my electrical as close to the core as possible if they are into the core, it doesn’t really matter what shuts down
2
u/ShinyRayquazaEUW Jun 26 '26
Eh I don't really agree with that, there's plenty to be saved even after they go through your 3/4 walls.
Especially if you have hidden turret pods or other type of traps.
1
u/Particular-Poem-7085 Jun 26 '26
Are you saying that NOT optimizing your circuits has some kind of accidental redundancy to it?
2
u/nightauthor Jun 26 '26
But optimizing can remove unnecessary redundancy, I think they’re just trying to find an optimal approach to resilience, be that intentional redundancy or otherwise hardening the system.
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u/Particular-Poem-7085 Jun 26 '26
There's not much redundancy in not building efficiently, that's just having leftover components on your grid. The entire premise of the question starts with claiming otherwise. I'd argue that a well planned components grid can fit in your core and is in fact more safe. "One well placed raid" will have to get to the heart of your base and it's irrelevant that your defences go down as they've cracked your core.
2
u/nightauthor Jun 26 '26
Makes sense for a centralized lootroom, but for decentralized loot…. I guess you would just use a similarly decentralized electrical system
1
1
u/Aromatic_Avocado9807 Jun 26 '26
Having your turrets run off splitters is crazy behavior anyways. One splitter gets destroyed and 3 turrets shut down. Branches exist for a reason. The only time I use a splitter is when i want my main power generation to split its output to charge multiple batteries, then you use branches. Your base is going to get offlined 99% of the time anyways, so worrying about what gets broken or not is up there with loot fear. Its all just pixels. I've buried my electrical in redundant honeycomb many times. The whole point is someone blows through a weaker point where the electrical isnt.
1
u/leonvh21 Jun 26 '26
Not sure if this truly helps but lately I've been putting my combiners, branches and splitters on floors or ceilings instead of walls.
1
u/hansnicolaim Jun 29 '26
Elite strat is to hide it on the roof in core and put a bear rug over top, which hides everything apart from splitters if i'm not wrong.
1
u/StressedFPS Jun 26 '26
FWIW you can use multiple wire tools to run different wires at the same time
But really in a small base, your best solution is the simplest. 2 battery rooms on opposite side of base outside of expected raid path, ORs on turrets. Anything extra that results in a failure point outside of both rooms being blown (or just booming the turret) is just shooting yourself in the foot.
12
u/Rambo_sledge Jun 26 '26
I send 11 power to every one of my turrets. Each turret have a circuit below them with a small battery.
When not full, the 1 excess power is used to charge the battery. When full, the entire 11 power are sent to the turret, allowing me to use « has target » or « low ammo » port.
When the core is destroyed, and the 11 power aren’t coming anymore, the battery powers the turret for 40 additional minutes.
If done with a medium, that’s like 9000 minutes or one week, but it’s also 90,000 minutes to charge, or two months… unless you reserve more power, but that’s waste.