The SMR

In v0.1 the Zeppelin provided a 3MW electricity supply. This acted as a bootstrap in the early game and was also meant to be a fallback to jump start stuff in the later game during an outage. However problems included:

• The Zeppelin supply was not obvious to a new player during early game, nor how to control it.
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• The Zeppelin supply ended up having limited practical use as a fallback because it was difficult to reduce total consumption during an energy crash, such as by turning stuff off or splitting the grid. Stuff kept working on a meagre 3MW, but so slowly it was useless.

In v0.2 the switch to a poles and wires grid makes the Zeppelin supply even stranger:

• The Zeppelin is not physically connected to anything, so how does the energy get to the ground? Microwaves? Phlebotinum? Docking pole?
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• The Zeppelin is a vehicle that moves around, making it hard to decide what happens if v0.2 supports multiple electricity grids. Which grid does it connect to? How is the current connection visible to the player?

Enter the SMR:

The Small Modular Reactor is a compact self-contained nuclear 3MW electricity supply provided at startup in v0.2. It fills a few roles:

• It visually and obviously connects to the grid of poles and wires, with an animation speed scaled by load.
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• If v0.2 retains the single global electricity grid the SMR will act as the hub, allowing centralised control of the grid via its UI.
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• Along with a few other fixed entities provided by the new start-up scenario -- rocket launchpad, supply container, gun turret -- it will form a mini-base to bootstrap and anchor early game-play near the center of the map. More on that in another post.