Heavi-Watt Conductive Wire
Cannot be run through wall and floor tile.
Heavi-Watt Conductive Wire is used for the same purposes as Heavi-Watt Wire (to carry large amounts of power between generators and transformers) and is considered the superior option in most regards—compared to the latter, it carries 30 kW more before overloading and it has a smaller Decor penalty (–20 vs. –25) and Decor effect radius (4 tiles vs. 6 tiles). These benefits come at the cost of requiring Refined Metal instead of Metal Ore; however, this allows for it to be built from Gold, which reduces its Decor penalty by 50% (to –10).
It requires a Duplicant with the Electrical Engineering skill to build.
Circumventing the Decor Penalty
Heavi-Watt Conductive Wire cannot occupy the same cell as a tile or door, so the Heavi-Watt Conductive Joint Plate is usually used in place of a tile to move power through a room's wall. The large Decor penalty can dramatically reduce the Morale bonus that your Duplicants enjoy, so naively running many segments of these wires along the length of rooms where Duplicants travel or work may spell large amounts of Stress for the colony.
Among the ways to handle these penalties, it is common to to build separated "maintenance tunnels" solely to shield Duplicants from the sight of these wires while allowing for generators far away from each other to still connect to a single electrical grid. Depending on the space and resources available, one might instead or additionally use Metal Tile flooring and frequent Metal Block statues to simply overcome the Decor penalties.
See Also
- Power Transformer - to connect separate grids (unidirectional)
History
- LU-364722: Max Power changed from 20 kW to 50 kW.
